As if there isn't enough going on, my brain's moving at top warp trying to imagine the possibilities of ways in which new technology - especially those that foster community - will evolve in my lifetime.
The latest kickstart my brain got is an invitation fromRissa Maidstone to attend an Information Week event at World2worlds today, August 4, at 5:00 PM PDT/8:00 PM EST
The buz surrounds the students in Texas State’s new, fully accredited Digital Media
certificate and associates degree program who can attend classes using
Second Life as its primary delivery method.
Is this the future of
education?
Will people from all over the world be able to earn degrees virtually?
Guests who will talk about this with us today are Chris Gibson, Vice President of Educational Technology
and Janyth Ussery, Director of Web Education for Texas State College
West Texas.
To attend, click http://slurl.com/secondlife/World2Worlds/132/188/35
and if you don’t have Second life already running you can download it.
It’s always smart to get up to speed on how to walk and communicate
before the event but now is as good time as any to learn!
What do Gartner, Social Networks, Twitter, New Media, Soup.io and Friendfeed share?
The answer is that they share room here and on my radar for today but throwing a list of links at you is not my style. Beyond this idea not being on my radar it's more like I hope that there are better ways of dealing with links I might want to suggest to someone.
Instead of sticking random lists of links in this - or other - blogs, mainly I
Write something about the item, then post it to this blog or the cancer-related Boobs on Ice depending on the topic
Use friend-feed to share stuff that passes through my line of sight and catches my eye
Tweet why I'm dropping the link in the tweetstream
Rely on soup to collect my own non-twitter content and then add bits and pieces I'd like to keep on my own radar to look at later
But today the call of these two screamed out at me and I don't want to opine at length. Thus random links:
It started on February 10th, which happened to be my sixtieth birthday and about sixty days since my cancer diagnosis. It was a hard time. But it was also My ooVoo Day which actually turned out to be ooVoo Week
I spent six hours interacting in six way on-screen conversations with the great people who read my blogs and tweets and it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys even before I ooVooed with Joe Jaffe who entertains while conversing.
What can I possibly write about what ooVoo,Crayon, Scott Monty, and their Big Idea meant to me? I can say: Community, Connection, Conversation, Comedy, and Commitment to a Cause. But the video says the rest.
During that week bloggers ooVooed with friends and fans. It was amazing. Then as if we hadn't already had enough fun, to thank bloggers hosting chats ooVoo donated an unbelievable $30,000 to the Frozen Pea
Fund Fund established to support Cancer awareness, research and education.
This donation was made in honor of blogger and
cancer patient who happened to be...me! . Although I could not be there, my husband and our daughter Bill and Kate Reynolds were part of a check presentation ceremony to the Frozen Pea Fund at Blogger Social in New York in April.
And not to sit on their laurels, ooVoo is right there in the community, making connections and planning more opportunities to connect. As we find ourself in election year, next up in June is a Political Edition of My ooVoo Day With.
I can't wait to see the momocrats in action.And who will take them on? Is there an opening for a new group called republidads in the making? Trust ooVoo to provide a forum for them if there is.
One reason I dislike TV news is that it's insipid and superficial. There, I said it. And even my non-insipid non-superficial friend from Information Week, Mitch Wagner, couldn't do much about the lousy teeny bit of time he was given in his interview on Fox news.
But he was well spoken, personable as always, and gave them the information in sound bite sized pieces which TV loves. He also gave us a little sanity and an overview of information and assured the fox folks that social networking was not just for kids.
It would have been great to have Mitch for about a 2 hour sit down about relationships in a connected age not a 2 minute pit stop before they went on to talk about Britney or something equally deep and meaningful. But he did get me thinking about where others participate online
My list is long and my excuse is that I have to know something about them if I'm going to explain to people what they're about. A small widget to link to these services is something I find handy and I place it in the blogs' side columns so that you'll know where to find me.
In addition I set up other services to aggregate some of the content of the sites - which in reality nobody but a stalker would want to keep up with. I use a few services like profilactic and to a less complete degree perhaps, onaswarm. Onaswarm even includes my twitter tweetings which can be prolific and overrun everything else and so maybe should be removed for sanity sake.
For the record, I'd like to see all the material appear at Onaswarm in a timeline instead of divided by social networks but just putting it all together is some kind of magic for me so I'll go with it.
