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.

Recently, we want to go forward to create a next step in virtual learning and strongly believe that an integration of Second life and Sakai system will construct a most powerful virtual interactive learning environment with the most wanted features.

Have an interest in using immersive learning environments and have ten minutes or so to spare? TAFE SA's Jacinta Ryan and Ruth Fraser are taking a group of students into Second Life to practice their customer service skills - and are looking for volunteer guest educators to come in world and role play as customers on the day. FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER 2009

"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.

Today, for the first time, New Zealand midwifery students began to enhance their regular study programme with learning in the virtual world of Second Life.

The Spencer's island (search "Spencer Museum of Art" in-world) is a changing exhibition in itself. Drawing on topics explored in the real-life museum's exhibitions, international trans-disciplinary artist Stacey Fox designs and builds the island to expand upon the current exhibition.

I've been to a few presentations in Second Life and most displays seem to be the same --- PowerPoint presentations that have been converted to images and then uploaded to SL, loaded into a prim, and then a script that loads image by image (slide by slide) onto one of the faces of the "screen" prim. However, as each slide is loaded, it is obvious that the textures takes a moment to download to a client.I've written a script that eliminates this "flicker/lag" issue by implementing a "double buffering" technique.

stats for your SL sim

Catherine Dutton, Instructional Coordinator, Instructional Support Services, Texas Woman's University This was a fantastic session that covered a topic near and dear to my heart - how to arm educators with the skills they need to get started in virtual worlds. Catherine shared what she learned from a course she helped to develop for her university. Developed October 2007 - Last session completed November 2008

It was in April 2008 when our Head of the Department asked us to develop specifications of our department's presence in Second Life. We searched for literature sources but the key papers or pointers came from our very generous colleagues on the SLED List. The papers, particularly, Jennings and Collins, 2007, offered useful insights in terms of how the learning spaces in Second Life are designed but there weren't any papers or reports that captured experiences of students, educators and designers Or any guidelines - eg do's and dont's of how learning spaces should be designed… So the question that we started with in our research is: How should 3D learning spaces be designed for learner engagement?

Project Wonderland is a 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entire new worlds and new features in existing worlds.