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Eloise Pasteur

Second Life offers healing, therapeutic options for users - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

healing second life support therapy

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 13 Jul 08 - Cached
  • poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I'd created to engage here - I was participating in an "anxiety support group" in the free, virtual world of Second Life.
  • As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!
  • No wonder analysts at Gartner, a leading technology research company, predict that three years from now 8 in 10 Internet users will work or play in virtual spaces.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • more attention to elaborate hairdos than Cher in her heyday
  • It has, in short, all the trauma and pain of real life, and some cautions are in order when it comes to seeking psychological support.
  • But maybe because it's a dream realm, hopefulness abounds. Nowhere is that truer than in Second Life's support groups, which help people cope with everything from cancer, depression, bipolar disorder and autism, to caretaker stress. There are more than 70 such groups, according to Second Life's Health Support Coalition. Most are secular. While a few groups are facilitated by associations such as the American Cancer Society, peers run most.
  • As expressed on the Web site, www.supportforhealing.com, associated with Second Life's Support for Healing Island, "we are NOT and never will replace the help of professionals ... but purely hold a safe place for people to come when they need a shoulder."
  • A year ago, before I had explored Second Life, I would have laughed at the idea of virtual shoulders. How can a person possibly be "real" via an avatar anyway - much less have a meaningful conversation with a puppy dog, barmaid, elf, or wilder avatar appearance such as a blob or a tree? It's hard enough to trust someone in real life, much less "second life." Then again, what better place to connect our yearning selves with other yearning selves than in a space of mutual creation - a place where those very selves can be one's unconscious made manifest? Indeed, avatar, in its original Sanskrit, refers to the descent of the soul in human form. Click, clack: When I rose from my hourlong anxiety group meeting, I felt seen and heard in the deepest part of me - more so, in fact, than in some "real life" interactions, where we often put up fronts.
  • The anonymity of Second Life can make all the difference in opening up to share within a support group. Somewhere in small-town America, a wife and mother of about 40 - she could be your neighbor or relative - suffers from serious depression. She loves animals, so within Second Life, as Fionella Flanagan, she's a big gray dog with a shaggy white mane. She attends the depression support group. Why does she do it? "I don't have to worry about what I say in the group coming back to bite me in my home town."
  • She also suffers from fibromyalgia, one of those crippling, invisible diseases that some doctors say is "all in your head." In Second Life, Fionella doesn't "have to overcome real life prejudice when I say I'm sick. There's none of that, 'but you look so good' junk."
  • When anxiety support group avatars were asked whether they were more honest as avatars than in real life, a wild-haired blonde, Galvana Gustafson (in real life an American, dancer and bassoonist with a master's degree in psychotherapy), put it this way: "My avatar is more honest than myself because the rejection won't hurt as much."
  • "All of Second Life is my support group," she reported.
  • Morgana later discovered the Support for Healing Island "because I was going through a major relapse with my bipolar and needed help from people who understood. I personally like to be in groups that are survivors, sufferers, and caretakers and loved ones, supporting one another. The best help and advice I have ever gotten are from people who have experienced firsthand."
  • People with autism or Asperger's especially seem to appreciate Second Life.
  • Researchers of autism use Second Life as a laboratory and tool. At the in-world SL-Labs and Teaching and Research facility, at the University of Derby in England, Simon Bignell, a lecturer in psychology, studies how Second Life can "enhance first life social-communication skills in people" with autistic spectrum disorders. The Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, Dallas, offers a therapy in Second Life for people with Asperger's that helps them practice interviewing for jobs.
  • Second Life's Health Support Coalition (a collaboration between Soj, the avatar Gentle Heron and Carolina Keats, who in real life is a medical librarian) has won a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to create an Ability Commons, for 40-plus smaller health and support groups. "Imagine a paralyzed 23-year-old lying in his family's back bedroom," the coalition wrote, "yearning for contact with age peers in similar situations. Second Life offers people with serious physical and cognitive disabilities opportunities to socialize and get information."
  • opens each meeting with disclaimers: "Please do not let these meetings take the place of professional help," he typed to us.
  • One in-world psychologist, Dr. Craig Kerley from Georgia, who was profiled on CBS's "Early Show," has hung his shingle for "cybertherapy" at $90 per hour. This work, he says, "can be valuable for those who have limited choices in their geographical region, have limited time to drive to regular in-person appointments, have limited mobility, and have limitations in their lifestyle that make traveling to a brick and mortar office difficult."
  • Still, Dr. Peter Yellowlees, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC Davis and a specialist in virtual worlds, cautions about therapy in Second Life, even with professionals. He advises using it only as "a potential adjunct to face-to-face therapy," and to "use passwords or other cues in Second Life to make sure you're talking to the right person" - the real therapist, not scammers posing as one.
  • Yellowlees uses Second Life as a teaching tool, not for therapy. His Virtual Hallucinations sim gives "the lived experience of schizophrenia - to hear voices and see visions" so his students (and the rest of us) can "get inside the head, just a bit, of someone who's psychotic." It certainly sparked empathy in me, much more richly than a mere clinical description of the disorder would have done.
  • Empathy: There's that word again, an odd one to associate with impersonal bytes and modems, but the right one. Second Life is a hot, humming thing of wire and light, a "server" - spiritual teachers would like the metaphor - that can carry community and genuine human sympathy.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 13 Jul 08
     
