School and University Web Pages for SL

by Karen Brooks

I am compiling a list of all schools K-12 and colleges and Universities that have SL webpages for their students as an information page, as well as any SL policies, such as Acceptable Use Policy, they might have made and list on the webpage. If your school has a web page with any SL information, links or policies, I would greatly appreciate if you could please share and post the link on here for review.

http://www.puritansguidetosecondlife.blogspot.com

Flickr photos of IBM's Education and Learning session in SL

by Corey Leong

Earlier today, I attended the Education & Learning session delivered by IBM in SL. It was a private session for IBM Partnerworld businesses and offered a speed dating type session for business partners to partner with services and products in RL.

Here are snapshots I took during the session:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/openmls/

Top 10 List Why (another take)

by Jeremy Kemp

Here is a starter list:

• Increases student engagement
• Allows rapid prototyping of learning objects
• Offers a flexible narrative
• Gives exposure with public relations and marketing
• Replaces place-based schooling with place-like settings
• Positions your school for next-generation media use
• Suits the needs of autism-spectrum learners
• Connects you with a vibrant community of educators already involved
• Provides a setting for experiential learning
• Helps teams gain skills with life-like activities

I started a wiki page if anyone wants to add/edit:
http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Why_Second_Life

Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University

Serious Virtual Worlds '07 (Coventry, UK)

by Dick Davies

Serious Virtual Worlds '07 : First European Conference on the Professional Applications of Virtual Worlds.

13 – 14 September 2007 @ The Serious Games Institute, Coventry, UK

The Serious Games Institute and Ambient Performance announce the first Serious Virtual Worlds conference.

The Programme

The extraordinary success of virtual worlds such as 'Second Life' as virtual social spaces for play leads to the question 'What is the potential for the serious uses of these worlds?' The theme for this first Serious Virtual Worlds conference is 'The Reality of the Virtual World' and takes a close look at how virtual worlds are now being used for serious professional purposes. Many organisations are now actively researching and deploying virtual worlds. Serious Virtual Worlds is your introduction to the serious uses of virtual worlds.

Who should attend?

Professionals with interests in using technology for communication and collaboration, for education and training, scenario planning and for commercial activities, from corporates, the Media, multimedia development organisations, public sector organisations, consultancies, technology solution providers, researchers….

The Conference

Day 1 – Introducing Virtual Worlds: presentations and conversations introducing virtual worlds and the 3D web from Cisco, HP, Forterra, Giunti, Daden, Ambient, Visual 3D, Anticyp,..closing with the launch of the Serious Games Institute's 'Second Life' Island

Day 2 - Serious Virtual Worlds: Action & Potential: live virtual world presentations and conversations from PA Consulting, IBM, Reuters, BP, Trusim, Forterra.

Archiving chat sessions in SL

by Ross Perkins

My response to a question posted on the Second Life Researcher's Listserv:

Does anyone know if there is a way to archive chat sessions from SL? Also, are there any types of tracking methods in SL that can be used to gather data for research?

One easy way to do [collect chat transcripts] (if you are in the conversation) is bring up the chat history (CTRL+H), then hit select all (CTRL+A) and then copy (CTRL+C) and paste (CTRL+P) to a document. However... the bad part about this is that all conversation - even whispers - get recorded. The other issue is that EVERYONE who talks must give consent to you 'recording' their chat - otherwise you have to delete it in later editing.

A tool that has been around a while is the NoteTaker 2.0 by Eloise Pasteur (sold for L$500 through the ICT Shop in the ICT Library on Info Island, and can be found in other places). This device only records the chat of people who touch it... so therefore the consent aspect is taken care of. Further, it only records chat - and not open channel general chatter. The transcripts are mailed to an email address that you put on a notecard.

There are both close-ended (multiple choice) scripts available, as well as open-ended tools. The MC format script is free and at the ICT Library - it is also "in use" - as there is a short survey to the left when you walk in that uses it. The open-ended device is a tool made/sold by Luc Aubretec (I think that spelling is correct). It looks like a clipboard, and people type in a channel command before entering their answers. This confuses newbies a little, but the instructions are clear enough should people choose to read them.

I'm sure there are other tools - like SLOODLE - that can capture chat. If you learn of more, please let me know so I can make other researchers/educators aware of them!

I'm sure you are well aware of all the consent issues that you need to take care of before collecting actual data, so I won't get on a soap box here.

Top 10 reasons to use SL

Forward by Ed Lamoureux. Original post by Chris Swaine) (May 07)

Reasons to use Second Life in education

Learning Environment

As an alternative learning environment, it provides:

• an alternative and potentially neutral space away from the 'traditional' classroom, which can be socially inclusive for those learners which the formal establishment has woefully failed.
• enables real time interactions and global alliances which are not constrained by traditional 'location' based environments .
• In 20 years time, we will laugh at what we now call a VLE [Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle etc etc] as being very quaint and 2D!

Support Networks

• Formal and informal, multiple support networks - from peer to peer through to trusted intermediaries - through to synchronous and asynchronus communication channels
• Collaborative space. One of SL's huge benefits is the collaboration - both for learners and educational practitioners

Learning & Teaching Dynamic

• Enable all learners to experience a greater variety of teaching and learning styles - fab for kinesthetic and audio visual styles!
• Can help to blur the distinction between the role of the teacher and learner.
• Different opportunty for greater range of interactions with the teacher
• The traditional role of the teacher and the learner can become blurred, which potentially puts the learner more in control of their own learning [andragogic /heutagogic approaches]
• Allows different learning styles to be deployed and adopted - especially for kinesthetic and audio visual learning styles.

Assessment

• Alternative environment to support formative and summative assessment - from RARPA [recognising and recording progress and achievement in non accredited learning - http://www.aclearn.net/display.cfm?page=1290] through to virtual portfolios
• Fabulous opportunity to showcase work in an interactive 3D environment rather than a 2D website, or though paper portfolios
• Help learners to become more actively involved in designing and carrying out their own assessments.

Personalised Content

• Enables a 3D environment for curriculum areas from marketing and PR to fashion and design, languages to retail.
• Allows another technology solution to be deployed [working on the premise that the technology should support the learning and teaching and not the other way around!] It is also 'just another tool' that a teacher [or learner] can deploy as part of any learning episode.