In any case, by going to their site you can get an overall view of what your friends are doing, reading, bookmarking, uploading. Sounds kind of creepy now that I say it that way, but that's what it does so there it is.
With one exception that is. Because of facebook's setup not much if any facebook content comes through to outside. Aggregators simply give a link to find your contact at facebook or linkedin by signing in and going through the process of asking if you can connect and thus see the what they share there.
Another service, soup.io adds whatever content I want them to automatically collect each day like clips from all of my blogs, my youtube videos, anything I might add to del.icio.us, tumblr and flickr account. It also allows me to manually - and very simply - add images, articles, quotes or links I find along the way and want to show someone or keep for reference.
This clip shown here shows the top of my front page including little icons for various feeds I have coming in and a picture of a woopie pie. After a trip to Lancaster PA a twitter discussion started about food that some others were unfamiliar with. I added this and then sent twitter friends here where they can see not only the photo but a recipe and a story about the writer's PA heritage. Nice and easy.
Do I need all these networks, aggregators, link magnets, ways of staying in touch especially since I'm a bit of a hermit anyhow? Who knows, but for now I've got them and I'm learning about their limitations and potential.
But that gets us no closer to the question I started out with: What networks do you participate in and how do you let people know who you are and where you are? My take is that this staying in touch thing could be a full time job, even with technology working for me.
Here's my "badge" or widget from profilactic, just to give you an idea. Oy!
In The "Work From Home" Generation writer Alex Iskold writes about the good the bad and the ugly of working at home. Commutes, laptops, wifi, time with family, savings, flexibility - Alex has it covered.
"instead of putting on suits and driving to work, people are heading to the basement in their pajamas
and turning on their personal computers. These are the early days of the new Work From Home generation..."
He's got the picture of me 20 years ago when I literally went to my basement to paint and teach and to the kitchen to do what we then called guerrilla marketing
Luckily at that point there were six of us in the house and car-pools, committees, entrepreneur groups and clients to keep me from feeling alone. But Alex addressed this too when he writes
"The dynamics of an office work environment stimulate us in ways that are not going to be present when working from home.
"Each interaction brings in human subtleties and brings an opportunity for creative thought and innovation. When working at home these stimuli will not be there and everyone is going to get bored, sooner or later. The antidote is to get out of the house - work from a local coffee shop that has wifi, and once in a while go to the office and talk to your co-workers in person.
Luckily for me, I discovered Second Life for meetings and twitter for brainstorming and networking
Alex recognizes these tools and trends including
" . .basic software for virtual teams, as well as how to assemble an online office. . . .
From better brainstorming tools to video conferencing there are opportunities to innovate to make virtual collaboration
smooth and painless."
I'm not saying either are smooth or painless, but what new technology is? And we do have to show more of our work-at-home brethren the wonders of Second Life and Twitter as tools, not means to an end or amazing solutions to every issue.
I'm still working from home 20 years after I started. Now I've just got better tools and more company.
If you've just happened across this blog and are wondering, Yes, I'm that Susan Reynolds.
who keeps Boobs on Ice to tell the story of being diagnosed with cancer on Dec 6m 2007
who taught art at my Home studio or the Lake Anne studio in the 80s & 90s
who spent many years as primarily a painter and gallery owner and marketing consultant but who is never all one thing to the exclusion to all else
who's Erin, Kerry, Ryan and Kate's mom (Hunters' Woods, Langston Hughes, South Lakes, Oakland Mills, NOVA, Reston Soccer, Reston basebal, Girl Scouts, etc)
who's the wife of Bill Reynolds' (Legum and Norman Community Management Department)
who's Tynan Clary in Second Life & who does consulting to help you use Second Life, twitter, blogs and social media for your business or personal visibility (read the blog below for more about this topic)
Fighting cancer is my main priority these days so I don't work on this blog as much as I'd like to, But you can follow me on twitter,at Boobs on Ice where the day to day about my cancer experience is, at Second Chances, primarily about virtual worlds, or find all my content that's posted on the web aggregated at soup.io
Great news for me, this event will have excellent presenters and is relatively nearby, not only convenient for me but also right of I-66 so easy for lots of people to get to.
Finding things to do besides dancing the night away in Second Life isn't that hard to do, but sometimes it takes a little time to figure it all out. What if you just want to go to an event, sit down and learn something about how it all works?
Ah - enter my own small sampling of Second Life events listed in the 30 boxes calendar on the side-bar of this blog. It reminds me what I'm doing as well but pretend I set this up just for you.
