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And You Thought They Worked on Virtual Islands

Originally uploaded by cogdogblog.

I was in San Francisco this past weekend for WordCamp and for a Sunday stroll just wandered aimlessly along the Embarcadero and then back down Battery Street. I passed this almost non-descript brick building and almost missed the familiar hand logo, rather strange to see it on a real building.

No one was around, the lights were off, but yes, here is the real Linden Lab. The have real real estate!

Greetings students, faculty and friends!
On August 19th, 2008 the Academic Outreach department will be hosting our first Second Life Open House from 9:00am – 4:00pm! Come join us on our virtual campus where you can experience East Carolina University in a new way.
For the educators, now is your chance to meet [...]

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Yesterday we took the massive audio equipment for NMC Studio One (that is a joke, we just use voice chat and WireTap Studio Pro) over to NMC Orientation to talk to Robins Hermano, who we learned is akin to the circus daredevils, by planning this fall to bring 700 of his accounting students into Second Life.

Robins RL avatar is Steve Hornik, an accounting professor in the College of Business Administration at University of Central Florida. Robins has been using Second Life actively for at least a year, and it was a few months ago when discussing NMC’s Second Life account creation and Orientation experience that he shared he had brought 200 students in through that service back in April 2008 (hmmm that is the cause of the nice spike in usage!).

He did laugh when I asked, “So what do accountants do in Second Life?” but quickly responded, “We count things!” Actually, as he shared, accountants are pretty active, with CPA Island and recent events like “XBRL and the International Future of Financial Reporting”. There is also an Second Life Association of CPAs and KAWG&F was the first accounting firm to open a working virtual business office in Second Life.

Check out his work on Really Engaging Accounting web site — and he did mention he is going to be sharing some results of his research into student engagement at the upcoming SLCC conference.

What caught our attentions was when he mentioned he was planning to bring more than 700 students through the registrations system for his upcoming fall semester accounting course — this is a basic required course in the UCF Business College.

In our recorded conversation (see below), Robins describes the ranges of ways he uses Second Life, with basic content like access to class content/recorded lectures and onto some custom interactive activities where students must manipulate a data modeler. He also shares some of his strategies for using Second Life with a large number of students (revolving around asynchronous design).

Studio One Interview with Robins Hermano (26:52 18.4 Mb MP3, apologies for poor audio quality in first half due to network flakiness)

We look forward to learning how the “big” class succeeds!

Located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, The Crow Collection is a permanent set of galleries dedicated to the arts and cultures of China, Japan, India and southeast Asia. The museum offers a serene setting for quiet reflection and learning.

The interactive portion of the site brings together information and opinions about Asian art utilizing images of objects in the collection and archival documents. Additionally, the presentation links to a participatory learning environment offered as a part of the education section of the Crow Collection website. Using Web 2.0 tools such as WordPress and Flickr, visitors to the site will be able to choose images and log their own entries. The dialogue created here documents the diversity of insight and perspectives on Asian artistic traditions and cultures.

This week, on Tuesday, is a special Metanomics show you can catch on NMC Campus at Outreach. Do you think Second Life experience can deal with a user interface update? If so, this is a show for you.

Dusan Writer will reveal the winners of his L$800,000 contest to design a better user interface. Then [...]

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Defining Character allows elementary students to understand and interpret characters within a narrative story by investigating visual images. As the Sid Richardson Museum primarily contains realistic imagery, there are many possibilities to encourage “defining character” through their collection. The project content provides still and video visual images, text, and audio. As a pre-visit resource, it assists students in building relevant vocabulary, establishing visual points of reference, and thinking critically about the works of art they will see on their trip to the Sid Richardson Museum.

Join us again this week at Outreach on NMC Campus for another Metanomics show. This time around, it features the use of Second Life to teach languages with guests from Language Lab.com

Metanomics sponsor Language Lab teaches foreign languages in Second Life. Their novel curriculum uses a staff of instructors and actor to immerse people [...]

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The Journey of Pots explores the history and origins of ceramic techniques from raw clay to finished works. Video clips document the step-by-step processes of creating with clay through wheel throwing, slab construction, coil building, and pinch pots. Topics include a kiln tour, an in-depth description of the firing process, and an overview of adding color and decoration through glazing; each process is highlighted by an object in San Angelo Museum of Fine Art’s permanent collection.

Row House Rounds are a venue to make Project Row House’s rotating exhibitions into a “living virtual museum.” This project provides a vehicle to preserve the art works displayed in their exhibition space and allows for these exhibitions to be documented and viewed across the country. For their 2007-2008 minigrant project, Project Row Houses created two installations of the Row House Rounds.