Flexible Curriculum

• Enable the curriculum to be more bite sized and delivered anytime - anyplace - rather than the institutional and non flexible 9-5 Monday to Friday.
• Can link home/school – home / college
• Help to provide flexible learning pathways
• Enable learners to co-design, manage and access the curriculum in different ways

Downsides

Responsive Infrastructure

• Technical specifications for running SL are still very high for many users to effectively use SL to support learning and teaching. Therefore, there is a risk of supporting the 'digital divide' - those that have - and those that have not.
• E-safety - this is more about education that setting up yet more barriers [which I.T. departments revel in "How can we make it not happen"!] - but for organisations it is still a real issue from firewalls to learner safety.
• Connectivity - not all places have a decent broadband connection

Evidence and Evaluation

• I would very much doubt there is much robust [robust = key word] evidence yet that virtual worlds DO support learner retention, achievement or attainment. However, I also have no doubt that it is only a matter of time before that starts to filter through. The fact that the community is now over 6.2 million worldwide and at any one time over 20k are in-world suggests that something is good - and it isn't just sex!

Inspection Frameworks

• Certainly the UK, Educational inspectors through OfSTED just couldn't cope with Second Life - they can barely cope with the concept of email! Therefore, there will continue being a struggle using this technology as inspection is a major driver [along with funding]

Immersive Education and VLE's: Call for Participation

by Aaron E. Walsh

I am a faculty member in the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College and direct the Media Grid standards group that today released the following Immersive Education call for participation (to educators, students and professionals):

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Media Grid call for participation: Immersive Education and Virtual
Learning Environments
---------------------------------------------------------------------
High quality PDF and Web versions: http://MediaGrid.org/#NEWS
---------------------------------------------------------------------

BOSTON, MA - June 04, 2007 - MediaGrid.org launches Immersive Education initiative with an open call to educators, students, and professionals who have experience using virtual learning environments or video game technologies (such as Second Life, Croquet, Extensible 3D [X3D], Panda3D, Quake, Unreal, Torque Game Engine, and so forth). Individuals and organizations can visit ImmersiveEducation.org to select the next-generation Immersive Education platform, contribute to best practices, and establish standards for virtual learning environments and game-based learning platforms...

Full release at http://mediagrid.org/news/2007-06_immersive_education.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I'd like to personally invite faculty and students who have experience teaching and learning in Second Life to participate. Second Life wasn't a viable platform for Immersive Education the last time (2003) we selected a platform, but it's a serious contender today. Details on how to participate are provided in the news release above, or directly at http://immersiveeducation.org/ (see "Participate in the Immersive Education standardization process").

Free Conference Opportunity

by Beth Ritter-Guth

If you are not yet a member of Innovate, please join. They are an excellent free resource. Read below about their newest issue and upcoming web conference! - BRG

Innovate is an open-access, refereed, bimonthly, electronic journal focusing on creative ways to use information technology to enhance education in all sectors. This announcement is a one-time only mailing that you will receive unless you subscribe to the journal. Subscriptions are free, but we do need for you to complete the demographic information on the subscription form that will pop up when you click on an article's URL.

We open the June/July issue of with two articles that resume the discussion of the Net Generation from our previous issue—but with very different assessments of the educational playing field. In addressing the needs of this population, Donald Philip proposes a model of education that acknowledges the sociocultural changes wrought by new technological tools, taps into the virtualization of knowledge arising from such tools, and fashions learning environments based on small, flexible groups that resemble the small teams currently used by institutions in the business world. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=368 )

However, Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer caution that our assumptions about the Net Generation may often be based on generalizations that do not sufficiently address contextual differences from one population to the next. Their ethnographic study found that while liberal arts students relied extensively on technology in their everyday lives, they remained resistant to in-class technology use and instead endorsed a traditional model of education based on interpersonal contact with the instructor. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=431 )

While debates about the Net Generation will continue, instructors are also addressing these questions through innovative forms of pedagogical practice. Helen Sword and Michelle Leggott discuss how their students used online tools to preserve literary texts from university archives while also exploring the potential of such tools to support new, collaborative forms of creative expression in cyberspace. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=389)

Edward Gehringer, Luke Ehresman, Susan G. Conger, and Prasad Wagle offer an account of how a custom-designed software product was used in computer science courses to support the construction of peer-reviewed learning objects by the students themselves, which can in turn be assessed, modified, or supplemented by future students in the same course, thereby allowing students to take ownership of their learning to an entirely new level. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=365 )

Bill Gibbs and Erik Larson illustrate the use of a videoconferencing system to deliver highly detailed forms of instruction in courses focusing on multimedia design and software design for online and hybrid courses. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=388 )

Meanwhile, future innovations in pedagogy and instructional design will continue to rely upon effective, well-planned faculty development and teacher training programs. In his account of faculty development efforts at Bronx Community College, Howard Wach outlines how these efforts evolved through three major formats—two-hour technology workshops, semester-long workshops, and a one-week summer program—and he describes the respective challenges and advantages afforded by each format. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=424 )

We close this issue with an article by Kathleen Roney and MaryAnn Davies, who describe how they employed a Web-based communications tool to promote standards-based instruction, foster reflective practice and focused mentoring, and facilitate the development of electronic portfolios to help teacher education interns bridge the gap between their training and their
classroom practice. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=294 )

Finally, please do not forget the Innovate-Live Seminar Series beginning Tuesday, June 5 through Friday, June 8, 2007. The seminar program and registration (free) is available at our Innovate-Live portal at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/

Please forward this announcement to appropriate mailing lists and to colleagues who want to use IT tools to advance their work. Ask your organizational librarian to link to Innovate in their resource section for open-access e-journals.

James L. Morrison
Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
http://www.innovateonline.info/
Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership
UNC-Chapel Hill
http://horizon.unc.edu/

Finding SLURLs

by Alan Levine

A recent question to the list...

I've also read about a way of sending SULRs to del.icio.us - however, I'm not that familiar with del.icio.us - and searching for "SURL" as a tag gets you the Usability lab at Wichita (which has very useful resources & I use a lot ... only I didn't want them right now!)

A combo tag may help-
http://del.icio.us/tag/slurl+education

And Sean had an excellent set of reference sites. For more of the "almanac" approach you described, try Aggiornamento II: http://aggiornamento-ii.blogspot.com/

Gartner announcement on 3D world trends

by Lindy McKeown

Thought this press release form Gartner would be useful for some...

Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A "Second Life"
in the Virtual World by the End of 2011

Analysts Identify the Five Laws for Virtual Worlds During Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo 2007 Emerging Trends, Analysts Say IT Leaders Must Take the
Initiative to Innovate

STAMFORD, Conn., April 24, 2007 - By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active
Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a "second life", but
not necessarily in Second Life, according to Gartner, Inc.

