Site Closed

If you are a regular or even new visitor to the Shimmer Island Site, then you will have noticed that the Daydream Island SIM is currently not available. I personally have no idea why this is, except to say that the plug seems to have been pulled no doubt as a result of issues between LL and the Owners. At this time I have been completely unsuccessful in being to extract any response from the SIM owner and must assume that they are no more. There is of course the possibility that the SIM will get a new owner and us residents get re-instated, who knows. Not wanting to be entirley at the mercy of forces that are clearly way beyond my influence let alone control, I have managed to acquire a new SIM and will be dropping a posting to this blog in due course. So I apologise for the inconvenience, but rest assured Skipper is on the case and from the dust of Shimmer Island a new and all together better SIM will arise.

Bye fro Now SA

First Sunspot from SOHO

Having recently installed the SOHO feature in the Astro-Park, I was having a browse at the image yesterday when I saw the first sunspot, only a smallish one in the upper right of the image here, but there it is and given the obvious hazards associated with observing the sun, having a picture sent down from SOHO to the net each day is certainly more than good enough for me; a truly amazing project. If you would like to know more about SOHO, you can find out by looking the web site http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/. Basically SOHO Solar & Heliospheric Observatory is a joint NASA / ESA space probe that was launched in 1995 to conduct studies of the Sun. The spacecraft actually resides in an orbit some 1.5 million miles from Earth. Why place the SOHO at such a distance? Well in this position it will have an uninterrupted view of the sun while retaining constant a communication with earth, in other words we are all three of us, Sun, SOHO and Earth aligned, clever stuff.

I must admit to having some difficulty with this web page on a prim in SL of recent, as it seems links seem to drop at almost random times loosing the page, if you are suffering similar, or know of a solution please feel free to comment, it would be appreciated.

Anyway here's wishing you good SL observing while socialising everyone back soon Skipper

LunarPod at Shimmer Island

I have decided to make more of a feature for our closest solar neighbour the Moon. If you have been regular visitor to the Astro-Park, then you will have now doubt seen the regular Lunar phase chart and my large rotating Moon with labels. The new feature, which I have termed the LunarPod, is a three sided panel and on one side you will find the Lunar Phases, but the other two sides feature Lunar Photo Of the Day, basically a web page on a prim and on the third face an innovative facility from Peter Grego in Cornwall UK, where at times of particular interest such as transits and eclipses and the like he streams live images. The next event is due to come on December 01 2008, with the transit of Venus, I am looking forward this and will try and organise some kind of Moon party maybe for SL residents.

RL skies in SL telescopes

Recently, while I was completing the material for Septembers edition of the Astro_Park , which by the way covers the Aurigid meteors, the constellation of Aries and the planet Jupiter, I had a thought on a further implementation of the Sky-Cam board; If you have yet to visit the facility, then the Sky-Cam board features web-page on a prim, the web page in question being a minute by minute snapshot of the sky above Cambridgeshire England courtesy of Paul Beskeen at http://www.beskeen.com. I must admit to being somewhat surprised as to why the thought had not occurred to me before, but why not have the live sky image textured onto the lens of a telescope? On your next trip to the Astro-Park you may like to take a walk into the observatory and there in the eye-piece of the telescope you will see the invitation to Touch for live image, RL skies through SL telescopes, maybe a first?

Second quarter survey published

The second quarter visitor survey results for 2008 are now available at the Beach House on shimmer-Island. This is raw data and is gathered directly from visitors who are invited to take a simple two-question three-option survey on attending virtual classes at the sim and its aesthetic appeal. If you are considering setting up a learning space, a browse over these results may prove useful for you. If you would like to stay in touch with the work here then please feel free to visit anytime and look around and maybe even join the Shimmer-Island group, its open enrolment and free.

New Learning Space, New Interface

If you have visited Shimmer Island before (slurl) then you will have arrived at the beach house and no doubt ventured to the first floor learning resources, which have been in place for a couple of years now and continue to prove popular. In creating these I wanted to produce a learning space with access to materials that allowed us to return to a more intuitive and tactile experience like books as a means of accessing information; when you think about it, asked if anyone would rather use a new library of operating system to get information, you can hazard a safe guess as to their preference.


