Presenting at Conferences

I've been thinking lately that I'd like to try presenting at a conference or two next year. There are a few scheduled that I should be able to attend:

1. Colorado TELECOOP, April 16-18, Breckenridge (proposals due January 26)
2. Colorado Community College Conference on Composition, April 18, Greeley (proposals due January 31)
3. Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange 2008, June 5-6, Orem, Utah (proposals due Feburary 1)

Obviously, I'll have to choose between the TELECOOP Conference and the 5Cs. Why did they have to schedule them at the same time?

Hallelujah!

Our team has finished our presentation for IT 6750. It was great working with Alex and Blake to analyze the trend of using virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, in higher education and corporate training.

Audacity and Trend Analysis

I've been learning how to use Audacity, a free audio editor and recorder. I can record an audio track, cut off the extra time at the beginning and end, and insert the file into a PowerPoint slide. I'm doing this for our trend analysis on Second Life.

I had planned to use this blog as a research journal for the project, but we ended up creating a wiki.

Another Prensentation on SL in Higher Ed

Muve'in On Over

From: intellagirl, 3 weeks ago

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Presentation for the 2007 Serious Games Forum at Purdue University


SlideShare Link

Presentation on Second Life and Education

I have to confess that I haven't watched the presentation yet, but I'm sure that if Laura was involved, it will be very informative.

From: sorry.afk, 1 day ago

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CSI: New York and Second Life

I finally got around to watching the episode of CSI: New York from last week that was supposed to portray Second Life. One question kept going through my head: Had anyone involved in producing the episode actually ever been in Second Life? It certainly didn't seem so.

The avatars and sims did look like ones that could exist in Second Life. However, the CSI characters' avatars did things that I've certainly never seen avatars do: find out from a white rabbit (or anyone else) where a particular avatar is currently located, walk off in synch while holding hands, teleport together to a different location, assemble a crowd on the spur of the moment for any kind of activity, pick something up with a hand.

I'm afraid this show is only going to make it harder for educators to convince administrators and students that Second Life is different from violent computer games.

Results of Research on Virtual Worlds

This week, I've found the following blog posts and websites about Second Life:

1. Another review of There
2. A review of Gaia Online
3. Virtual Worlds Review--not updated since Feb. 20, 2006, includes list of virtual worlds by category
4. "The Virtual World That Started It All"
5. OnRez Viewer: "OnRez Viewer, First Impression," "Electric Sheep's OnRez viewer - first impressions"

On Wednesday night, CBS aired an episode of CSI: NY featuring Second Life. I recorded it but haven't had the time to watch it yet.

Twine

I read about Twine in a post on Read/Write Web. It looks very interesting. According to the About page, "Twine is a new service that intelligently helps you share, organize and find information with people you trust." In addition, "Twine uses the Semantic Web, natural language processing, and machine learning to make your information and relationships smarter."

I've requested an invitation to try it in beta, but I haven't heard back yet.

Video: Exploring Virtual Worlds, Part 1

This video was produced by Joe Sanchez and posted on the Sloan-C SL-Net social networking site.


Find more videos like this on Sloan-C SL-NET

Keeping a Research Journal

A couple of my classmates in IT 6750, Alex and Blake, and I are going to analyze the use of virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, in higher ed and corporate training.

Since I read Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, last year, I've been wanting to try having my students use blogs to keep research journals. Unfortunately, I haven't taught a class since then where that would have worked.

So, I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to use this blog as a research journal for our trend analysis.

A few days ago, I ran across a reference by Ray Schroeder to an article on MediaShift a PBS-hosted blog that tracks "how new media—from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism—are changing society and culture," by Mark Glaser titled "Your Guide to Virtual Worlds." This article looks like it will be a great resources for our project. Glaser has sections on background and history, Second Life, virtual worlds in the media, a glossary, and resources, including a partial list of virtual worlds.

About the same time, Nik Peachey wrote about There.com, what he likes about it, what isn't so good, and how he can use it.