Sometimes just being able to whip over here to the blog, click on the calendar & find some people who you can identify with and have a discussion with is a fun thing to do. However my event schedule's probably not the place to find a disco night in Second Life.Just be warned I'm a little tame.
There's some variety though, so you could meet some interesting folks. Most of my Second Life friends are people who are very clear abut who they are in the everyday world too..
SO how do you get more than just the list you see in the column on the side of the page and pictured here?
If you click on the center of the box you'll get a page with more detailed listing of what's happening in my part of the SL world - sometimes more - sometimes less - depending on how much I know and how much time I have to add it
Please note: I don't make all the things I do public but I do include things that I do or that I think would be helpful or interesting, from a Victorian Salon to a geek talk at Cisco to a party for bloggers.
One thing that always bugs me is seeing something listed in a blog etc and finding NO info about it other than a name and some numbers.
"Sim xyz 12/34/45" is just not going to do it for me. Why Second Life folks don't like to give us links in order to get us to attend events I don't know
It's hard enough to find places in SL without having to type numbers in tiny boxes, So I've tried to include a link that you can use to teleport to where the event is being held - if I'm able to find one.
Sometimes you might find the calendar has broken links but I try to make a tinyrul when possible. If it's broken try highlighting the SLURL and pasting in your browser window.
I hope this helps you find something interesting happening soon, and that you give Second Life a try. For more Second Life related information check in at my notes and links tumblog: Second Chances and here in the Artsy Asylum Blog under the category: 2nd Life / Metaverse
Whoever said you can't get something for nothing hadn't met the people at Sun Microsystems.
They're running something called Java Technology Fundamentals (click image for enlargement) on Nov 29th at 9AM SL/Pacific (Noon Eastern) and promise to have information on other Sun resources not just about Java but about other platforms as well
It's just another way that rel life companies are using virtual worlds to create learning and networking opportunities for a wide variety of people.
Another plus - you can attend in your pajamas, or as we call them at my house, permajamas.
Events are held at the Sun developer playground and you must have downloaded the SL software and gone through orientation beforehand.
If you're brave, tell them my virtual self, Tynan Clary sent you.
Note - Don't try to accomplish orientation the same day as the event Questions: email : sdnonsecondlife@sun.com
Avatars as Personal Brands is the kick off panel scheduled for tomorrow at Orange Island.
Times of the discussions are on the graphic at right (click to enlarge - and remember these times given are on Second Life Time/ US Pacific Time) and on my 30 boxes calendar (there listed in "my time" or EST).
see box in left column of the blog that will give you highlights and take you to the larger calendar
First thing that popped into my head was - why is Second Life such an insiders kind of place? Why didn't they ask Connie Reece - or her Reece Llewellyn Second Life incarnation to be on one of these panels?
For Connie / Reece or as all of twitterville knows her: @conniereece, the whole pink hair in real life to go along with the pink hair in Second Life to go along with the pink boa in her photo is inspired.
See Connie talk about her pink highlights in real life here
I'm only glad I could play a part of pointing out a place to get Pink hair. Even though I didn't know at the time that's what she'd come home wearing.
But back to avatars. It seems to me like what we see, the image in front of us on the screen, has a lot to do with how we come to think of the person on the other end, whether we ever meet them in person or not. And Connie and her hot pinkness kind of personifies that.
It's almost too much to think about. And I've got too much to say to do both that and remind you about this avatar event.
I'm going to do my best to be at the 9am and 11am discussions at a minimum, as well as checking in when I can.
I hope to learn a lot and see some great examples. Our digital selves and the 3-d web are in their infancy. There's a lot to digest and consider.
*Office hours Tues 5PM Eastern/ 2PM Pacific or just drop in & pick up a frozen pea t-shirt, pea beach-ball etc.
*Drop a notecard to my SL avatar Tynan Clary anytime.
by mail
Susan Reynolds
1474 Northpoint Village Ctr #314
Reston Virginia 20194
It started on February 10th, which happened to be my sixtieth birthday and about sixty days since my cancer diagnosis. It was a hard time. But it was also My ooVoo Day which actually turned out to be ooVoo Week 
My list is long and my excuse is that I have to know something about them if I'm going to explain to people what they're about. A small widget to link to these services is something I find handy and I place it in the blogs' side columns so that you'll know where to find me. 
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