Just lately though I have been thinking about the way we associate form with function, not just Oh its book and therefore has words to be read, but also, this looks like a library so it musty be full of books! So I began considering breaking with the traditional associations, form from function and explore the possibility, advantages and preference of creating a learning space that appeared to be more in keeping with a relaxing chill-out space, populating it with learning / information resources whose appeared would be more in keeping with their immediate environment rather than function or purpose. For a location, I bought in a new sky platform “Secret garden in the Sky”, which seemed ideal for the project.


To access these new resources an avatar simply approaches close enough, within 2 meters, at which point a label appears telling what it is, if you are not interested in the content then simply move out of range and the label disappears. Should you wish to open the resource however simply stay in range and the object will morph into a screen, retexture its surface to the opening page? At the moment until web-page on a prim achieves more functionality, I am still employing the use of pop-up windows.




There is I feel a more ambitious project waiting for me here though in the production of resources that respond to avatars, rather than avatars having to make all the selections and choices, but as I say that’s a further extension of the project. Please feel free to come along to the main beach house anytime and take the teleport to the sky garden and let me know your thoughts and impressions.


Bye for now Skipper

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

Hi, like how the place is developing

Flame Firanelli

All sky camera at the Astro-Park

If you have been along to Shimmer Island, then I suspect you may have taken a teleport up to the Astro-Park. In recent times I have been populating the park with all kinds of astro type resources, but the one resource I have been on the lookout for is a facility that will allow me to display a live image of the night sky, after all lets face it, surely one of the great pleasures in astronomy is actually seeing real stars. Anyway the other day I decided to get on top of this one and see what could be done and I came across a web site run by Paul Beskeen at http://www.beskeen.com Paul runs a whole sky camera linked to his server that streams images to the web every 60 seconds. Well it’s just as well web page on prim came along recently because it was no great task to get the images displaying. An avatar touches the screen and the stream switches on displaying the latest image, now if the avatar remains within 4 meters, then a scanner will reload the page every minute, if you move away then the default texture is returned and the stream closes.


So what can you see? Well as you can see this is a day time shot, but I would safely say stars down to magnitude 3 / 4, and we may be lucky enough to capture the odd meteor trail. All in all its well worth a look and by the way if you would like to join the Shimmer group and stay in touch with all our latest resources, then you can open enrol and membership is free.

Look forward to any feedback, by for now Skipper

My Tiny Life

The title of this posting as you can see is in fact taken from the book of the same name, you can pick up a copy used real cheap from Amazon and I can recommend it. I found my copy in a charity shop and it makes compelling reading. The story line is based around a journey through the RL-VR world of LambdaMOO. If you are intrigued by the blurring and merging of SL and RL, with all the moral, legal, aesthetic and philosophical connotations of functioning in both realities, then I feel you will certainly find this book worth a dip, and when was it published – 1998, that’s ten years ago and eight years before I got into SL!

SL and Professional Development

I ran our first in college professional development for Second Life the other day with staff. Though I know many colleges have vulnerabilities regarding the ports that SL requires to be open, we have managed to get around that by having a subnet that bypasses the firewall and so is physically separate, though of course we do also require a partitioned open Windows build at the client. After demonstrating my place in SL and its main features, everyone went onto the net and signed in for an SL account, logged in and started the tour of Orientation Island. All in all the feedback for the event scored between Good and Very Good, so that’s encouraging. Having started , I guess the next stage is going to be in developing a strategy for the systems deployment as part of our main stream programmes.

Testing times at castle Bromlestein

As part of my teaching here at the College for 08-09, one of the new courses will be in ‘Games Design’ and not surprisingly Second life came to mind as one of a number of possible platforms that I could be making use of. Unlike the other games design packages at my disposal though, I realised SL would have to be adapted for the task of an action type adventure, so that while being able to extract a certain amount of adrenalin, would also be able to get my students to either learn or have their current knowledge in some way tested. I decided to go for the latter, and as a first attempt the result is Castle Bromlestein.

