Following the recent Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference (April 9th-12th, 2014), Linden Lab has moved to help promote an upcoming Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed to help Spanish-speaking educators in the use of Second Life as a starting point in their interaction with emerging and innovative environments that can be used for education.
Professor Max Ugaz, USMP
The course has been developed by the Universidad de San Martín de Porres (USMP), located in Santa Anita, Lima, Perú, by the university’s Project DirectorofVirtual Worlds, Professor MaxUgaz.
Commencing on Monday, May 19th, the course will comprise three week-long modules with a total of 15 lessons and an average workload of around 5 or 6 hours per week.
The course details and registration form are available the university’s website, which includes an introductory video for the course (in Spanish).
Bay City reaches its sixth anniversary this year and the community there is inviting everyone to join in the celebrations!
The very first project undertaken by the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW), Bay City was officially unveiled in May 2008 and has since grown into a thriving and vibrant community.
Celebrations will kick-off around midday on Sunday May 18th, 2014, with a special parade which will line-up at the bandshell in Bay City – Harwich prior to setting out along Route 66 at around 12:30 and making its way to the Bay City Fairgrounds in the North Channel region.
A live concert will then be held at the Fairgrounds, starting at 13:30 SLT, featuring a trio of live artists and including GoSpeed Racer of KONA Stream providing music leading into the event.
All Residents of the Second Life grid are invited to participate. Celebration goods are already available at the Bay City Community Centre, in the Daley Bay region, for those who wish to be a part of the parade, and a viewing area is provided. The music event is also open to all who desire to attend.
About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest Bay city group, and home to most Residents of Bay City.
For more information, contact Marianne McCann in-world.
Since my initial post on the SL11B Community Celebration announcement, the original SL11BCC post has been expanded to include links to the various application forms.
Currently, the organisers are seeking applications from Performers, Volunteers and speakers and performers in the Auditorium. All applications should be submitted no later than Tuesday May 20th.
If you wish to be an exhibitor at the SL11 Community Event, please note that applications will open on Sunday April 27th.
The SL10B Community Celebration Lake Stage by Kazuhiro Aridian
It’s time to kick-off another week of fabulous story-telling in Voice, brought to Second Life by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library SL.
As always, all times SLT, and unless otherwise stated, events will be held on the Seanchai Library’s home on Imagination Island.
Sunday April 20th
As it is Easter Sunday, Sherlock and John Watson have decided to put their feet up at 221B Baker Street and invite Caledonia, Corwyn and Kayden round for a spot of tea. I understand they’ll all be back on the case next Sunday!
Monday April 21st, 19:00: More Sci-Fi Adventures
With Gyro Muggins.
Tuesday April 22nd, 19:00: The Raven and the Storyteller
Aoife Niphrendil reads from A. Gouedard’s novel, an enchanting tale of the travels of a Raven called Wilf and Moon the Storyteller, both of whom are immortal, and of the people and events they meet on their journey. The stories told are set within the book as their journey unfolds, and in the tradition of fables and stories within a story.
Wednesday April 23rd, 19:00: Tír na nÓg
Tír na nÓg (“Land of the Young”) is, in Irish folklore and mythology, one of the names of the “otherworld”, in part a supernatural realm of everlasting youth, beauty, health, abundance and joy. It is also the title of the first volume of Marni L.B. Troop’s The Heart of Ireland Journals.
In looks, the Faerie are folk little different to humans, other than their pointed ears, although they are vastly different in other ways, and Casey is a princess among them.
She is horrified when a stranger from Iberia arrives on the shores of Ireland, home of the Faerie, believing them to be the gods of his people, but the kings of the Faerie respond to his overtures by having him slaughtered.
Thus the Faerie kings bring down the vengeance of the Iberian people upon their own folk, and war comes to their land. Caught in the middle, and herself in love with an Iberian called Amergin, Casey tries to find a way to bring peace between the two peoples so that they might live together. Unfortunately for her and her beloved, things do not go as she had hoped.
Join Caladonia as she continues reading this intriguing faerie tale.
Thursday April 24th
16:00 The Ballad of Donny Granger
The Ballads of Donny Granger, Book One is the first full-length illustrated novel from the mind Stephanie Mesler, also known in Second Life as Freda Frostbite. Want to know more? Then join Freda at the Seanchai library!
19:00: Goin’ Crusin’!
With Derry McMahon and Silvershade.
—–
Please check with the Seanchai Library SL’s blog for updates and for additions or changes to the week’s schedule. The featured charity for March and April is Project Children: building true and lasting peace in Northern Ireland one child at a time.
SL11B, the Community Celebration marking Second Life’s eleventh anniversary, has been officially announced, with a blog post which reads in full:
The event will be held from Sunday June 22nd – Sunday June 29th—seven days of amazing exhibits, music, conversation, debate, firework displays, games, puzzles, sports and everything else the wonderfully inventive communities of Second Life™ can pack into seven days and 11 sims.
