Case-Notes from the Artsy Asylum

Can Virtual Reality Provide the Future of Education?

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!

But What Do I Do When I GET to Second Life?

Post Publication Note: This was first published in late November 2007 and one thing that I'm aware of that has changed since that date is that my island home and office were a BC - before cancer - thing.

After December 7 I was recovering from the shock of sudden diagnosis of invasive cancer, then surgery, and by spring 2008 the time and money seemed better directed towards other things than virtual land ownership. Although I hope to change that as I pick up energy and consulting work, right now there's not a place to visit me in Second Life

- - -

What can we do in Second Life?

I've put some ideas together below and also added them to a download text file that you can save for when you need it.

Or just enjoy reading about the highlights here. You'll find more shopping information in the download but the essentials are the same.

All these places are free to visit. And enjoy. 

Remember however that businesses listed are trying to generate a - usually small - income for themselves.  Since I believe in adding to the SL economy I also support spending some money - maybe $20 or so - to create an avatar that really does represent "you" in the virtual world,

Yes, you'll find plenty of people to give you lists of places you can get freebies.

And I'm not against freebies. But I think that if you want to show a serious interest in anything - including virtual worlds - investing a couple of dollars isn't too much to ask.You'd spend $20 on a videogame and almost that on a CD. So I encourage you to buy

Download thingstodo.txt was created in a simple notepad format that should be easily readable for most of you.

--------------------

HELP

You can always use a pointer or two. And although we may not be able to redo orientation, going through Help Island is an option, and what's dubed a "Public orientation" island can be helpful too

Public Orientation
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Orientation%20Island%20Public/100/171/33

HELP Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Help%20Island%20Public/124/135/27

---------------
DO Something - Learn Something

***** You'll find Business and Networking Events with real world people who for the most part don't try to hide their identities and are -generally- who they say they are at: *****

Doctor Dobbs Island - holds Events every Tues at 8AM SLT & every Fri at 1PM SLT

Intel Conference Center - Drop by and see the boards for event listings & feel free to just walk around

Sun Microsystems - Pavillion

IBM - vast vast complex and some fun too!

Dell Island Complex - Conference Center & Lots more to wander around, get advice, and more

----------

Wearables - the stuff that gives you identity

Skin - yes I said skin. This is a great place to buy some that looks great on you

ETD - has a great bargain room - and nice hair and clothing besides that

They have great hair at Naughty but the lag is hellacious and most of the clientele look like hookers so be prepared

Second Life, ooVoo and Connecting Around the World

Chatting with Phillip at ooVoo yesterday I was telling him that my husband Bill was impresed with the technology and the people when he experienced ooVoo day with me in February - in fact so much so that he had already used ooVoo to hold a voice and video meeting involving participants in three of his offices.

Phillip said that some new goodies will soon be released that may make these conferences even better, and I passed this on to Bill who, though not the IT guy in the firm, feels that his department can be served by some new looks at the way they approach communication across multiple states and different offices.

This conversation came to mind later when I was catching up with virtual worlds expert and futurist Tao Takashi's blog (mr topf in Second Life)

In talking with Jeanette Gibson, Director of New Media Communications at Cisco they cover options for interacting with employees around the world

 Jeanette: ... In Second Life for example, I can meet with teams in Europe and feel more connected to them.

mrtopf: How does that compare to e.g. video conferencing, phone conferences etc.?
Jeanette: I’d say that Second Life is better than a phone call or webcast. You get the sense of physical proximity. But it’s not as good as our Telepresence technology that is virtual meetings, you can see the real person. With globalisation this is so critical, having many ways to reach people.

mrtopf: Telepresence though is a bit too expensive for many right now but it looks impressive.
Jeanette: yes, it’s for large businesses now, companies that have many branch offices and need to connect, it’s $100,000 -$300,000. But someday we’ll have telepresence in our homes.

You know, I'm not the tech guru here so I have to ask about the difference between the video conferencing via computer that ooVoo does and the teleconferencing that Jeanette and Tao are talking about. Sounds like one primary difference is lots of dollar signs.

Beyond the dollar signs people have fun meeting in Second Life and also via ooVoo - will video conferencing ever be the same?

And ooVoo is putting their dollar signs in a pretty important place, donating to the frozen Pea Fund, which counts for something as far as building community.

