Group items tagged

Linden Lab's official resource for educators in Second Life.

On finding support groups in Second Life: The SLHealthy wiki (slhealthy.wetpaint.com) is probably your best and most comprehensive resource for Second Life health support groups, organizations and locations.

On "official" Second Life health support groups like those operated by the American Cancer Society versus groups begun by individuals who have suffered from a particular ailment: We have not reviewed the information provided by groups, though in several instances, we've decided not to list information about a group because it's clearly unethical. One example is a pro-ana (or pro-anorexia) group, and another was a for-profit "organization."

If you're thinking about joining a group, I suggest you use the same radar you might in the real world: Do you feel comfortable? You should feel perfectly OK about asking questions you have.

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,

Are you or someone you know looking for a low-cost way to get started in virtual worlds — or Second Life in particular? As of today, the New Media Consortium (NMC) is offering land parcels in Second Life that are part of three unique custom-designed educational communities. These parcels are available now for lease exclusively to bona fide faculty, educational departments, or learning-focused institutions. The new sim NMC Campus, “Teaching”

The land is full-permissions, and can be used for almost any purpose consistent with research or teaching in Second Life. The parcels come in sizes from 1024 sq m to 8192 sq m. Costs are roughly 10 US cents per sq meter per year. This works out to $100 US per year for the smallest plot (32 x 32; 1024 sq m; 235 prims) and $800 per year for the largest (64 x 128; 8192 sq m; 1875 prims). There are no hidden or additional costs. Common area on the new sim NMC Campus, “Teaching 2″

Each educational community has a beautiful central area which has a number of spaces that all the residents on the island can share — these include a multi-media amphitheater, a conference room, a large classroom or other meeting space, a gallery suitable for exhibiting student work, and a resource center that has been stocked by the folks who run the highly regarded ICT Library in Second Life. Scene on NMC new sim available for lease, “Teaching 3″

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."