    Personal anecdote of seeking support in Second Life. It is written by a journalist and addresses a lot of the issues from several sides - including advice from various mental health practitioners and comments from volunteers as well as some real insight into the world of SL and relating it to the public.
Eloise Pasteur

It's Lively in the virtual sea » VTOR - Virtual TO Reality - 0 views

www.vtoreality.com/...1731

comment lively opinion second life

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Update 11:11am PST: Lestat figured this out and shared. You just double-click on the seat cushion to sit in the chairs
  • In its current state, Lively is like IRC in 3D. You can meet your friends in a room and chat with bubbles over your head. I’ve seen many attempts to do this type of thing over the years but the only one that comes to mind as being a big success is Habbo Hotel.
  • When there is an ability to actually create something original objects (can’t do yet), stream audio and video (can’t do yet), interact with objects (how can you do this?),
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    Yet more on Lively
Eloise Pasteur

Look Lively! - Massively - 0 views

www.massively.com/...look-lively

comment lively massively opinion second life tateru nino

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08 - Cached
  • The Massively crew has spent a little more time hammering away at Google's new virtual artifice, Lively. By now, you've probably seen all sorts of news reports calling it a rival and competitor to Linden Lab's virtual world, Second Life. Technically, that's what we call bollocks
  • Describing Lively as a rival to Second Life is like calling a conference center a rival to a library. They're just not servicing the same needs, and the comparison is fundamentally nonsensical. Lively is tightly focused, and fails to intrude on the bulk of virtual worlds space.
  • Movement is accomplished by double-clicking on a spot to teleport your avatar there, or clicking and dragging the avatar with the left mouse button to walk your avatar. Don't try to drag your avatar past the border of the camera view without repositioning your camera first, or you will get unsettling jumps and find your avatar in strange places.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lively keeps things simple and does those simple things well. The television in our sample room is playing the trailer for Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A few clicks is all that is required to link a YouTube video to a television object -- but as far as we know, no other embedded video formats are supported.
  • All content that is currently in Lively is made by Google-approved developers, and is presently free -- though it looks very much like the majority of content in Lively will be pay-for before long.
  • If you want to interact with an object (sitting down, for example), single left click on the object. If you want to play an animation, single left click on your avatar, and select an item from the animations tab (different lists of animations are available depending on whether you are sitting or standing). And ... that's actually about it. Lively is simple, and straightforward, and focuses on doing one thing well: The furnishable 3D chatroom. It can be embedded on a webpage and your avatar can be in multiple rooms at once via different browser windows or tabs. If you've got a group of up to 20 people (who all have Google accounts and are running Windows), and want to share a Youtube video or sit around and shoot the breeze in a lightweight space, and having your own content isn't for you, then Lively is for you.
  • But a rival to Second Life? No more so than corn syrup is a rival for sea salt.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 09 Jul 08
     
    More on Lively, from the Massively crew
Eloise Pasteur

ArtsPlace SL: Where are the new approaches? - 0 views

artfossett.blogspot.com/...where-are-new-approaches.html

challenge education immersion presentation second life tools

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 07 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Speaking only for myself, I have as little imagination as the next bloke, probably less. I broadly agree with where Stephen is coming from - I am crap at thinking up different ways of presenting stuff to audiences in-world - but I also think that there are times when simply replicating a RL activity is perfectly OK.
  • Over to you... how would you use SL to share and discuss 4 positions on a topic without it simply looking like a re-creation of a traditional RL panel session?
  • Eloise Pasteur on 07 Jul 08
     
    Some support for the idea that SL can be boring, should be boring, and challenge to suggest ways 4-way discussions could be made better in SL
Eloise Pasteur

