Second Life

Virtual Worlds and (digital) identity; influence on self-esteem...

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.

Second Life Community Gateways

A combo -- reviewing methods of producing Second Life videos when the focus is on recording an event and not storytelling -- and a video of a discussion that took place on jokaydia today about the best ways to share Second Life resources.

Introducing your students to Second Life