Virtual Campus Blog

So you’re ready to dive into Second Life? Great! Thanks to Linden Lab and a partnership with ISTE, educators coming inworld for the first time have a streamlined, educationally-focused starting point to guide them along the way. Those of us currently in Second Life all remember the day we ‘rezzed’ for the first time and what it was like during those initial few minutes of virtual life. That process can be overwhelming simply from an experiential point of view, but sometimes, it can be made even worse by ne’er-do-wells who enjoy harassing new avatars as they appear on Orientation Island. I don’t have statistics, and my sense is that’s rare, but it does happen. Worse, new avatars are left to their own devices to find and teleport to educationally-related sims, a process that, for the uninitiated, can be daunting.

The New Educators Pilot Program (sometimes referred to in ISTE circles as the Educator’s Experience Pathway) changes all that.

Read more…

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BGSU%20Collaboration/133/93/28

The area of the BGUS Virtual Campus known as Collaboration island was a busy place to be last week as several new BGSU Residents have begun working on projects. As you can see from the pictures here, the private sandbox was full of set materials belonging to Louise Later, Vickie Greenwood (and her awesome 1 prim house!, and more. The set was used to shoot some machinima footage (shot on two Macs by AnthonyFontana Chevalier – me – using SnapZ Pro) for Louise’s guidedog project (see blog posts here and here).

Turbo Quang is a grad student in Digital Arts who has also just started his project on the island. The project will allow SL residents to experience death ceremonies in several different cultures.

Polgara Paine’s school house project has also found a new home on Collaboration island. The school house will be used in an assignment that asks two students to race to the top floor to retrieve a book from the libarary. One student will be confined to a wheelchair however, to impose a similar situation the physically disabled may have in real life.

Professor Radhika Gajjala was in today’s Bowling Green State University newspaper (BGNews) speaking about Second Life’s economy, SL for research and more.

“For me it’s a research project to investigate the virtual economy,” Gajjala said.

Read on here.

The Second Life Educators website is stocked with plenty of video on demand, posts about the conference, print materials, and more. Check it out at:

http://sledcc.wikispaces.com/