More at

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861

SL Presentation Slides Available

by Esther Grassian

Yesterday I signed up for slideshare.net and posted my slide show there for the presentation I did yesterday in RL and in SL, for the California Library Association's Academic Section.
http://www.slideshare.net/estherg/second-life-for-cla/

There were about 35 academic librarians in attendance at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and a number of avatars in SL, though I don't know exactly how many. Many, many thanks are due to Lori Bell for setting up and pushing my slides in SL, and to Jeff Lebow of Worldbridges for helping me learn how to use Skype and then for streaming the audio into SL during the presentation. I couldn't have done it without your help--thank you both so much!

I'm about to send copies of my handouts to be mounted on the CLA web site and will send that url once they're up. Someone sent me a message,meanwhile, asking for the url of the critical thinking guide I created re Web 2.0+, so I'm pasting that in here in case anyone else would like to have it now, though it's included in the bibliography that will be mounted on theCLA web site:

"Thinking Critically About Web 2.0 and Beyond"
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/web20.htm

Esther Grassian
Information Literacy Outreach Coordinator
UCLA College Library

SL Educational Event Calendar

by Bruce Sommerville

I have created a test Google calendar, called SLEDevents, for educational events in SL, and RL events related to SL.

.

The calendar only shows two upcoming events for June at the moment, and since these are both conferences, a detailed agenda/timetable is not shown, but links to the relevant blogs, wikis, webpages giving the detailed agenda/timetable are included in the calendar, along with a brief description of the event (taken from those sources). The calendar can be accessed in-world or out-world as follows:

.

In SL: Search for 'The Study Space' (in 'All' or 'Classifieds'), at Gualala, and teleport there. Look for the computer screen to the right of the door, under the sign, and touch the screen. This will open your web browser and show a read only version of the calendar.

.

In RL: Paste the following URL into your web browser:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=f3b7ubjteso0776u83v4i38qm8%40group.calendar.google.com

.

and you should see a read only view. Click on the event to see further details and links.

I would appreciate it if a few people could try it, in-world and out, and report back. If it seems a suitable solution, I will endeavour to keep it updated myself, based on notifications of major events coming through this mail list.

.

Bruce Sommerville

Teacher of English & Academic Literacy

Insearch, University of technology

Sydney

Info Island News

by Lori Bell

You are all invited to any events listed below that interest you. Also included is information on classes we are offering in conjunction with the University of Illinois Graduate Schoolof Library and Information Science and a new grant to expand health information.

.

In the last two weeks, two sessions of Virtual World Librarianship with 20 students in each class have been held on Info Island. More sessions are planned later this summer. Library staff and other interested individuals are learning about how to provide library services and education in Second Life including how to develop exhibits, collections and resources, reference services, skills needed to be a librarian in the virtual world and more. The course is a six week non credit course offered by the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the Alliance Library System. Instructors include well-known sl librarians such as Abbey Zenith, Puglet Dancer, JJ Drinkwater, Hypatia Dejavu and others. For more information on these courses, contact Lorelei Junot.

.

Alliance Library System receives grant to provide resources on MUVES and accessibility

Alliance Library System(ALS) is pleased to announce new services to be offered on HealthInfo Island in the 3d virtual world of Second Life. Alliance received a grant from the National Library of Medicine Greater Midwest Region to build upon the consumer health outreach currently done on HealthInfo Island. HealthInfo Island is part of the Alliance Info Archipelago, a group of islands collaborating to provide library and educational services. Through this project, ALS will offer exhibits, programs, and awareness about accessibility and assistive technology and about virtual world accessibility in general for Second Life residents.

.

The library is also working on obtaining funding to offer additional services in this area. Project Coordinator is Katt Kongo. For further information on the grant and activities, please contact Lorelei Junot or Katt Kongo.
.
Phenomenal SL Photography
Self Portraits from DeeDee, Felony, Lilith, & Shoshana
Info Island Art Gallery
June 2 - July 15, 2007

Curator: Bucky Barkley

This show focuses on the self-portraiture of four very talented women (in alphabetical order):

* DeeDee Deepdene
* Felony Fabre
* Lilith Lunardi
* Shoshana Epsilon

For more information contact Bucky Barkley

Introduction to Machinima in Second Life and Online

editing using Jumpcut.com

Sat. June 16, 12:00 PM PST (Noon SLT)

Where? ALA Arts Island, Machinima Institute, 172, 136, 35
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Machinima_Institute_ALA_Arts/172/136/35

This 1.5 hour class will introduce you to the 3D real-time video capture function using the SL browser and alternative third-party software for capturing and editing machinima.

Part 1 : Each class will provide the basics for capturing video clips using built-in video capture. There will be a group "hands-on" component.

Part 2 : Introduction to the online editing site, Jumpcut.com Time permitting and we will upload our video footage to a the online editing site. Short video clips can be directly uploaded or emailed to the account. Jumpcut can also be used for SL snapshots, rather than video.

Join the class group: Library Famous Paparazzi! or IM HVX Silverstar if you for a teleport or to be added to the group. Contact HVX Silverstar for more information.

June 1 - 31 at the Librarium on Abitibi
Shamanic Journeys - the art of Kohshari Mahana at Harrison Hall, the Librarium

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Abitibi/167/41/23

The Librarium is proud to present "Shamanic Journeys: the art of Koshari Mahana." Koshari's work tells the stories of journeys she's taken in the inner...and outer...realms of the human mind, heart, and spirit.

From the artist: "Shamanic Journeying has no rules per se, everyone's experience will be different. Mine are unlike what you may experience and there are no expectations. My art is representational of my journeys, dreams and visions, none of them are exactly literal interpretations. I would like for the viewer to not hold onto my experience but to let the imagery in the artwork speak to them and become personal for them." The exhibit includes original paintings, a sculpture into which viewers can teleport, and a Maze to wander in. For more information contact JJ Drinkwater.

Caledon Library Book Discussion for June 2007
June 18th, 6pm SLT
Whitehorn library, in Caledon VictoriaCity
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon%20VictoriaCity/50/204/40
.
Miss Hermoine Fussbudget of Caledon will lead a discussion of two poems:
*The Charge of the Light Brigade* was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to commemorate a famed, and doomed, charge at the Battle of Balaclava, on October 25, 1854.
*The Last of the Light Brigade* was written by Rudyard Kipling many years later, as a satire on the England neglected its retired soldiers
An accompanying exhibit will be displayed on the 3rd floor Gallery of the Whitehorn library throughout the month of June For more information contact JJ Drinkwater.

.

If you would like tours for your group or an introduction to the library, please contact

Abbey Zenith or Lorelei Junot.

Designing in Second Life

by Jeremy Kemp

When "designing" an education island, there is something to be said for NOT designing the island but rather designing a scaffold for orderly growth.