For Row House Round #27, Project Row Houses addresses the difficult topics of race and class. In the face of ever-changing demographics, PRH selected artists who would create provocative site-specific works within the Artist Project Houses to spark dialogue outside and throughout the diverse Third Ward Village community. Featured artists include Chuy Benitez, Nancy Bless, Andrew Garrison, Veralisa Hunter, Brendan Fernandes, Lauren Kelley, Susan Plum, Hanalei Ramos, Jiny Ung, and Lauren Woods. Installation shots and profiles of each artist are included.

Row House Rounds are a venue to make Project Row House’s rotating exhibitions into a “living virtual museum.” This project provides a vehicle to preserve the art works displayed in their exhibition space and allows for these exhibitions to be documented and viewed across the country. For their 2007-2008 minigrant project, Project Row Houses created two installations of the Row House Rounds. The theme of Round 26 is “the people, places and things of Northern Third Ward.” With the influx of new residents into the area, this round celebrated the rich history of the Third Ward community. Seven artists, both local and international, explored the community history through photography, oral history, interactive pot-luck dinners, and abstract art. Featured artists include Pavel Banka, Barsamian, Thurman Brown, Ray Carrington, Rita Duffy, J. Hill, and Lynne McCabe.

Highlighting four Pre-Columbian sculptures and four Asian tomb figures, this Digital Teacher’s Guide provides resources in the subject areas of history, geography, and of course, art. Students have the opportunity to learn about the ancient objects and can use custom interactives to create their own tomb figure, take quizzes, and more. The presentation also contains information about each piece, as well as lesson plans, suggested classroom discussion starters and activities, timelines and detailed pronunciation guides and glossaries.

These presentations were created by the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas. They include materials adapted from the Art-for-All program, previously funded by the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation and distributed in print.

These presentations include materials adapted from the Art-for-All program, previously funded by the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation and distributed in print. Two works are featured in this unit: The Tragic Death of Pepe Illo in Madrid Arena (The Bull Barbuda Piercing Him With The Left Horn) by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya and Au bal masqué – les fêtes parisiennes – nouveaux confettis (Masked Ball) by the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Two Digital Teacher’s Guides provide resources and lesson plans containing information about each piece and its artist, suggested classroom discussion starters and activities, timelines, and detailed pronunciation guides and glossaries. These presentations were created by the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas.

The Dignity of Work Teacher’s Guide
The dignity of hard work was and still is a part of the Texas mentality. It is prevalent in the history of Texas, the culture of Texans, and the art that represents the people of Texas. Many works of early Texas art preserve the lives and the daily activities of the people they represent. These works record details of the clothing, daily chores, and special events in their lives. Work is important not only as a contribution to both family and community, but also as a form of self-worth and a source of self-esteem. This unit uses the theme of work to explore the role of hard work in settling the Texas frontier, and the value of work in the Great Depression.

This project was create by the North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts (NTIEVA). The Institute is committed to continuing its involvement in research and development efforts related to cutting edge issues in art education.

The Dignity of Work Student Learning Site
The student site provides two related activities that allow students to engage with portraits of people at work and pick out important clues about the characters. Students also have the opportunity to engage in critical thinking about another set of works.

Texas Skies Teacher’s Guide
Texas Skies builds upon the growing interest in regional American art, specifically early Texas art. Artists can tell stories in a painting. Even though the artist can’t create the sound of thunder using paint, or make a work of art feel cold and wet like a rainy day, the artist can still create something that helps the viewer remember these things. Art can bring back memories of puffy white clouds on hot summer afternoons or the sound of crickets chirping under the night sky. Texas Skies demonstrates how children can use their senses to observe their environment and to learn about early Texas art.

Texas Skies Student Learning Site
This unit is designed for young students to learn about color and patterns. Teachers may adapt it for use with other grade levels.

The North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts (NTIEVA) is located in Denton, Texas and is a part of the University of North Texas. The Institute is committed to continuing its involvement in research and development efforts related to cutting edge issues in art education.

Visions of Texas Teacher’s Guide
Visions of Texas builds upon the growing interest in regional American art, specifically early Texas art. Artists look at the world with fresh eyes, then take that unique vision of the world and create a way to share it. A passerby may look at the characteristics of the land around them and find the plants too prickly, the water too murky, or the sky too grey to be interesting, but an artist has the ability to find uncommon beauty in the commonplace. Early Texas artists found beauty in thorny cacti as well as flowering bluebonnets. The artists of early Texas preserved the landscapes of their regions in oil, watercolor, pastel and print media, creating a vision of Texas that extends across state lines and from their time into this.

Visions of Texas Student Learning Site
The accompanying student site demonstrates how artists created the illusion of depth in Texas landscape paintings and poses questions about the places featured in the artworks.