Having read ‘Exodus to the Virtual World’ by Edward Castronova, an excellent book, I became suitably convinced that my game should feature a mythology, and so I put together ‘The Illumni Chronicles’; if you feel in the mood for a short read you can take a look here.

http://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/sl/castle/Illumnichronicles.htm

The game takes place in a medieval castle, whose stonework has embedded into it a knowledge base of the Illumni. As players move around, scanners are able to detect an avatar and at random times rez either a spinning golden question ring or a defender of the knowledge; Kbot (growler). In the case of a ring, when touched by an avatar it will present a multiple-choice question, at the moment these are all based on html. The avatar responds by entering the correct option number through chat. In the event that a Kbot appears, it will attempt to home in on the nearest avatar, and if it engages, points are lost. There are two ways of dealing with these Kbots, try to outrun them, or use a hand held weapon like a sword to repel it. As I have only allowed Kbots to persist for a short while, avatars have a reasonable chance of keeping their score; I did manage to get guns and bullets working, but they required my students to have full edit rights, not a good idea on my own private land really.

I have a database logging all the scores and that seems to work well at the present time.

You can find a short a short video on YouTube: -


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAoERnzJcHg

In the video clip one of my Alts is seen answering a question, and then shortly after finds himself getting attacked with pretty poor performance I must say, by a couple of random Kbots; not an easy task recording and defending at the same time, at least that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it. If anyone would like to come along to Shimmer Island and take the teleport for a try, then you are more than welcome, though you will have to maintain your own score for now. The whole thing is just about out of proof of concept I feel, though still in development, and so naturally any feedback would be appreciated.

And in keeping with the game theme, access to the castle is through a disguised teleport, located on the top floor of the beech house

Bye for now, good luck Skipper Abel

Cyber Masonry

I was in SL recently and generally tidying up some of my LS code, when it occurred to me that given the rise of scripting communities in SL and the way in which scripters can move around cyber space plying their trade, we may soon witness the arrival of a new guild, the Cyber Mason. Since that first revelation, I often find myself using the term in conversation and so I decided to promote the idea by having an RL tea-shirt logo. I may even post a picture of myself wearing it.

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

Hi Skipper, I'm from Orpington College and I'm currently doing a Foundation degree in Education & Training at Greenwich University. One of my lecturers, Simon Walker, told me that Bromley College had been experimenting in SL and I was interested to see what you've been doing here. Together with my ebuddies, we been using SL to collaborate on tasks for our Celtt course. I'm looking forward to learning more about SL and hope to get the chance to have a chat here in the future, particularly as our two colleges are merging.

Floydette Albatros

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

fhgfhfghfghfg

mvashistha Agrawal

What is immersive

I managed to get alonf to a meet the day on the 'Immersive experience' held at the ischool sim. The discussion was centred on the theme Is Second Life experience automatically immersive, simply because it is a virtual world? If not, what makes the experience immersive (or not)?
Some of the commensts at the meeting such as the lure of surrealistic environments and the ability or not to capture emotions in immersive worlds made for a good start.
Whether an experience is immersive or not or say the degree of immersoveness has much to do with the willingness of participants, and as someone pointed out; everyone finds this more immersive than say IM systems like MSN? So are good immersive experiences purely voluntary, which maybe you counter with tha fact that there are involuntary ones also, where you just have to join in. Do we compare the immersive with IM's .
Then comes the one we are all aware of in that with regard to students who are already interested in computing becoming immersed especially if they are already gamers. As you can see the meet was well attended and the chat was typed live I felt. This in itself added to the immersive experience, copy n paste text can be a little off putting I feel, and can reduce the awareness you have of the environment, so immersive reduces as you focus on keeping up with the reading, which of course is not restricted to just SL and the like. Anyway a good meet ischool, I will certainly try to get along some more