Funny thing about Second Life is that tricks"residents" into a false sense of permanence. Great height, thick beams and a sturdy foundation on a building, for instance, has the effect making it seem more real and long lasting. What is "permanence" when you can keep a skyscraper in your napsack and create mountains in a few seconds?

The initial impulse for educational designers seems to be recreating a campus-like space. Campus landmarks, appropriate greenery and land features closely resemble an idealized version of the home office. Makes sense. The administrators feel comfortable, its good PR and photographs well. It puzzles me why the "old timers" cringe at this obvious early stage in the campus evolutionary growth.

This may be very appropriate in the early days when your work is mostly PR and consensus building with the campus community. You SHOULD build something recognizable out of the shoot to introduce your ideas, but will it help students learn in the end?

Well, no. In fact, using up your prim budget and filling your campus with best-in-class structures by professionals seems to move in the opposite direction. You may have wasted budget on marketing and PR that might be better spent later in projects to build community. And students may eventually be put off by gorgeous buildings that they themselves can never match.

"Enemy of better is best" may be the watch word here. Why discourage would-be student architects by hiring professionals out of the gate? Less is more, especially once the hype bubble fades and we put down press releases and pick up the teaching.

There certainly is no shortage of builders who will put up a gorgeous "Virtual University" facade. And our campus will be added to the growing number of Desert Isle academies.

Nope, campus building is NOT a game of 3D architecture but rather a challenge in social engineering - not of terrain and prims but of community scaffolds. Don't ask "how much time will it take to 'build' my campus" but rather "How many people can I gather to build their own campus?" Or "how can maximize the social impact per meter of land assigned?"

That said, there is a compelling argument that several learning objectives could be met best if SOME of your campus is lifelike. Plopping newbies down in a bizarro landscape increases cognitive load, decreases learning time-on-task and may even reduce transfer of the lessons learned to other situations. See (Sweller,1988; 1994) (Chickering, 1987), (Goldstone & Sakamoto, 2003)

I would assert that several traits are essential for a successful launch and staying power:

• An explicit structure for physical expansion
• A complimentary blend of SL and web-based social tools
• A pedagogically informed set of realistic structures (taking minimal space and prims) with intentional social scaffolding
• A coherent User Interface with helpful clues for navigating, teleporting, etc.
• Spaces designed for both formal and informal learning
• A generous sandbox

At San Jose State we are experimenting with a peer mentoring program and offering paid assistantships to a handful of socially engaging students and credit to the larger number of experimenters.

Please DON'T go out and spend a lot of money hiring fancy designers until you have a good idea what you hope to accomplish pedagogically! The age of instant PR from screen shots and machinima is rapidly ending and we will be asked more emphatically to "show me the learning!"

--J

- Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University

SL's #1 problem for .edu is...

by Jeremy Kemp

...not sin (porn, gambling etc.)

...not accessibility (tech reqs, tools for the disabled, complex interface)

...not disruptive strangers (griefers, unaffiliated interlopers, etc.)

...not commercialism and corporatization

...not legal issues with Intellectual Property and the legally questionable Terms of Service

But the MOST troubling feature of this setting for education is the lack of affordances for reflective learning and asynchronous tools in support of learning communities.

Many class sessions in SL seem to wander into the realm of decorative chat.

But the vast majority of online learning at the post secondary level is NOT synchronous. Here at our university, only a small percentage of faculty add a chatroom tool to their LMS designs.

Students who flock to distance learning for flexibility and time-shifting are loathe to set aside a specific time for meetings - especially nano-band activities like instant messaging. I just can't imagine spending ALL my students' time in SL parking their avatars an nyawning through excruciatingly slow chat interactions.

Blending RL synchronous meetings and online asynchronous reflective activities such as threaded messaging and project work seems to be the most successful model. I've used the "book ends" approach in my elearning classes from 2002 on. Students meet for a longish in-person session on campus, arrange teams. This also allows for in-person pre and post assessments and also public speaking training at the final session. Students get the face-to-face benefits but are able to spend less time on campus tied down to a schedule. Each mode has its strengths and their work is tightly integrated RL/online.

So virtual environments for learning represent a two-legged stool when used by themselves. We benefit from an engaging feeling of presence and also from the visualization and modeling. But the missing third leg of the stool is reflectivity. The platform is woefully lacking ways to integrate in-world learning with existing distance learning tools for reflection such as threaded messaging, blogs, portfolios, assignment structures and assessments.

In my own class work, I'm struggling to create a multi-modal experience where my students may choose how they devote time to the class. Grading is a pain: How do you assign grades for a team when 1/2 of the members want to meet in-world to give chat presentations while the others cannot commit to meeting times and prefer building on their own and leaving items for the others to work with?

Does anyone have advice for instructional design in a multi-modal setting like this? For connecting your previous LMS instructional designs with this new synchronous-centric tool?

Ideas?

Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University
SL: Jeremy Kabumpo

NMC Orientation Island: Wanted

by Alan Levine

Things are moving quickly this month with development of a new Orientation Island on NMC Campus. We will be offering our own SL account creation form on our site, but also, the main SL site will soon offer newly created accounts options to pick an Orientation Island based on their interests- NMC will be listed as one for education. Thanks to everyone who already contributed ideas for what ought to be included.

We are looking now for landmarks for educational regions that can be offered as places to go once a new avatar has finished the basic orientation, in addition to links or free resources, tools we can offer. This will be made available perhaps as kiosk and/or a handed out notecard. Please let us know by adding to the list on our wiki:

http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Orientation_Island

In addition if you have any interest in helping out at some level as a mentor or guide (this could make for a great class project as well to assist new users).

This will certainly evolve and grow over time, but the timetable for the public SL site that will make this an option is making us move quickly.

Machinima that shows off education in SL

compiled by Milo from SLED posts

Beth asks the list for, "really solid example(s) of machinima that outlines educational goodness in SL for both K-12 and college (or education in general)". The responses (from Ben & Alan)

SLCN
http://slcn.tv/ - TV in Second Life, check out the BPE conference videos

SJSU SLIS Second Life Campus
http://youtube.com/profile?user=jeremykemp

Ohio University Second Life Campus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA&mode=related&search

Case Western Reserve University
http://blog.case.edu/casenews/2007/04/20/secondlifearticle
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2066

Emergency Preparedness Training in Secondlife
(Google Video) an overview of the Play2Train sim
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8182785842131047047

Introduction to Second Life (blip.tv) covers a wide range of uses of Second Life, from business to education to art
http://www.blip.tv/file/74378/

Global Kids Educational Programs in TSL (HolyMeatballs.org) gives an overview of the educational potential of SL for teenagers
http://globalkids.org/olp/pod/05.mov

Architecture on the Double (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7bXu2ozXo0

NOAA's Virtual Island (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is8YX32GAyQ

Online Conference, "Future of Education"

by Beth Ritter-Guth

For those of you who are interested in some professional development, there is an excellent conference gearing up called the Future of Education...