The North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts (NTIEVA) is located in Denton, Texas and is a part of the University of North Texas. The Institute is committed to continuing its involvement in research and development efforts related to cutting edge issues in art education.

It has been a long time we managed an in world audio interview. Would you believe the dog ate my microphone? Hmmm, I did not think so. But when you listen to the audio (apologies in advance) you will see how rusty I am. Details on this part follow below.

I spoke briefly to Chase Marellan, who in real life is Nicholas Chase, programmer and author, and a principal at InterSection Unlimited, makers of a very interesting Second Life application called ChatBridge.

This tool has been used since June for the weekly Metanomics show, which is video broadcast from one sim in Second Life to several others (include Outreach on NMC Campus) as overflow viewing places.

In Second Life, ChatBridge is a small mic device, and what it does is to broadcast any local chat in one sim to all of the other sims, so there is a common chat area across all sites. This is much more reliable than the group IM channel the Metanomics folks used earlier this year.

But there is another more interesting feature- the ChatBridge also allows people to participate in that same chat area via a web site, not even logged into Second Life. So interested viewers can create an account at Metanomics and go to the live show page. There they can see the streaming view embedded in the web, and read and add to the chat going on across the Metanomics sites in Second Life.

This got me very interested in this web/Second life integration, and given the NMC in world conferences were large enough to have multiple sims, I was interested in how this technology might work.

So in this interview, Chase describes how ChatBridge works, where it is being used, and some other aspects of connecting the virtual and web worlds.

As a note, Chase is co-authoring a book due out soon on Platform Second Life:

This book focuses on the skills needed to build applications that connect real life and Second Life. This includes:

* displaying RSS feeds in-world and creating 3D displays with external data
* controlling access to your virtual presence based on a real-world database
* updating external databases based on what happens in the virtual world

Platform Second Life is aimed at developers building Second Life applications, from casual scripters trying to build a cool tool to enterprise-level coders integrating with their company’s legacy systems.

The book is not yet published, but a f ew chapters are available for purchase via the Manning Early Access Program.

So we do have an audio file to share, but its hard to listen to. The story is I use WireTap Studio to capture my interviews. When I upgraded to my new MacBookPro, the serial number got disconnected, and I did not dig it up in time for the interview, so I ran it in trial mode– completely forgetting in trial mode, you can record, but about every 15 seconds there is an overlaid audio of a sultry woman saying, “This recording was made in a trial version of WireTap Studio Pro” — how embarrassing! I promise to do better next time!

Interview with Chase Marellan 5:55 4.1 Mb mp3

We all know there are places beyond Second Life… but did you imagine there were fifty active virtual world spaces?

Gary Hayes, Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production in Sydney, has just released his 2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World’s A Stage :

I am doing a commercial report and curriculum development on the evolving range of social virtual worlds and have recently ventured into fifty of them to review and sample the culture, creative, business and educational potential. On my travels I got out my virtual camera and decided to capture a bunch of small vignettes which quickly turned into a body of audio visual delights - so decided to create a nice seven minute video for posterity.

I thought I would share the video publicly as it demonstrates how ubiquitous, popular and streamlined many of these spaces are becoming across the intraweb / ‘cloud’. With over 300 million frequenting or registering for the non-game based worlds and millions of new investment in 2nd and 3rd generation services there seems to be no stopping them

Sit back and enjoy the journey…

It’s not exactly as the headlines bill “Second Life on your iPhone”, but the AjaxLife client for Second Life- which allows chat, IM to and from your iDevice does now work, see the announcement:

AjaxLife is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch! It’s currently about where AjaxLife itself was just over a year or so ago - you can chat to people, IM those on your friend list (online or offline this time ’round), and receive IMs from arbitrary people. Thus far, there is no movement, no inventory, no money transfers, etc.

Lacking an iPhone, I was able to connect successfully on my iPod Touch over my home wireless network, which provides a basic menu to do local chat, IM, or access my contacts:

The contacts list does show who is in world:

I sent a few IMs to contacts but did not get any response, so I decided to do a local test, and logged in as my alt avatar, Zoraster Gaffer. I did manage to get back and forth IMs from the iPod (CDB Barkley) to Zoraster, and when I teleported Zoraster to CDB’s home, I could see him as he normally would look in Second Life:

And the back and forth communication was near real time. The people I was IM-ing did report getting the IMs I had sent from my iPod, but I did not receive their replies.

This is pretty neat in terms of spreading the connectivity to/from virtual worlds and a super impressive accomplishment again for Kathleen Berry, but do not get carried away when someone labels this “Second Life on an iPod”.

Not yet!