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

I am just a visitoy

Taken Takaaki

In-World Planisphere

A while ago when I was making my first HUD, which is now available for free on in my Astro-Park Sky-platform. As part of the HUD features, I wanted to include an SL version of a Planisphere. So what is a Planisphere? Well it’s a tool for showing you what stars are visible at a given time from a particular Latitude, and as such is a good tool for improving your understanding and appreciation of the daily and annual motion of the stars. Anyway, I did come across some design issues, trying to make a HUD version as well as discovering a superb web based Flash version, that you can find at http://www.open2.net/science/finalfrontier/planisphere/frames.html and I decided to include this into the HUD instead.



I still felt however that it would be good idea though to have an SL version, and so last evening I had another go. I found suitable free star chart and cover templates on the net and after making a few modifications mainly for accessibility and readability, I uploaded them to SL. It was then simply a case of rezzing shaping and texturizing two cylinders. Once in place and scaled, I set about putting together a rotation script. At the moment you will find that by touching the outer white ring, the chart rotates in 5 degree jumps, so about five days each time. The latitude setting for the original star chart is 50o North, which on the face plate I have stated is Northern Europe, but of course that includes all countries around the globe that fall within that particular celestial co-ordinate. I have checked the Planisphere against one of the handheld variety of my own, and it seems to work pretty well. So next time you are passing Shimmer Island, why not Teleport up to the Astro-Park and give it a try, feedback welcome

Bye for now, Skipper

Swivelling Information

Following the completion of the Interactive star chart at my Astro-park skyplatform, I decided to add some information content for the Solar System display. I had considered placing a notecard in each planet, but decided it would be more interesting, for me at least to try and utilise a screen of some kind. In the end I got down to some scripting and settled on a clickable slide board combined with an avatar scanner. Now depending where you stand, avatar wise, the board will point in you direction to be read. In the screen shot left standing at the Planet Saturn.


In the screenshot here, you can see that I, Skipper Abel, am positioned by the planet Pluto, and the board has swivelled right. There is of course the situation of how I get the system to deal with more than one avatar, making this an ongoing project.

Bringing the sky down to SL Earth

Continuing to look for ways of using Second Life as part of my teaching, not so long ago I decided to put a new skybox above my place at Shimmer Island that would act as a meeting place and resource center for an astronomy venture that I am moving forward as part of a more general enrichment programme. The Skybox I called the Astro-Park, and went about gathering and producing some suitable features to install, like a small observatory and the planets of the Solar System. I experimented with making a simple holodeck for the Milky Way, and a deep sky projector that casts images of nebula and galaxies into the dark night sky.

My latest addition to all this is an interactive star chart. If like myself you have occasion to look at the night sky on charts, you may have become aware that a lot more attention is being paid these days, particularly so with those appearing in popular magazines, by the inclusion of colour and images. And so my thought was, can I use SL to make them both 3D and animated?

Well this is the project so far.


At particular points on the chart you will find small 3D models of stars, planets etc. Just touch on any one of these to open and close the object. In the case of planets and stars, (not to scale), they will expand and rotate, as this happens the adjacent screen fills with an accompanying information slide. Guessing what the surface of a distant yellow orange star looks like has I must admit required some imaginative license.


For meteor showers I decided to develop a particle emitter, which I think looks reasonably convincing. I am still thinking about using short introductory voice-overs. If you feel like teleporting over for a browse around please feel free and drop me an IM by way of any feedback and if you would like to join the Shimmer Island group.

Bye for now Skipper

Polling Second Life Style

I recently had the chance to run a live session in SL with a class of candidates. Up until this point I had either delivered walk through type presentations of the virtual world, so having people seated at machines and being able to give them some actual tasks and activates was something that I had been looking forward to. The event was a Continuing Professional Development session, and candidates were either completely new or newish to SL. One activity I was particular keen to tryout was my idea for a poll. Normally this would be a case of selecting some kind of option from a form, but as this was SL, and I wanted to cash in those particular aspects and unique social opportunities that the environment affords us. I carried out the exercise by first getting everyone to teleport up to a skybox, where I showed them a series of slides on one of my boards. Each of the slides would present a particular scenario on which that had to respond by indicating a level of agreement or confidence.