Click Here... http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=12

SL at NMC Summer Conference

by Alan Levine

We've just posted a summary of the events from next week's NMC Summer Conference that will have connections and opportunities for participation remotely from NMC Campus in SL (bandwidth, technology flubs, and LL updates allowing) including live video of opening and closing keynotes, live audio from featured sessions, and a few other things- we are especially keen for a good showing on the beta grid June 6 for a live demo of the voice features at the conference opening session.

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Info and details:

http://sl.nmc.org/2007/05/30/nmc2007/

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If you are coming to the conference, we've scheduled some times and places where you can meet up with your SL friends in RL ("oh my gosh! you look just like your av!") and we are hopeful some of you can help out in worlds the sessions where we are doing live media. See details and places to sign up on our wiki:

http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/NMC_2007_Summer_Conference
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And tag the heck out of stuff with "nmc2007"

CTU Grand Opening Friday, June 1-2

by Cynthia Calongne

Greetings from Lyr Lobo! *grins*

Colorado Technical University is proud to invite you to Bonfire, our Second Life grand opening party June 1st-2nd (Friday noon - Saturday noon SL Time) featuring 24 hours of live music and celebration. Many thanks to the New Media Consortium's (NMC's) Virtual Worlds team who designed Colorado Technical University's Second Life campus.

Several of my student projects from our computer science classes, including the Amusement Park and the Maze Game Traps, will be out on the Boardwalk for you to enjoy. I presented them at the Best Practices in Education in Second Life conference May 25th. As you review these projects, think back to your first days in SL and what you were building. *smiles* I wasn't making Amusement Park Rides or a Duck Shoot during my first week or two in SL and I am very proud of my students' accomplishments. *grins*

Everyone is invited to Bonfire and we hope to see you! *cheers* The party lasts 24 hours, so drop by at a time that is convenient for you. The island name, if searching by map, is Colorado Tech. Click the following link to bring up the location within Second Life.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Colorado%20Tech/128/128/0

This event is hosted by a variety of talented folks and sponsors, including Flameheart Sol and Konny Kembla. Many thanks to our organizers! Here is the official announcement, also available in the Events/Live Music section of Second Life's Search menu.

The House of Flames is pleased to announce the Grand Opening of The Second Life Campus of Colorado Technical University by hosting BONFIRE 2007, twenty-four hours of live music, sponsored in part by Thomson NETg, Kent-Havercamp Enterprises, and Slipstream Audio. Come visit this new campus, professionally designed by the New Media Consortium, and also a home to the Academy of Second Learning. The music will start at noon on Friday, June 1 and will rock the island until noon on Saturday. Come and see the most awaited music festival in Second Life!

Publish an article about Second Life

by Chareen Snelson

**Publication Opportunity**

Articles of about 3000 words are being solicited for the Winter 2007
issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly.

This is a great opportunity for graduate students (or anyone else) to
get published in a peer reviewed journal.

More Information: http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/5multi.htm

The winter 2007 edition of Academic Exchange Quarterly will contain a
selection of articles on the topic of "Educational Multimedia and
Hypermedia." Academic Exchange Quarterly is a double-blind peer
reviewed print journal featuring articles from multiple academic areas.
The readership is approximately 24,000 for the print edition. Articles
are also available electronically through databases such as Expanded
Academic, Expanded Academic International, and Infotrac OneFile.

Focus of the upcoming section on educational multimedia and hypermedia:

*Articles describing how educators and/or researchers are using
-Video conferencing
-PowerPoint in new and innovative ways
-online photo/video/sound archives
-digital storytelling
-virtual 3D worlds
-multimedia games or simulations
-mobile technologies (e.g. cell phones or portable digital assistants
with cameras, portable music or video players)
-multimedia to support new directions in research or data collection
-multimedia used as assessments for learning

*Articles that consider the theoretical, ethical, and budgetary impact
of multimedia technologies in all of its emerging forms.

*Preference will be given to newer forms of multimedia technology, but
all innovative uses will be considered. In addition, experiments need
not be wholly successful to be of interest -- when well-analyzed,
unexpected results can add to our knowledge as well.

Who May Submit:
Submissions are welcome from teachers, professors, librarians,
trainers, administrators, and graduate students who actively use
multimedia for instructional or research purposes, or who are in the
process of adopting it. Please identify your submission with keyword:
MULTIMEDIA

Submission deadline:
any time until the end of August 2007; see details for other deadline
options like early, regular, and short.

Submission Procedure:
http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/rufen1.htm
or
http://www.higher-ed.org/AEQ/rufen1.htm

Results of our SL survey (Cybrary City)

by Cathal McCauley

From March to May this year we ran the first survey in our branch in Cybrary City. While a very basic survey it indicates positive trends in relation to our SL involvement with most visitors having a very positive view of the project and intending to return to our SL branch. A major challenge is making people aware of our presence as most found us by serendipity or 'other'! Not a new problem for Library services but one particularly challenging in SL. You can find out more about this brief survey by visiting our Second Life branch and collecting the survey notecard. A new survey is now running in the branch, please complete it if you can! Thanks to all of our respondents!

Cathal (SL: Gortadoo Ewing)

SLanguages 2007 Conference

by Gavin Dudeney

A much smaller affair than the Best Practices, which was obviously a model of good organisation and a great success – congratulations to all! However, we hope this will be interesting to those of you who are engaged with language education in-world.

Introduction

The Consultants-E are proud to host the first Annual Second Life Language Teaching Colloquium (SLanguages ) 2007 on Saturday June 23^rd on the island of EduNation in Second Life. The aim of this event is to bring together practitioners working (or planning to work) in language education in Second Life, for a series of presentations followed by a panel discussion.

Rationale

The explosive growth in Second Life over the past few months has brought more and more educators in-world and we are now seeing an increasing number of language educators experimenting with the environment and trying to work towards ideas for exploiting it in their teaching. However, recent conversations on lists such as the Second Life Languages one have thrown up some serious queries and debates on the effectiveness of such environments on the language learning process and have demonstrated that more discussion and experimentation are needed in order to fully get to grips with 'Web 3-D'. Additionally, the entrance of larger organisations such as LanguageLab and the British Council has increased interest in Multi-User Learner Environments and has started off the debate on a possible roadmap for future work in-world.