In the end, with ooVoo, as with Second Life, the fun is in the process of participation- no matter where we chose to have the conversation. The most important thing is to take part.

Codgers and Computers

Shel Israel wrote today about where we "connected seniors" came from - I think some people think we retire and our kids buy us a computer as a way to keep us occupied - or to keep us from visiting them and the grandkids.

The observers may have been watching too much TV instead of interacting with connected people of all generations. That picture couldn't be further from the truth.

Not Pulled or Pushed by Offspring

Although I think that every house should have a computer sitting prominently in a public part of the house so a passing family member can sit down and do a quick google, my computer usage didn't start because of kids - either grown or in their shorter state.

No, I didn't start using them to share photos of my babies with my family, nor because I want to see photos of their babies now (although I do). And I didn't start using a computer because my kids were using them in school.

From the first time we as a young family could afford a computer I saw it as a tool we all - including me - could DO stuff with.

I remember the first house where the much maligned Commodore-64 sat in my kitchen. It must have been 1981 or 1982 and I was in my 30s with three children.

Apple was not in our price range, so the Commodore did the job of bringing computers to the masses - and me. Within no time a computer was part of my life and I've never looked back.

As computers evolved I was evolving too, thankfully.The decreasingly ugly box always had a prominent place in a well-used public room of the house. It got used more often and became more a part of what we did.

Jump ahead thirty years

If you'd told me that one day I'd be using a laptop computer to opine about the role of virtual worlds in business communication I'd have probably rolled my eyes. Researching and writing about my next step in the cancer wars I might have accepted a little better.

I'm not crazy about the term "seniors" but I don't like "silver surfers" either. Don't pigeon-hole me - just listen to me brag that at age 60 I'm ahead of three out of four of my offspring as far as being connected.

Those three born between 1971 and 1979 lag behind their sister born in 1985 and although I wonder about why that is I don't spend enough time pondering it to keep me from interacting with twitter, exploring plurk, or adding images to flickr.

PS - Dropping in on my Soup.io page will get you a collection of all my web content except twitter. Have you checked out Soup yourself?

ooVoo Means Community, Connection, Conversation, Comedy and Cause

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. 

Submit to Stumbleupon flash button

Dont want to miss it? Go to http://www.oovoo.com/ to download ooVoo

Twittering Lightly through Spring

You'd think someone in Grandbaby 2.2 mode could have managed more tweets than this in April. Cancer fatigue syndrome aside, I'm seriously slacking.

Click on image to get full size display of the usage I've made of twitter in the year since I began tweeting.

Do you use tweetstats? Did you know that going to http://tweetstats.com and entering your twitter name could get the graph for your twitter use too?

It's a great little goodie that Damon Cortesi aka twitterer dacort put together for us with love plus his techie know-how and who knows what else - like gum and shoestrings maybe.

It would be interesting to see if Damon could monetize this, so I asked myself how much I'd pay for more stats - like who's talking to me and what's different in my followers / followees or conversations this month versus last month given that what we have is an aggregate of all conversations since the beginning of tweetdom - or in this case since I started using twitter a year ago. My answer was really that it depended on what kind of information was offered.

I wonder how interesting it would be to see more about who it is we used to be talking to at 3AM vs those we talk to now after midnight (obviously the west coasters but are there more differences?)

Granted, I've got a social science background and used to produce monthly statistics reports for the employment and training program I monitored, so I'm a stats junkie. But the graphing available to us now is just so rich it's fascinating.

Beyond our curiosity about who's talking to who, what tools they use and when, Damon has written about how this kind of tool can be used to identify spam twitter accounts here. I could seriously spend a lot of time just looking and graphing and looking and thinking. It's probably time to donate via the button on TweetStats too.

..

end note: Recently I saw that Lawrence Simon aka Second Life's Crap Mariner had referred to my writing as a "fire hose" I don't know if that means he was still following me on twitter after my surgery when I was updating and thanking people - or not. That red line on the graph is kinda dramatic, even for a communicator.

Dear God: I want a Grandchild and Lifestream Filters. . .TODAY!

Could it really be possible that this glut of information overwhelming me could me managed? Without going back to school to learn to be the techie that creates that new killer app that does it?