Now rather than clicking a panel or button of some kind, I had made a simple two prim scale from 1 to 10. To vote, each person simply stood next to the number they felt related to their measure i.e. 1 low confidence in the statement and 10 high confidence; there were five questions in all. When everyone was in place I took a screen shot, after which avatars made their way back to the board for another question.

I posted the results, by uploading the images onto a series of boards and used the llsettext to display each question. The exercise proved worthwhile I think. There was one moment of amusement and amusement though, when one new avatars keen to get in place ran to the high confidence end of the scale, failed to stop in time and plunged over the edge of the skybox 351 meters into the watery surroundings of Shimmer island.

SpeakyEasy at Shimmer Island

If I were to be asked "what is the main advantage of using Second Life over say using one of the more traditional delivery platforms for learning materails and resources such as a vle?". Well of course there are many, but I think my first reaction would be to simply recite what I consider to be the top three and they are "Social, Social, Social". And to put my committment where my opinions are, I have setup the SpeakEasy. While retaining the theme of my sub-tropical island, I used a Skyrock to house three breakout huts, where small groups can get together and either text or voice chat in the relative seclusion of the skies above Second Life. Given the seperation of the huts, you should find that conversations in one will not be overheard in the other two. To aid the sense of privacy, and introduce some sense of ambience, I have included the sounds of running water and random bird song.

So if you are looking for a venue with difference to hold those meetings, feel free to teleport over and up.

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

he kev brace here

gl00b0y Grut

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

hello to all

igo Cioc

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

Great day for blogging at Shimmer Island!

Lorri Momiji

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

hi

rad Zabibha

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.

PBL event at Coventry

I went along to a conference in-world hosted by Coventry University for a discussion on using Problem Based Learning in SL on Tuesday. We gathered in an arena of standing stones, nice touch, and it soon became clear to me how International the gathering was with candidates from the US, Germany and Hong Kong. In fact while so many people in RL are wondering about the advantages that virtual worlds can possibly offer, this surely this must be one. Forget carbon footprints and think about the joys of industrial action, cancelled flight, terrorist alert and DVT free long haul travel. Anyway, coming from a computing background, it was refreshing to see such a range of interests that included Language and Design, Science, Architecture, Marketing Economics and Games Technology, and I must a have missed a few others, plus some very notable SL freelance developers. All in all this made for a good mix and I am sure promoted the lively discussion that followed.

Of course before you can get student or staff involvement for that matter, there has to a learning curve and this was discussed from a number of perspectives with estimates of 6 to 8 hours just to accommodate the demands of Inventory, Search, Maps and Events etc, in other words the day to day housekeeping type of activities. Then coming to the acquisition of reasonable competence in Linden Scripting, an estimate of 6x90 minute sessions for non-programmers was proposed, and 5 hours for building, which seemed to pass virtually without opposition, so that would seem to set a rough benchmark. So if you are proposing rolling these particular aspects of SL to classes, this I am certain will help your planning. And do bare mind as someone pointed out, that the general comfort zone with the interface probably doesn’t start until somewhere between 10 and 20 hours of use anyway.

There was a fair bit of discussion around PBL and builds in SL and again this is another of those curves, which along with all the other things that will need to be learnt in this new virtual world may be frustrated by access given the hardware and connection speed demands in running SL. Though having said that, I am reminded of the assertions that would emanate from the ‘one hand clapping’ school of philosophy, do you need SL to learn SL? Did I need a computer to learn programming? Well not all the time and with the availability of SL books and websites especially the numerous YouTube videos, you can and I do learn a great deal about SL in RL. From my own perspective I am currently pursuing a programme of encouraging students to work as online collaborative communities, and so building and scripting aside, for me SL is truly the ‘Killer App’ of all Social Networking software.

