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Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark. Now, if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do. More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming.

Now fully operational, the NMC Campus has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3-D space. Expressly designed to encourage explorations both formal and informal, traditional and nontraditional, real and surreal, and serious and playlike, the spaces are flexible and will lend themselves to additional uses, yet to be defined. The campus has a variety of places for these interactions, from the serious to the fanciful, each designed to support an optimal group size; these range from 2 to more than 75. The campus also supports a wide variety of traditional media, including posters, PowerPoint slides, photographs, charts/graphs, videos, and weblinks, and these resources continue to be added on a regular basis as a core component of the project. All of these resources are available to NMC members who may wish to bring classes to the campus for a visit, as part of a research project, or for a full term. Complete details on using the campus are available on the NMC Campus wiki. Also available is the complete Second Life toolset of sophisticated building tools and the LSL scripting language, with which all of the NMC Campus and Second Life has been created. These allow the creation of virtually any simulated situation, process, or environment, and the incorporation of sophisticated interactivity. For the latest information on the project, see the main pages in this blog,

Today Angel Learning, in conjunction with the Second Life Educators Community (SLED), will unveil a brand new island in Second Life dedicated toward educational experimentation. Campus Technology had a chance to teleport to the new island ahead of its May 15 public debut to bring you this exclusive preview.The idea behind Angel Learning Island is to provide a space for educators to experiment with learning scenarios, meetings, and other kinds of interaction with students (and each other) in a virtual world. The island is free for all (not just Angel LMS customers), so educators can learn about Second Life--the basics, as well as advanced techniques--before investing any campus resources and before committing to any one particular approach to learning in a virtual environment.Ray Henderson, chief products officer at Angel Learning, told us he thought that educators did not need "experimentation in isolation, but more open places where there's a ladder up, so to speak, a way to [educate instructors in the ways of Second Life] so they can do experimentation on their own."