Actually, even that won’t be the end of it, as the sims will be open for a further seven days for everyone to explore.
My monochrome rendering of the A’stra Main Stage from SL10BCC, create by Toady Nakamura and Flea Bussy
The theme for this year is a line lifted from Winston Churchill’s 1943 address to the American people, while visiting Harvard University: the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Why this quote? I’ll let event PR lead Saffia Widdershins explain:
Last year’s theme was “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” but we focused mostly on looking back, and rightly so, as 10 years was an important milestone and a perfect opportunity to reflect back on where we came from.
This year it’s time to look forward; to imagine where we are headed.
When Winston Churchill said this in 1943, he could not have imagined a virtual world like Second Life, but now, more than seventy years later, his words have come true in this new world that we have created.
If there’s one thing that makes SL unique, it’s our community of users. Users from all corners of the globe come together under a single umbrella to build a community that comes from our minds and our imaginations. Everything we see, touch and use in Second Life is a product of our imaginations, our minds, and our community.
And this year, at the SL11B Community Celebration, we want to celebrate precisely that!
Details are understandably sparse at this point in time – this is, after all the initial announcement – but rest assured, more details will be appearing as the plans start to come together.
I’ll be doing my usual coverage of the lead-up to the celebrations and the week of festivities itself, as well as covering any other SL11B activities which may be going on across the grid that I get to hear about.
For those wishing to keep bang up to date with the news on SL11BCC, click the FOLLOW link on the blog!
The fifteenth installment of The Drax Files Radio Hour takes a look at Ebbe Altberg’s comments and Q&A session at this years Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference which took place in both Second Life and OS Grid between April 9th and 12th.
The VWBPE session, which lasted a little under 90 minutes, featured some initial comments from Ebbe, followed by a wide-ranging Q&A session which many found both positive and perhaps a little revelatory (particularly given concerns ahead of his arrival at LL about him coming from “outside” LL / virtual worlds). Mal Burns videoed the session on behalf of VWBPE, and I have a full transcript for those who prefer to read rather than listen.
For those wishing to cut to the chase and jump to the clips from Ebbe’s presentation in the podcast and the discussion which follows, it starts around a quarter of the way into the show (14:19).
Ebbe Linden (LL CEO Ebbe Altberg) addresses the VWBPE conference on Friday April 11th, 2014
Some 15 minutes of Ebbe’s opening comments and the Q&A session are presented. These include his remarks on revisiting the Linden Lab Terms of Service (“we’re working on some simple tweaks to the language to make that more explicit”); his views on LL / SL and its position in the metaverse as a whole (“I think for starters, I’m mostly focused to get the ‘verse’ part right, and then we can think about ‘meta’ later on”); Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift and more.
The excerpts are followed by a joint interview with Liz Falconer, Professor of Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of the West of England (UWE), and Stylianos Mystakidis, E-learning Manager for the Library and Information Centre at the University of Patras, Greece.
Intended to be a discussion of Ebbe’s VWBPE session, this actually covers much broader ground, from why issues such at the Lab’s bikini banner ads, can reinforce negative views of Second Life within the education sector, even though real life can be a lot more risky (and risqué) for students, through to the advantages of experiential learning and the potential of virtual worlds where such narrative styles of teaching are concerned.
Liz Falconer (t) and Stylianos Mystakidis
At close to 24 minutes in length, the interview has to be listened to in order to be fully appreciated; Stylianos and Liz offer a considerable amount of food for thought – so much, in fact, that it is hard distill everything down into an article like this without either failing to do the various elements of the discussion justice or presenting you with a wall of text to read. This being the case, I’m going to focus on those aspects of the discussion which particularly struck one or more chords in me, while urging you to listen to the interview in full, if you haven’t already done so,
The first thing that particularly caught my attention came when Stylianos asked what is the one question that seems to be most easily avoided or ignored when people talk about virtual worlds achieving mass adoption – and that’s the question of why should people turn to VWs rather than continuing to use all of the familiar tools and options they have at their disposal and which offer convenience and ease-of-use: Minecraft, Facebook, Skype and so on?
While it is true that access to a complex virtual world like SL does need to be addressed and simplified in order to make it easier for people to access such environments, and it is equally true that things like VR headsets will offer additional means of appreciating and enjoying VWs for those using them, I am far from convinced that technology and technical solutions alone hold the key to VWs achieving mass adoption. This is something I touched upon in reference to Philip Rosedale’s keynote at the VWBPE; as Botgirl Questi eloquently and succinctly put it following that particular keynote:
Mainstream use of virtual worlds requires compelling mainstream use cases that clearly trump other options. Better technology doesn’t matter to people who don’t know why they’d want to use a virtual world at all. That’s the challenge that no one has successfully addressed.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 