Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Hi, interesting blogging project!

Lorri Momiji

Making a WiKi in Second Life

Following the previous post describing my attempt at producing a Forum in Second Life. I decided to complete the circle by making this post showing a similar project at making a WiKi. I regularly get my students to make use of Moodles WiKi for their project work, and every time given the unpredictable and organic way in which the pages of a WiKi are likely to link and grow, I find that the job of trawling through the project can seem to result an exercise of diminishing returns for me. And so my thoughts turned to the far more visual and semi-immersive world of Second Life.

You can see from the screen shot that the project has three main areas of Design, Coding and Testing; a specific example using the WiKi for Software Design. The intention here is to have submissions placed onto the appropriate surface starting on the vertical scale at day 1. Of course in a normal WiKi, pages would be hyperlinked, but here I am suggesting that relationships are formed by association, where related postings are placed next to each other on the same day or above on subsequent days.

Each posting takes the form of a prim cube, whose texture and text will have been generated and uploaded from a Word template.

Once in place, a posting can be touched producing a dialogue menu, with options allowing Notecard text to be emailed, or the full Notecard given. The third option is a feature that I encourage, whereby a screen shot of the topic, say a design diagram, code section or test strategy, can also be uploaded into the prim to be displayed on the surface of a 3D screen.

The screen is rezzed each time with sides in both landscape and portrait for ease of viewing. This last feature I included to encourage the social dimension of Second Life, now the group can arrange to meet at the WiKi and review posting together.

Even from a superficial look, you can see how easy it becomes to form an overview of the projects development and activity. I must admit here to also having an almost intuitive sense of anticipation that the sheer physical forms that will come to emerge will in themselves provide a new and valuable insight, though of course this remains to be seen.

If you would like to see the project in action then just follow the link here to YouTube.

Please feel free to post any comments and of course drop into my place at Shimmer Island in Second Life anytime.

Thoughts on Second Life Rollout

I have been having some serious thoughts lately, regarding the necessary rollout of Second Life to the much wider community of users, not least after reading the outcome of a survey posted on Wagnet Joneses New World Notes blog in May this year of current residents. Mainly we appear to fall into the groups of innovators, capitalists, fasnionistas, role-players and social gamers.

It would seem then that in order to promote the adoption of SL we are likely to be drawing upon a population that would fall within the larger three groups or from other possibly larger though as of yet unclassified groups.

For those of us already in and enthusing about Second Life, its all to easy to forget that we are in the view of Stephen Downes, who I heard speaking at this years Eduserve Second Life conference 'the rounding error'! A touch cynical maybe, but compared to the desktop user-base, there is some ground to be made up here.

Essentially Second Life will I suspect to all intents and purposes be a product that we have to sell, sitting as it does for most outside the mainstream of the more familiar Office type applications.

I decided to look into the possibility of making an SL application that could be seen to draw upon some of the standard desktop software, though here I am coming from a Windows perspective, equivalents are readily available.

The outcome has been a Forum. Like all forums you can post, reply, open and email users, features I readillyachieved through some Linden Scripting. More importantly though, because why reinvent the wheel when there are plenty of good forums out there already, there has to be some advantage, and this is where the attributes of working in a virtual world such as Second Life can pay off, because now a forum can be visual, almost tactile and sociable. Basically each post is a prim, whose texture is generated from a Word template, saved in Paint and whose main content it dropped into the finished prim as a notecard.

Once completed a user, in Edit Mode, a cunning plot to get them involved, simply positions the new posting onto, rather than into the forum. There is going to be an opportunity here to witness the emergence of some interesting forum patterns I feel.

Sound interesting? Well you can take a look, because I posted a video up to YouTube

If you have any feedback just drop me an IM, email or teleport over to Shimmer Island for a chat.

EL4A

Had a meeting with some of the team from EL4A (E-learning For Africa) recently, where we discussed working in partnership with team on their project. An opportunity we look forward to as a team here at Bromley.

Currently EL4A are developing a African centre that will host all African educational, health and development institutions. If all goes according to plan, then this will lead hopefully to a complete Africa Island in Second Life, sounds impressive.


The principle focus at the moment is on the development of e learning using Second Life in bridging the African digital divide.

The EL4A project currently has a presence at EduNation (224, 48, 22), which you can see here, where each country will soon contribute by placing content on their regional map. So why not teleport over when you get the chance and see what’s happening?

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Hi I`m Firefox Stransky

Firefox Stransky

Low prim count low space

If this the way things are are getting for you then tryout the ‘Sky rock sculpted’ from Harmpie Rhode. As you can see it’s really a skybox, though I did have some difficulty getting it to altitude, just under 500m. But I ended up rezzing a copy of my sky workshop platform, then rezzing the Sky rock onto it and deleting the platform. Anyway for your money L$100, you get a scripted sculptured prim 40mx40m that only actually takes up 2 prims! As you can see I have relocated my breakout huts, planted a few trees and grass. The next stage will be to set the destination on my long-range teleport, but first I need to make a few home improvements.

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

I'm interesting about interactive mode Moodle ans SL.

Renzo Amat

The Spacedome

I went along to the Galaxy Dome in the sim Spaceport Bravo on Tuesday at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/120/65/278
Dr. Knop (Prospero Frobozz) was the guest speaker.
The venue for the event was really impressive skybox holodeck with a rotating image of deep space scenes. Today we apparently call that Dark Energy. From the fact that the Universe's expansion is accelerating, we know that Dark Energy makes up 2/3 to 3/4 of the total energy density of the Universe. The only disappointment for more was an interuption in RL that cuased my login to time out, after which I had some diffuclty getting back in.


Around the auditoria you can see that large slide images were put into place that change texture when they were touch by Prospero Frobozz as he presented findings and speculations from his work on Einstein's General Relativity *does* allow for a very exotic material which will have (effectively) a negative gravitational effect.
This was a nice venue in itself and well worth a visit just to look around.