The idea of implementing PBL using SL as a roll play adventure, almost treasure trail, combined web link type of web quest exercise was an interesting one, that a few people seemed to have plans for and others latched onto including myself with enthusiasm. The whole idea of using roll play brought out a surprising raft of ideas surrounding the prospect of an avatar being more RL than SL, in that you could induce the need for food, water, the hazards of injury, survival etc.

I must say that for me utilising the net is central to many of my activities and plans for SL. The arrival web page on a prim is going to give us all some good in-world opportunities to make use of the wider Internet, and I look forward to that with eager anticipation, while at the same time of courses appreciating the substantial difficulties technically in being able to make this happen.

I left the session, with some new ideas in mind and a sense of growing fascination with the way that SL is being adapted to the needs of its residents and look forward to more long haul, short stay conference teleporting.

Voice in SL

I have just downloaded the and installed the Second Life FirstLook client that support 3D voice and it seems to be working fine on the main grid. Once you have the client running and logged into the grid there are a few new parameter that need to be set from the SL Edit/preferences option, but if you follow this link it will take you to a Flash movie tutorial for those specific settings. My first impression is that even using a pair of headphones for the £1 store, the results are fine, delays are minimal. From my perspective in using SL principally as a personalised learning and collaborative social networking tool for students, the arrival of real time in-world speech provides an even more immersive and engaging experience, though I know there are calls from those who see this feature signifying a loss of anonymity particularly for accent and gender. But take take heart on that one, voice distortion is I am sure is just around the corner for those out there for who this is a genuine concern. I know eagerly await the arrival of web page on a prim, but then isn't that just typical, some people are never happy are they.

The Mag Rack

While browsing around SL recently, I noticed that a number of free or very cheap in-world magazines are being published, so I decided to create a new rack in my virtual library. Prim Perfect is a genearl type SL mag while Voodoo Extreme specialises in gaming. Hope you enjoy the facility and please be sure to let me know what you think.

Mags and videos

While I have been busy publishing some more Shimmer Island videos and posting them on to YouTube this week, I have also come across an excellent online newspaper, the Metaverse Messenger, its a pdf with back issues, very well produced and packed full of articles, well worth a read.

SI on YouTube

I have been able to present my work in Second Life on two occasions this last week. Firstly at a CAMEL (Collaborative Approaches to the Management of E-learning), event held here at Bromley College and then at the Greenwich University 'Designing for Learning' Conference. It was at the conference that the use of pre-recorded videos really came into their own, when just before my slot, Linden Labs took SL down for a scheduled update. The day was saved though, because I had screen videod my material just in case the night before. I have now started to upload these with voice over to YouTube and you can find the first in the series at this link

Student idea's on Second Life

I was impressed to find this blog the other day by Joe Sanchez (University of Texas at Austin) . He has been getting students to make use of blogs and other social networking tools including SL. And his studnts blog ' Social issues in a networked Society ' makes some very interesting reading . In fact all very refreshing from the often anecdotal views all too often banded around these days, well worth a look.

Virtual Museum

I recently decided to expand the features at the beach house by including the opportunity for collaboration. But with space running out on the island I decided to use a skybox, that you can teleport back and forth from. The content of the skybox take form of a museum of computing. At the moment you will find the top floor has some fully populated click and go examples, whereas the lower floor is waiting for some student activity, which given the time of year may not commence now until September 07, however anyone wishing to make a contribution will be welcome, just drop me an IM.

The emergence of a metaverse

There is little doubt regarding the ever increasing popularity of Second Life, but what about the near future? I found this highly engaging and thought provoking article that explores the intriguing possibilities that will become possible through the mashup of SL and Google Earth, well worth a read and please feel free to post comments, just follow the link.

Populating the CLS

If you have not tried it out yet, then why not Teleport over to our Collaborative Learning Space here on the first floor at Shimmer Island. Interactive resources include C, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, WAP and XML. And remeber you can comment to this blog in-world from the ground floor poster.

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

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

this is a test SL blog ... very interesting comments from in-world :P

Oneibus Jun