Dusan Writer's Metaverse » Second Life Second Only to YouTube and Facebook - 0 views

dusanwriter.com/?p=682

hamlet life nielson premium second teaching

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 04 Jul 08 - Cached
  • That means less revenue from subscriptions and virtual land ownership (since you need a Premium account to own land.)
  • Perhaps the real economy has shifted, as Philip famously predicted, to a service economy - one built on helping folks solve problems, not on furnishing their beach houses. Meanwhile, the brands, which struggle to make SENSE of Facebook - how do you make money on random pokes, afterall, continues to struggle with Second Life as well - how do brands, which prefer to communicate in 30-second snippets and maybe a viral thing here or there, make money in environments where the users are deeply engaged? Throw up a billboard on GTA maybe, throw some free skins around in Second Life (see Evian), but struggle to crack the question of how a 30 second brand makes an impression in a 296 million minute world.
Teachers Without Borders

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/...avatars_consume.php

energy environment secondlife avatar

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 06 Dec 08 - Cached
  • 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.
Teachers Without Borders

Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...index.cfm

21st century skills eschoolnews games gaming second life

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 28 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, agreed educators who spoke during an April 16 webinar on gaming in education.
  • gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making
  • repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "I call Second Life an engine for creativity," she said.
  • L'Amoreaux cited a team of students in an internship program studying museum creatorship, who partnered with others for a Second Life activity that involved a recreation of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938 Nazi Germany.  As participants, the students assumed the roles of reporters, exploring the events for themselves. 
  • Still, Trevena cautioned that teachers, administrators, and technology staff must work together and be prepared to support a Second Life program.  Identifying sustainable funding sources, upgrading computers and investing in hardware, and having a backup plan if the Second Life platform is down are all necessary.
  • A 2006 NCES and University of Michigan study found that by age 21, the average youth has watched 20,000 hours of television and played 10,000 hours of video games, said Ntiedo Etuk, the CEO Tabula Digita, which offers games centered on pre-algebra and algebra. 
  • "The reason that [gaming] is successful is obviously that it's relevant to students--it allows for the notion of competition, which gets students going, there's an opportunity for socialization, and there is instant feedback on what they're doing right or wrong," Etuk said. Video games also foster collaboration, because instead of a teacher standing in front of a classroom, students begin to help one another and become teachers themselves, he added.
  • Teachers can set difficulty levels and receive reports on student data, including the last time a student played their game, what their score was, right and wrong answers, and the topics they covered.
  • "We found that students in our project have improved their self-efficacy in science,"
  • Video games engage students and help foster some of the 21st-century skills, such as problem-solving, which may be more difficult to acquire in a traditional classroom with a textbook.
  • "When you think about the skills that students need when they leave school, like creativity and curiosity...identifying problems and solving them--these are skills that [can be] hard to teach in the traditional face-to-face classroom," Clarke said.  "And a lot of these technologies are being used in the corporate world--IBM is now using games to train its employees, so you see simulations and games emerging outside of K-12 education."
  • Teachers Without Borders on 28 Apr 08
     
    Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills Environments such as Second Life can both stimulate and educate, experts say
Ole C Brudvik

NMC Announces Parcel Leases in Three New Educational Communities in Second Life | nmc - 0 views

www.nmc.org/...virtual-worlds-lease-available

education nmc secondlife

shared by Ole C Brudvik on 21 Apr 07 - Cached
  • 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″
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • You can see these sims now in Second Life — they are called Teaching, Teaching 2, and Teaching 3, and each is fully open to the public — no group memberships are required to visit. Soon to open as well are Teaching 4, Sciences, Mathematics, Arts & Letters, and Outreach; those sims each also have “large lot” options — parcels as large as a half-sim — available. Large lot leases include basic terraforming, landscaping, subdividing, configuration, and ongoing maintenance. The cost of the lease can even be folded into a “Special NMC Membership” package if desired, and both the lease and the membership billed on a single invoice — call for details if that is of interest.
  • NMC Virtual Worlds offers the full span of services to support educational institutions in Second Life, and many, including the use of the NMC’s Campus in Second Life for your own events, are free to NMC members. See the listing of services currently offered [PDF, 100k]
Dr. Fridemar Pache

Trailfire Frequently Asked Questions - 0 views

trailfire.com/faq.php

diigo help test trailfire

shared by Dr. Fridemar Pache on 11 May 07 - Cached
  • How do I add a mark to a trail? Create a new mark and give it the name of an existing trail, and it will automatically be added to the end of the trail.
  • How do I create a trail? Create two marks with the same trail name, and they'll automatically be linked together.
  • Who can see my trails? When you first get install the browser extension trails you create will be visible to all users.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • and you can add them to groups or give them the ability to edit some of your trails.
  • To get the URL for a trail
  • You can also find trail and mark URLs on the Trail Summary page
  • trail-or-mark-URL
  • URL-of-the-trackback-blog
  • MySpace just use the trail or mark URL as the link value
  • "My Stuff" page
  • source mode of the WYSIWYG editor
  • Why use
  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 11 May 07
     
    Let's test, how Diigo and TrailFire can work together. This is a test, wether a highligted sticky note with marks from Trailfire shows the mark, i.e. the Trailfire annotation too. Before that, I tested the converse.