Please, I don't have enough time or energy to get to doctors' appointments. I'd be on the laptop during reconstructive surgery to try to figure this all out. Maybe some of the young geeks can manage it for me because I'm frankly overwhelmed with information.

And Ian Kennedy from everwas.com seems hopeful - somewhat. But he sums up my problem as if he was reading my mind:

" It’s like . . In a matter of weeks we’ve gone from “Wow! I can find everything here!” to, “Crap! Over 600,000 results for the phrase Serendipitous Discovery? How can I find the one reference I’m looking for?”

"The huge opportunity ahead is a filter to bubble up the things you need to know without missing anything you want to know."

Oh please God, let this be possible!

• Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - TechCrunch
• Lifestreaming Services Need Better Filtering - Lifestream blog

What Ian says about what's happening at MyBlogLog has merit, though good lord I HATE that it was bought by Yahoo and I now have to jump through Yahoo hoops when signing in.

But maybe they're on the right track - or the totally wrong track - someone help me out here:

"We’re trying a few things out at MyBlogLog that vector results based on how you have tagged yourself on your profile. Right now, in a user’s New in My World feed, it’s a straight, chronological feed based on items that match your tags."

What do you think? Is there HOPE for information overwhelm? I've about reached my limit.

link  The Lifestream Filter Will be the Next Great Algorithm War

Our Lives: Drawing Boundaries, Keeping A Record

When the Editors Association of Canada speaker bailed, a blogger, editor, web guy, drummer and dad Derek Miller filled in. He spoke about the line between his online and off-line lives - with an emphasis on how he's handled the issue since developing colon cancer.

Derek says, and truthfully so since I watched/listened to this more than once:

"It's less of a bummer than it sounds, really."

Since I've been writing about the words we use online, how and where and with whom we connect and how what we say lives after us, it's a short trip to get to wondering how we separate the personal from the online US.

Derek talks about how the very act of writing about his illness in his blog took away some of the pressure. There was little wondering who knew about his diagnosis and who didn't. And in this I saw parallels to talking abut a divorce, a birth, a new job, or any announcement we might make and then wonder who we might have missed contacting.

In the talk he wonders how his work will stay archived after his death, the depth and breadth of images  he's leaving for his children. He considers whether his words online will be seen by family and friends, and gives voice to my concerns about how what we write about will impact them.

Though some of us may have more reason to think about this in depth, knowing that we'll die sooner than we'd probably like, we'll all die at some unknown point and the topics he raises are not simply for those closer to the end of their lives

This is technically a podcast Derek says, but is not an MP3. What an AAC audio enhanced with images is I don't know what that means but to me it looks like a slide show accompanying Derek's voice as he is doing his talk to the group. In any case: Life, death, and the blog is fascinating.

Soup Sifting

One hour Soup maintenance; I'm just hoping this isn't like Gilligan's six hour cruise. Or was it two hour cruise? I'm sure all of you will tell me.

If it was twitter it would happen the day after it was scheduled, and about three hours later. We shall see.

And as the soup.io folks suggest, I'm not holding my breath.

But come on guys, in the meantime I don't have a place to stick the stuff I wander across that's not important enough to blog about but IS interesting enough to hold onto or comment on.

Which reminds me. What did I do with that stuff before there was soup?

Maintenance.

What Web Wows You?

If you love web 2.0 apps like Viddler, MySpace, YouTube, Google Earth, Joost, Facebook, Jaiku or Twitter haven't voted for the 2008 Webware 100 Awards get on over there and start voting!

There are ten categories this year including:

• Audio: Music, podcasts, audiobooks.
• Browsing: Browsers, start pages, RSS readers, widgets, runtime engines.
• Commerce and events: Retail, auctions, travel, real estate, concerts, conferences.
• Communications: E-mail, chat, voice.
• Productivity: App suites, to-do lists, groupware.
• Publishing and photography: Blogging, content management, photo sites.
• Search and Reference: Search engines, encyclopedias, mapping.
• Social: Social networking, family sites, recommendations, online worlds, contests.
• Utility and Security: Infrastructure providers, storage, online protection.
• Video: Video storage, playback, streaming, editing, and animation.

You can pick up to three apps in each category and the nominees are amazing. But time is running out. The last voting day is March 31st.

Click my "I Voted" badge to get your chance to cancel out my vote for Scrabbulous, 30 boxes, Viddler, Twitter and get your favorites some love.