First SLLC meeting of 2008
The Ohio Learning Network Second Life Learning Community in Northwest Ohio (whew!) met for the first time this year and discussed recent projects in Second Life. Radhika Gajjala is working with two graduate students on the a bi-lingual educational exchange project (English and Japanese).
Cassandra Jones is teaching “Women in Sci-Fi,” an American Culture Studies class. She is using Second Life to explore fandom and the many ways in which people express their interest or participate in fandom. Cassandra lead the group on a field trip to the Star Trek Museum of Culture in Second Life. We were also joined by Montana Miller, Richard Anderson from Psychology and Chris Wammes from ITS.
A portion of the discussion was focused on creating a survey for students using Second Life. What sort of initial reactions, experiences, or change in online practice did Second Life facilitate? Perhaps these responses change over time as the students become more familiar with the virtual world.
We also dedicated a short amount of time looking at:
- A “chat logger” which records local chat even when your avatar is not there
- The new planetarium on BGSU island (SLURL) and
- The ongoing construction of the Writing Center on the BGSU virtual campus (SLURL).
MacBook Pro 2007 Graphics Freeze Workaround
I have been having problems with my MacBook Pro. Finally, I have found the problem (thanks to the SLED listserve)!
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/MacBook_Pro_2007_Graphics_Freeze_Workaround
What’s the problem exactly?
When running Second Life on an affected MacBook Pro, your machine completely freezes up. The cursor doesn’t move, pressing the Caps Lock key does not change the Caps Lock light and your machine is no longer reachable from any other machine on the network. The only means available to recover is to hold the power button down until the Mac powers off and then restart it.
The solution they give requires a download and install of the OpenGL Profiler which will then tell your Mac to run the SL client with a different rendering driver (one made for ATI cards, not Nvidia). I will have to check with ITS to see if this is even a possible solution that they might have me pursue. If you are having problems like this please let me know at afontan @ bgsu. edu.
New Trees on Campus
Let us know what you think about the new trees. They are made from sculptie prims made by Greg Wark (Des Edmon) and textures I made (or modified) myself. Let me know what you think!
Second Life, Revisited
Chronicle Careers: 11/12/2007: Second Life, Revisited
I think Michael Bugeja does a wonderful job pointing out some of the important issues of Universities in SL. However, his tone seems overly cautious for something as flexible and adaptive as Second Life. These issues are not reasons to turn and run from Second Life, but instead things that need addressed and resolved be each University using SL.
This definitely isn’t the first time the idea of and “Education Grid” has come up. They’ve been discussing it on the SLED listserve for years. While it may have its benefits, in terms of security, it may also cause a disconnect between grids… I certainly would not want to log out of the main grid to log in a separate avatar on the educational grid to attend an art gallery opening at BGSU’s island only then to repeat the process to visit more galleries.