  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 11 May 07
     
    The correct link is probably this one.
  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 11 May 07
     
    This phrase is ambivalent to me. Are there really mark URLs, in addition to trail URLs?


Dr. Fridemar Pache

FAQ - Avimator - 0 views

wiki.qavimator.org/FAQ

ao avatar design faq secondlife sl whatis

shared by Dr. Fridemar Pache on 19 Feb 07 - Cached
  • You would then have to insert this animation into an AO (there are lots of free ones (ZHAO is widely used and is free).
    • Dr. Fridemar Pache
      Dr. Fridemar Pache on 19 Feb 07
       
      What is an AO? Somebody has to look it up.
  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 19 Feb 07
     
    sl secondlife avatar design faq whatis AO
Dr. Fridemar Pache

https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/educators/2006-May.txt - 0 views

lists.secondlife.com/...2006-May.txt

education gnu secondlife sl tourbot

shared by Dr. Fridemar Pache on 12 Feb 07 - No Cached
  • Wandering Yaffle's _blacklibrary has a cool tour bot that takes visitors around the space chatting descriptions as it hovers. Use this tool to guide students through a physical space when you're not there. Copies of these scripts with GNU code are offered at: www.simteach.com/wiki, scroll down to Second Life / Scripts for interactivity.
  • Dr. Fridemar Pache on 12 Feb 07
     
    secondlife sl tourbot GNU education
Shamblesguru Smith

Math(s) for k-12 Educators - 39 views

I'm indexing SL for Educators in SL itself ... in three towers on an estate called International Schools Island. Int.Schs.Island SLurl is = http://tinyurl.com/2o44dw In the curriculum Tower (3rd...

math maths sl

started by Shamblesguru Smith on 09 Aug 08 no follow-up yet
anonymous

Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, uh, I Mean Woodbury, uh, I Mean Linden Labs «... - 4 views

etechlib.wordpress.com/...woodbury-uh-i-mean-linden-labs

SecondLife griefing VirtualWorlds LegalConsciousness JLU

shared by anonymous on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The SL Justice League is being accused of lobbying to have Woodbury closed as a chronic source of griefing problems
  • Defense of the Woodbury students behaviors is being given as “edgy performance art”
  • Justice League
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Rolig recommended skimming the SL forums on this topic
  • infringements mentioned there
  • sexually explicit content placed in PG locations
  • real life stalking associated with SL griefer attacks;
  • riefer attacks on Prokofy Neva and his SL real estate tenants;
  • sexually explicit content being promoted in student areas on the Woodbury sim
  • aggressive and targeted griefing of minority populations, notably furries;
  • griefer attacks on newbie organizations and events such as NCI.
  • The justification given for these actions seems to be “performance art” and/or a research project on societal norms and adherence
hansel molly

Great Remote Computer Support Services - 3 views

Computer Support Professional offers unrivaled online computer support services that gave me the assurance that my computer is in good hands. Every time I needed the help of their computer support ...

computer support

started by hansel molly on 06 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
cecilia marie

Software Support Saved My Spring Days - 1 views

Last spring, I was having trouble with a recurrent problem from a software I installed on my PC. It keeps on displaying errors on the screen which really got me ticked off. After 2 weeks of putting...

software support

started by cecilia marie on 10 Aug 11 no follow-up yet
Sanny Y

The Number One Computer Tech Support Service - 1 views

Computer Tech Support Service offers the most outstanding computer support service. They have friendly computer support technicians who are very skilled in giving accurate and fast solutions to my ...

Computer support service

started by Sanny Y on 13 Sep 11 no follow-up yet
jameswaltz

Desktop Support to Keep My PC Running Fast - 1 views

I have been subscribing to desktop support from OnlineDesktopSupport for almost a year already. I dit it because I need to keep my PC running fast. If I have a slow computer, I will not be able to ...

desktop support

started by jameswaltz on 12 Sep 11 no follow-up yet
Shamblesguru Smith

College Fair in Second Life - 3 views

http://bit.ly/SLCF09 This fair was opened by Claudia Linden on 24th of October and the presentations are now over. But .. the University/College displays will stay up until 13th November .. there a...

SLCF09 #SLCF09 shambles shamblesguru second life international schools island

started by Shamblesguru Smith on 28 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
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