And I promise I’ll update my blog with all the other things I’ve been doing very soon!

I stayed up till 1am to attend the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 at Cybrary City in Second Life and saw Stephen Downes presenting “Virtual Worlds in Context” in real life and streamed into Second Life.

Unfortunately, as fantastic as some of Stephen’s observations are on other topics, I was disappointed. Maybe if he engaged in Second Life with a more open-mind and developed some understanding of the various projects that are being undertaken by the community, his presentation would have been more interesting.

The thing is…. I agree with many of the limitations that Stephen has identified. Most of us who are experimenting in Second Life are well-aware of the many issues that it does present. Free and open-source would be better, there are problems with the grid and scalability, economic issues, the lack of democracy etc. Believe me – I have cursed the Lindens on more than one occasion! Arrgh… LAG!

However, having acknowledged those limitations, I believe that some of the projects happening in Second Life are educationally and socially valuable, innovative, engaging and fun! The potentials of Second Life are definitely not worth disregarding simply because the ideas are not entirely new, or that some of the educational ideas being explored in Second Life have previously been explored in MUDs and MOOs or Active Worlds.

3D virtual worlds offer unique opportunities for shared experience, for creating immersive environments and interactive objects, for role-playing and communicating. Second Life can be clunky and frustrating to use at times- but it gives us a glimpse of where some of these possibilities are headed in the future.

There is work to be done to better illustrate the educational uses, to address the technical restraints and to find ways to draw attention to the really amazing things that you can do inside a virtual world. We need to develop facilitation skills, we need better tools for information sharing… and yes, the best scenario would be a completely free and open source virtual world.

But I’m not going back to MUDs and MOOs, nor SimCity….. Second Life takes it so much further! The educational potentials of immersive, experiential learning are so exciting, and the work being done in Second Life to explore the uses of virtual worlds will heavily influence the virtual worlds we engage with in the future – both for educational and social purposes.

And I don’t care what Stephen says… it’s not a game and it’s not “like Star Trek… with casinos”!

posted by jokay Wollongong on Cybrary City using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Pandora Kurrajong came to visit me in Second Life today for a tour. She and Gnu Curry joined me as we visited some interesting spaces including the Island of Svarga (SLurl) and the ICT Library (SLurl) on Info Island.

Here we are checking out some virtual books at our Virtual Meeting Space in Wasp (SLurl).

posted by jokay Wollongong on Wasp using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Blogging and BlogHudding have been easy to neglect in the last few days in favour of working on a design of our virtual meeting space. It’s starting to get to a reasonable state now…. more to reveal shortly!

posted by jokay Wollongong on Wasp using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I managed to make it to the last 20mins of Intellagirl Tully’s aka Sarah Robbin’s presentation at UNC, which was also streamed into Second Life using Shoutcast.

Her talk was titled “Creating Authentic and Engaging Community-Oriented Learning Spaces: Using Second Life in Higher Education Classrooms.” She made some interesting points about how learning spaces influence identity and relationships.

posted by jokay Wollongong on Cybrary City using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

It was great to catch up with our friend Konrad again, who is exploring SL with a focus on setting up a space for professional development of teachers. Here we are at Science School checking out the Weather Simulation

posted by jokay Wollongong on Science School using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Awaiting the end of the airing of the show in RL… discussion is about to begin.

I have to say I wasn’t that impressed by the tv program… too much focus on US comment, and not enough Australian connection. Everyone has already heard about Anshe Chung….. let’s move on to more interesting things!

No mention of educational projects – and there are several Australian examples to choose from! Nothing on arts projects and the amazing creativity that goes on in Second Life and very little focus on the array of different types of businesses inworld.

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I’ve staked out a good seat, and I’m awaiting the beginning of the ABC Island Launch which starts in an hour or two.

I am very intrigued about what they will present on the Four Corners TV show which is running to coincide. Let’s hope they do something interesting! More reports to come!

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Sean (he’s the gorgeous looking cat in the pic) and I sitting by the campfire at Boracay… Corwin Carrillion’s island in Second Life.

We were supporting a little tour of TALOites for the TALO Swapmeet currently happening in Adelaide.

Corwin’s space gets more amazing everytime I visit! Well worth checking out!

posted by jokay Wollongong on Boracay using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]