Through the course of the event, we hope to tease out some of the major issues and considerations in delivering language education in Second Life, and work towards some basic guidelines for best practice in the area.

Location

The event will take place in the Seminar Area of EduNation, the Consultants-E sim in Second Life. You can find the island using the Search facility in Second Life, or by following this URL: http://tinyurl.com/yehbto

Technical Details

The seminar will use Second Life as its primary medium, but will also make use of a Ventrilo voice server. In order to hear the presenters and participate, you will need to download and configure the Ventrilo voice client. This can be downloaded from the following site: http://www.ventrilo.com/download.php . Details of how to connect to the EduNation Ventrilo server will be given nearer the day, once the approved list of participants has been finalised.

Sign-Ups

The event has a limit of 50 participants, so you are encouraged to sign up early to avoid disappointment. You can sign up for the event in-world by IMing Dudeney Ge (Editor's note: or see email address in original SLED list posting) stating your real name and your SL avatar name. If sign-ups exceed 50, we will put people on a waiting list and they will be moved into the participant list as and when spaces become available.

Archiving

The talk visuals and audio streams will be archived and made available on the island as soon as possible after the event. If you are unable to attend, we will keep these materials available for a while after the event so that you can catch up with what we hope are going to be stimulating and diverse presentations from around the globe.

Programme

All times are GMT (CET in round brackets) [ SL in square brackets ]

Full abstracts will follow shortly...

08:45 – 09:00 (10:45 – 11:00) [01:45 – 02:00]

• Introduction from Gavin Dudeney, Project Director of The Consultants-E

09:00 – 09:45 (11:00 – 11:45) [02:00 – 02:45]

• Paul Preibisch & Kip Boahn (Korea)
  The English Village Project

10:00 – 10:45 (12:00 – 12:45) [03:00 – 03:45]

• Hugh O'Donnell
  The Scottish Secondary Sector

11:00 – 11:45 (13:00 – 13:45) [04:00 – 04:45]

• Nik Peachey
  Materials Design in SL (LanguageLab)

11:45 – 12:15 (13:45 – 14:15) [04:45 – 05:15]

• Poster Presentations

12:15 – 13:15 (14:15 – 15:15) [05:15 – 06:15]

Lunch

13:15 – 14:00 (15:15 – 16:00) [06:15 – 07:00]

• Birdie Newborn
  Language Inside & Outside the Classroom

14:15 – 15:00 (16:15 – 17:00) [07:15 – 08:00]

• Graham Stanley & Kyle Mawer
  Tales of Mystery, Imagination & Education in the Teen Grid (British Council)

15:15 – 16:30 (17:15 – 18:30) [08:15 – 09:30]

Panel Discussion

Poster Presentations

The poster presentation session is for those attendees who are working in language education in Second Life, but are not speaking at the event. If you would like to display a poster about any SL work you are doing (with optional landmark and notecard), please contact Dudeney Ge in-world to transfer full permission versions of the texture, landmark and notecard. Our staff will take care of putting your poster together and displaying it in the Social Area on the island.

If you do decide to prepare a poster presentation it would be valuable if you could be with your poster through the duration of the poster session to talk to interested participants.

Lunch Break

The lunch break is not only an opportunity to take a break from the conference, should you need one, but also a chance to chat to the other participants and to enjoy the event in a more relaxed social environment. You are encouraged to break off into groups and explore the themes of the day with like-minded colleagues.

Q & A

The Q & A will give each presenter 5 minutes to summarise their thoughts on the day's discussions and presentations before moving on to open the debate up to the audience for approximately 45 minutes. Questions from the audience will be fielded by Dudeney Ge and directed to appropriate presenters as they are submitted. Please note that questions must be sent to the moderator and not directly spoken in public chat.

Advertising

Please note that this is not a commercial venture, and whilst reference to actual in-world locations and events, as well as RL organisations and work are fine in the context of the event, presentations have been designed to be informative rather than commercial. Speakers may, of course, hand out notecards, landmarks and free SL gifts as they choose.

K. Hudson's PPT from the BPE conference

by Ken Hudson (Loyalist College, Canada)


http://www.slideshare.net/kenny.hubble/kenhudsonslbpe07keynote

SaLamander Project & Critical Thinking

by Esther Grassian

I think we need to help people learn to ask questions and think critically about what they find in virtual worlds and other Web 2.0/3.0 sites, as many of us have tried to do with Web 1.0. I mounted a page that's probably way too wordy, but may help get across what I'm trying to say. If anyone's interested, here are the title and the url:

"Thinking Critically About Web 2.0 and Beyond"
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/web20.htm

Open SLedware

by Beth Ritter-Guth

Hiro Sheridan had a mastermind plan to start discussing ways to create a SL based Open Courseware program. This resulted in a nice chat and the foundation of an awesome new SL initiative!

Out of world, join the Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/open-sledware

visit the Wiki: http://opensledware.wikispaces.com/

Inworld, join the group Open Sledware

Slideshows from the SL Best Practices in Education Conference

Sarah Robbins (Intellagirl Tully) of MediaSauce
http://www.slideshare.net/intellagirl/engagement-in-second-life-learning/

Jonathon Richter (Wainbrave Bernal) of CATE, Univ of Oregon
http://www.slideshare.net/wainbrave/the-salamander-project/

Conference Video Mashup by Professor Lilliehook

by Barbara Payne

I really enjoyed the links to the photos from the conference. I took some as well, and as the resident music prof, I just couldn't resist adding music for a more "immersive experience..." LOL Here's the mashup of some of the internet pics and my own:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzRmHMQ9P8M

I hope the conference committee is enjoying basking in your success..and resting a bit.

Follow up: Second Life for Educators Class

by Bill Moseley

Thanks for a great conference yesterday - I enjoyed myself and came away very enthusiastic about the work of my SL colleagues. This email is a follow-up on the Second Life for Educators course that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. If you are not interested, then please forgive and ignore me. If you are interested, then there is one more week to join us.

The web site for the class (and registration) is: http://www.bmoseley.com/sl101/

SL Education Facilities Survey

by Andrew B. Mallon

Our Social Research Foundation is about to conduct a study of all SL Development
companies to include questions on their existing facilities for educational and other
non profit institutions.

If you have any questions you would like us to consider including in the survey, please
email to me by Tuesday (editor's note: see SLED list for email address)

FREE SL Office Residency on EduIsland II

by Laelia Laval

Nancy Sharoff (Laelia Laval - SL) and Kevin Jarrett (KJ Hax) are pleased to announce the launch of "SLolar Central" (SLolar = Second Life Scholar), a facility providing FREE, temporary "office space" (and other resources) for K-20 educators and school administrators exploring Second Life. Need a place to 'set to home'?

