Group items tagged

I'm going to check out Emerald. Have used Meerkat and it's buggy, Hippo can be annoying... Emerald, like Meerkat, allows download of full permission assets from SL and upload to compatible platforms...

Virtual Worlds, Real Libraries: Librarians and Educators in Second Life and Other Multi-User Virtual Environments
Edited by Lori Bell and Rhonda B. Trueman
Foreword by Stephen Abram

Eighty percent of Internet users are expected to engage in some form of virtual world activity by 2011 (Gartner Research Group), and librarians and educators are already there. This fascinating book-the brainchild of two pioneering virtual world librarians-is designed to help libraries and schools recognize the importance of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and consider ways of getting involved as they proliferate.

Project Goals

Our goal is to help develop mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction by

1. developing basic standards for metadata and content representation; and
2. investigating preservation issues through a series of archiving case studies representing
1. early games and literature and
2. later interactive multi-player game environments.

Key deliverables includedevelopment of metadata schema and wrapper recommendations, the archiving of key representative content and the development of generalizable archiving approaches for preserving this content. Our approach is intended to address both the pressing need to preserve the bits and available representation information of early and significant works now, and the need to begin to address more difficult issues surrounding long-term preservation of more recent multi-player interactive virtual worlds.

"Warcraft: Culture, Gender and Identity," a credit-awarding class being offered at Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota. At the helm of this innovative course is Landon Pirius, Ph.D., also known as Nodnal the Gnome Warrior of Blackwater Raiders-US. No stranger to the convergence of WoW and academia, Dr. Pirius wrote his doctoral dissertation on "Massively Multiplayer Online Virtual Environments: A Potential Locale for Intercultural Training." We didn't go quite that deep in this interview; we simply visited with him about his wildly successful college course and how it's helping shape modern educational methodologies.

Sloog is a bookmarking service for Second Life residents. It allows users to save favourite places and avatars and search for them later, both in-world with a simple plug-in (HUD) or via web browser at www.sloog.org

I might be missing the point - but IMHO this is a 3D singles club/Contiki tour/dating service with porn options.

An interview about the x3D standard, a standard that allows 3D rendering of content across platforms. For those that know, is the successor to VRML.

blog post from U of OK regarding Alessi, Trollip and Shaffer's research and theories into fidelity of simulation, learning and relationship between them and whether learning is readily transferrable from games or VWs toreal life.

excellent article on students' reactions to SL as a teaching and learning tool with pre-service teachers.

Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life was a research project at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London. The project was funded by the Eduserv Foundation. The team worked part-time on the project from June 2007 to May 2008.

Update: We are teaching more MA sessions in Second Life in spring 2009.

Introduction: During 2007-2008, the project team, Diane Carr, Martin Oliver and Andrew Burn, researched learning in two online, social worlds, Second Life and World of Warcraft.