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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,

one idea for a gateway activity might be a show-and-tell for clothing and avatars, so people see what is possible

the personal communication really teaches more than signs and object chat [9:24] CDB Barkley: What do you think will be the impact of the voice capability? Have you tried the beta? [9:25] Ravenelle Zugzwang: so as Teachers leading your students into SL, you can relieve some of the new enviroment anxiety by familiarizing yourself and being there as a connection for you students when they come in? [9:25] Ilene Pratt: Voice is going to be very interesting! It works remarkably well! It'll be like an Elluminate session but you'll really BE there with others!

[9:25] CDB Barkley: If you had to share 1 or 2 top places with a colleague new to Sl, where would you send them? [9:26] Lizzy Saintlouis: Edu Island and Info Island [9:26] Ravenelle Zugzwang: I think people will be nicer to one another when they can hear the others intentions through voice inflection, or not but more opt to be polite. Text is really misread often [9:26] Robins Hermano: NMC, NOAA, Terra Incognita [9:26] Ilene Pratt: The International Spaceport Museum is great! [9:26] CDB Barkley: But text is so much more information dense

We’re excited to be able to offer and host a new workshop that will take place in Second Life. Dan Undertone, a.k.a Dan Zellner in real life (Northwestern University), will lead this 8 session workshop that will use the new theater and studio on NMC Campus, the Machinima Building on the Learning sim. We had a small taste of this last October, when Dan led an activity that was part of the Symposium on Digital Media. Participants in a movement activity led by Dan Undertone, October 2006 Here is the information for the new workshop Dan is offering. Description This workshop will focus on using improvisational theatre games and other drama techniques to familiarize users with Second Life and its creative possibilities. Participants will plays the roles of author, actor and audience as various games are played and scenarios created.

But now we seem to have reached a point where the rapid addition of capabilities is no longer the key challenge, and indeed can be counterproductive.

talked about how all too often Linden Lab is now simply ‘in the way’

a company of almost 250 people

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.

The Nielsen people record actual minutes using various "sites" across 180,000+ US-homes. Second Life comes out at 760 minutes per week (that's over 12 hours), or over 1h 45 minutes per day... (wimps - I'd be an outlier around the 2500 minutes per week mark!). Amongst its users (comparing to other user-minutes per week) this makes it more popular than even the 800lb gorilla of World of Warcraft (653 minutes per week).

What does it all mean? Well, it might mean Second Life is a niche market, but it's a fiercely loyal niche market that really, really gets it - and this gives Linden Lab a reasonably solid (hard numbers are impossible to come by) income stream and around that a reasonable likelihood of continuing to provide its service.

Comparing it to social media sites the difference is even more extreme - Facebook does the best at 84 minutes per week: that's 11% of the time that Second Life users spend. Twitter weighs in at about an hour a week on average. Stephen Fry is much bigger in his usage I'm sure, but the averages are up there for easy comparison.