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Kevin and Nancy met at the Google Teacher Academy in NYC. We are so excited about SL's potential that we decided to create our own community for fellow educators. So, we leased three floors in a gorgeous tower on EduIsland II, located at:
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http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%20II/32/213/21
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Here are some photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/502557125/
http://flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/502557089/
http://flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/502557063/
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SLolar Central is a gathering place for educators committed to exploring the possibilities of SL, a place where avatars can experiment with modes of communication, building, movement, etc. to enhance their SL experience and find ways to use it in the classroom and as a means of professional development. Our vision is to create a community of learners devoted to exploring SL and sharing the experience. To find out more, please visit SLolar Central's Google Groups page at:
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http://groups.google.com/group/slolar-central
1. Click on 'Files'
2. Click on 'Temporary Office Space Residency Application'
3. Copy/paste text into the body of an e-mail and send it to laelia
[dot] laval [at] gmail [dot] com
4. Don't forget to click on 'Apply for group membership' as well!
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We are very excited about the potential for this community and hope that many of you will join us as we explore the infinite possibilities of SL. Space is limited, so act fast. Any questions? Let us know!

Virtual Worlds for Studying Real-World Business

by Rob Bloomfield (a.k.a. Beyers Sellers, Kingsfield Island Resident)

Some of you already know of my interest in virtual worlds as a platform for business research and education. I finally have a paper for public distribution, available for download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=988984. Feel free to pass along to others.

If you find the proposal interesting, visit the Wiki website at https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/WFS/Home.

(The url www.WorldsForStudy.net will also take you there, and is easier to remember).

You might also consider joining my SL group, "Worlds For Study."

WFS is focused on the use of virtual worlds for education and research in business, law, economics, etc. , not Second Life per se. However, SL seems to be *the* place to find educators interested in virtual worlds, as indicated by the success of today's "best practices" conference.

By the way, if you are interested in using "serious games" for education in non-business settings, you will still find some helpful ideas . And everyone seems to enjoy the part where I describe my own experience in SL…

Workshop Materials

by Kim Hampton and James Rickman

Kim writes: I am creating a workshop Web site as part of a professional resource we are developing at Bedford/St. Martin's (an academic publisher). I am interested in providing a forum for teachers to exchange, share, comment on, and post workshop materials for community use. One topic I'd like to include is "Teaching in a Virtual Environment."

Has anyone created a collection of workshop materials that address this topic, specifically how to teach in SL? We would love to work out a deal where these materials could be posted to our site. Please let me know if you have anything you'd like to contribute.

James replies:

http://www.njit.edu/v2/CCCC/VC/Papers/Teaching.html

http://www.teachingquality.org/pdfs/tlnvirtualchat.pdf

Underlying pedagogical assumptions (Editorial)

by Owen Kelly

I find it interesting the way different strands of different threads can come together sometimes in an entirely personal way and trigger off something else entirely.

For example:

• People have been worrying about the right clothing to wear when appearing before your students in an SL class;
• Mechthild Schmidt leapt on someone she thought might be commercialising Teen Sl, when I read the post as indicating that a bright teenager was using Teen SL to rehearse his life as an adult;
• Kimberley Hampton has just wondered if anyone has "created a collection of workshop materials that address this topic, specifically how to teach in SL?" and would like to publish it;
• Birdie Newborn has just challenged Chris Swaine, saying that "the underlying assumption of your argument, Chris, seems to be to corral Second Life into traditional guidelines" while she thinks that "SL offers wholly new potentialities".

These all tie together for me into a topic that concerns me: what kind of pedagogy does Second Life support, or (more interestingly) what will happen to pedagogy once it has been metaversed?

Almost everyone in SL is a prosumer in Toffler's sense of the word: their consumption and production are inextricably intertwined. This necessarily includes their part in the production of the comunal meanings that they in turn consume. This must be especially true of so-called virtual worlds like SL where the very existence of the world is a communal fantasy: an act of communal production that is at the same moment an act of communal consumption.

This means that everyone in SL is (to one extent or another) self-educating (we can throw in terms like micro-learning, informal learning, if you like) and that puts a large burden on almost all traditional notions of pedagogy. In a knowledge economy mediated by digital interfaces you should be able to claim prior-learning credits for all the PlayStation games you have become familiar with.

I have several specific reasons for raising these general points now.

1. We have just finished a project in SL called Semano Semano, which was a pedagogical experiment that I have documented in two interlinking essays here:
- http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/15/semano-semano/
- http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/25/second-life-a-component-in-a-vle/

I would be very interested to have any reactions or comments either here or on the site itself. (Please note: I am not suggesting that our work is either interesting, important or right; merely that it is interesting and important to me and I would like to share it because I think it may be pointing in an interesting direction).

2. The fourth League of Worlds conference will be taking place in Sweden at the end of October (The first 3 were in Helsinki, Finland; Melbourne, Australia; and Boone, North Carolina. The fifth is scheduled to be in Mexico.) This conference arose from the kind of concerns that I am outlining here. If you are interested then you should find details at www.leagueofworlds.com This year we are planning to hold a shadown conference in SL and I will keep the list up to date with news about that.

Both 1 and 2 are attempts to wrestle with the question of how pedagogy will radically change in a world of self-training prosumers (of whom our teenage entrepeneur from Teen Second Life might be a good example). I suspect that we ignore this question at our peril.

And I teach in outfits borrowed from Zorro or the Matrix depending on my mood :)

Classroom alternative to YouTube for sharing SL related content

by Cathy Arreguin

Because K-12 institutions routinely block YouTube, it can be difficult to show great educational examples of Second Life, as well as those wonderful tutorials by Torley and others.

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However, I was just clued into TeacherTube. com as a purely educational alternative. In fact, Suffern Middle School (Ramapo project), CATE and English Village projects already have great posts that might really help communicate the educational potential of SL to others. Edutopia also has a featured article this month for reference.

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TeacherTube also allows for support files, such as Word docs! Check it out!:

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TeacherTube videos tagged with Second Life:

http://www.teachertube.com/search_result.php?search_id=second+life&x=0&y=0

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Edutopia article:

http://www.edutopia.org/upload-university

NMC Campus Updates

by Alan Levine

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June 6-9 Live form Indianapolis

Second Life Events at NMC Summer Conference

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The annual NMC conference is being hosted by IUPUI and will feature a significant number of sessions related to Second Life and Virtual Worlds. We are right now planning a number of these to have counter parts in SL, including live video streams of the opening and closing keynote sessions, and a live audio stream from a session where we will hold a RL+SL NMC Campus Teachers Buzz Meeting.

Also, at the conference reception on Wednesday, we are going to ask our remote participants to show up at NMC Campus on the beta grid, so we can do a live audio session to and from the conference. I have to let you know the last demo I did for this at a presentation from University of Mary Washington had a HUGE impact on the audience.

We are also exploring some spontaneous audio streams and interviews from Indy.

Look for details sometime next week on the NMC Campus Observer http://sl.nmc.org//

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Educators in SL Survey

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Thanks to the 180+ who have already responded to our survey. There are a few days left before we close it, and we'd really like to push the numbers higher. Please share the survey link widely:

http://tinyurl.com/2csr8v

The information is already shaping our thinking for the future, and you can expect to see the results publicly shared in mid to late June.

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NMC Orientation Island In the Works

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Things are moving nicely along with the development of an Orientation Island to assist educators and students entering SL for the first time. They will use a special account registration form on our site, and rather than being sent to the wild public Orientation, where newbies have been known to get chased by large body parts not normally displayed in public, they will experience the basic orientation of walking, flying etc, but also end at a location full of educational resources and teleports to destinations. Ultimately, this will be also a place where SL educators may return to for refreshers on how to do these things.

We are interested in anyone that wants to share any education resources (thanks to those who already volunteered) or might be interested in participating or help shaping some sort of mentor program.

There are a lot of improvements in the works for the account creation / orientation process from the main SL site as well.

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Howto Event in August

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We are in some early stages for a in world conference in mid August aimed at provided practical lessons, tutorials in building, scripting, machinima, avatar customization, and more of the key things worth knowing. Stay tuned, but we will have a call for presenters ready by mid to late June.

Innovation & support in SL

by A.C. Vandergraaf

You are invited to participate in an academic study on Second Life. We are interested in the innovation-related practices of Second Life members so we can study the composition and structure of the Second Life community and the extent to which members receive resources and support from Linden Lab and other members. The questions focus on information sources such as the Official Linden Blog and the forums, and Second Life features and tools so we can study the ways in which Linden Lab invites and supports Second Life residents to create in-world content and to further develop the Second Life platform through (close) contact with Second Life members.

Take me to the survey!

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=703590

(this project cannot succeed without your help, so we offer you a chance to win L$...)

If you have questions at any time about the survey or the procedures, you may contact Rocketgrrrl Tripp (aka Shenja van der Graaf) For further information you can check the website http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vanderga where the results will be posted in due course.

Australia Council Grant - SL Artist Residency

by Sean FitzGerald

For the Aussies...

AUSTRALIA COUNCIL: GRANTS (NEW MEDIA ARTS): SECOND LIFE ARTIST RESIDENCY

"The Australia Council for the Arts is offering up to $20,000 for a collaborative artist residency in the virtual world of Second Life."

http://www.ozco.gov.au/grants/grants_new_media_arts/second_life_artist_residency/

Second Life job openings at Global Kids

by Barry Joseph

Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, now in its seventh year, is
about to experience significant growth in a number of areas with the
hiring of eight additional staff members.

PDFs for each position, along with a description, position status,
and question area, can be found at: http://www.holymeatballs.org/2007/05/olpjobs.html

Article about CATE-SL in Eugene Weekly (Oregon)

by Jonathon Richter

Here's an article that the Center for Advanced Technology had written about us in our local hip paper, The Eugene Weekly http://www.eugeneweekly.com/

Eduserv "Virtual worlds, real learning?" Symposium 2007

by Nick Noakes (from Eduserv listserv)

Subject: Eduserv "Virtual worlds, real learning?" Symposium 2007
Powerpoint slides and streaming media

The Powerpoint slides and streaming media from the Eduserv Foundation
"Virtual worlds, real learning?" Symposium 2007, which was held on the
10th May, are now available from the Eduserv Website at the following
location:-

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/presentations

Article on teaching styles in SL

by Carol H Tucker

In Second Life Insider:

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/05/23/teaching-styles-in-the-sl-community-case-study-asl-hairmakin/

Global Kids presents Prof. James Paul Gee on Sloodle!

by Tabitha Tsai

For the last 2 weeks, one of our interns, Nik385 Doesburg (in Teen Second Life) has been hosting an avatar contest on Global Kids Island.

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The story goes something like this:

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On May 31, 2007, 2pm SL time, a special alien visiting from a planet unknown to us, is expected to land in TSL somewhere near our volcano, and this friendly so-called alien will be looking for an appropriate avatar outfit to "fit into" as he/she explores Global Kids Island for the first time.

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The teens are excited to find out who this special alien guest is, for now all they know is that his name is James Paul Gee. For those of us in the field of games and learning, you might have heard of Professor Gee from the University of Wisconsin or read one of his books. http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/people_gee.htm

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We are thrilled to invite Professor Gee to Global Kids Island and as part of welcoming him to TSL, Professor Gee will be speaking on a live audio stream while trying on different avatars created by teens. At the same time, we invite adults within SL or outside SL to listen in on the audio stream and participate in a live chat with teens via *gasp* SLOODLE!
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Here's how you can participate in our first ever mix grid Sloodle event:

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On Thursday May 31st, 2007, 2pm SL time, Gee will be landing on Global Kids Island in TSL.

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Open a regular browser and paste this audio stream beginning at 2pm SL time:

rtsp://dss17.streamhoster.com/lv_globalkids/audio.sdp
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Once you are listening in, please register for a free Sloodle account. You can also do this prior to the event to save some time.

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Step 1:

Click on this link:

http://www.sloodle.com/mod/chat/gui_header_js/index.php?id=13

Step 2:

Make up a user name and password on this page. If the user name is available you will be taken to their registration form.

Step 3:

Fill in the mandatory fields in the registration form which are:

First name, Surname, Email, City/ Town and Description

Then click update profile

Step 4:

After clicking update profile, you will see this message: "You are about to enroll yourself as a member of this course. Are you sure you wish to do this?"
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Click on YES and you will immediately be a part of the teens dialogue on TSL with us.
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The main goal for this event is to encourage teens to interact with Professor Gee in a highly interactive and fun way. He will be speaking to them addressing issues such as avatar representation, online identity, and the embodied nature of learning that he expects to embrace as he tries on different avatar outfits created by teens.

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Teens will know in advance that adults from around the world will listen in and participate in the live chat dialogue with them. The event is scheduled for no longer than 1 hour. Everyone is welcome to listen in.