Second Blog

A week ago, I got a phone call from a journalist working for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, asking me about the seminar he heard I was giving at the University of Düsseldorf. Turns out that Matthias Rückel had given him my name and number – thanks!

Unfortunately, the article was shortened significantly according to the author, so that all the information I gave to him didn’t find its way in – but the seminar is mentioned. (And no, I did not tell him that the Middle Ages ended in the 12th century.)

Anyway, if you’d like to take a look, here’s the article.

As I see it (and of course I’m biased due to my own focus on education), it’s good to see that in the wake of all the negative press, the attention of the media is now turning to alternatives to commercial success (or lack thereof). Going hand in hand with the recent policy change of Linden Lab on wagering in Second Life, this will hopefully make things easier for those of us who believe in what might be called the reputable side of SL.

Today, I went shopping. Virtual shopping, that is. Virtual window shopping, even, since SL is currently having some nasty problems and all items on the Slexchange Marketplace were “unavailable while SecondLife is experiencing technical difficulty”.

Believe it or not, I went through all 185 result pages that the search for “medieval” yielded.

Next to the Trivia Treasure Chest (which is not medieval but which fits the theme nicely), my shopping list now includes

Stocks

I’ll probably just dump these items in the village square once I have actually bought them. I think students are going to have fun with these!

While doing some research on the educational uses of SL this weekend, I came across several excellent pages and documents which I think merit some more attention than to just be published under my Resources.

So here’s my private top 5 for the last weekend (in no particular order):

The first of these is called The Who, Where, When and How of Second Life as a teaching tool in 2006. This is a 14-page document prepared by Jeremy W. Kemp, divided into the sections “People”, “Locations”, “Events” and “Tools”.

For each of these, he presents some illustrated examples, finishing with a short outlook on “Trends to Watch in 2007″.

Another one is The Educational Potential of Second Life. Its author is Nicholas Johnson from Ohio State University. He outlines both the negative and the positive aspects of Second Life before listing some educational ideas and possibilites.

Also included is a section titled “A Beginner’s Guide for Educators” which contains various (SL)urls to explore when new to SL. Or to revisit later, of course.

Next, there’s 101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom, which is a document written by Dr. Megan S. Conklin of Elon University. She talks about getting a class started (incuding both technical and organizational issues) and in-world dynamics before pointing out some sample assignments and examples for classroom objectives.

Here’s another interesting one: Seven Wonders of Second Life. This could be called a private initiative by Existential Paine to identify “the most creative and unique builds in SL that are well done and mind blowing”.

He has started by listing his own  recommendations and includes a call to action: Anyone can add his or her own list in a comment or trackback of the original blog entry.

The final one, many of you will already know - Top 20 Educational Locations in Second Life. But for those of you who don’t: It’s a wiki created to keep track of “the list of ‘top’ locations as decided by Wiki consensus”. At the moment, it contains examples for 

Naturally, all of these recommendations come complete with SLurl.

If any of you would like to post your own (current or all-time) Top 5, I’m looking forward to your comments.

Well, the discussion about the supposed downfall of Second Life is heating up nicely. But if the saying is true that even bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, we’re doing just fine.

By the way, I just skimmed the topics of the last postings to the SLED mailing list and couldn’t find a single mention of this topic over the last week or two. Now what does that tell us? Several things, I suppose, most of them having to do with the German media.

Via a posting in Lars’ personal blog, I just became aware of the press coverage of the (supposed or real?) exodus of companies and single users from Second Life.

Quite apart from the fact that the zdnet-Artikel gives the number of unique users with 5,2 million, whereas the Linden Lab counter shows 8,150,180 total residents (and yes, apart from the question of how many of these are actually active), I cannot be worried.

In my opinion, a bit of a hype is a good thing to start with, but that’s not something you can expect to continue indefinitely.

In an interview with Technology Review, Ian Hughes from IBM once more confirms IBM’s belief that virtual worlds (be it Second Life or another platform) present a unique opportunity for business, collaboration, events, school and training.

Of course, it’s the last aspect I’m most interested in personally – and the fact that sales figures in SL are going down because avatars do not really need all these products to survive has absolutely no impact on that.

The potential of virtual worlds to not only communicate, but also to give this much-valued sense of “presence” remains, at least to me, beyond all question.

This Monday saw another German Web Monday in Second Life, specially intended to gather a group of people to test the new Voice functionality.

Unfortunately, the number of visitors was relatively small, but I had fun nevertheless.

I had daringly installed the First View client several hours earlier and was relieved (not to mention suprised)  that I could jump right in both talking and listening withouth any problems whatsoever. Okay, so my mike was a bit oversensitive and my speech indicator green most of the time, but I want to buy a new headset anyway.

So, great feature! I’m looking forward to using it in our seminar in the fall and was pleasantly suprised (that was twice in one day) to notice that our landlord, the European University Project, has already activated it on their land – thanks a lot!

As part of an assignment for the “Second Life for Educators” course I’m taking part in, I have just posted a message outlining my ideas for presenting texts in our seminar.

Here it is:

My main challenge is the fact that our subject is heavily text-based – we’ve not only got our source texts (or passages thereof), but also background information on these texts as well as on genres, history, language, persons etc.

As far as I can see (and I’m grateful for any additional tips), there are two ways to deal with this:

1. the integration of interactive objects and
2. using different ways of presenting texts to achieve maximum variety.

For the first category, I have been able to come up with some ideas I think are promising:

With regard to the texts, I have collected the following possibilities so far:

Additionally, I’d love to record samples of Old and Middle English texts with the students and integrate those, and of course we’re going to use a blog to discuss the seminar on a meta-level as well as do some creative writing such as fictitious diary entries of time travelers from the Middle Ages finding themselves in Second Life. Wonder where they’d go first. ;-)

So, these are my plans up to this point – I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback on this and hope very much I’ll be able to gather some additional ideas!

Cheers

Kirsten

Yes, I did indeed go to the round table yesterday, and I was glad I did! There were more than 20 visitors there, from places as far away as Duesseldorf and France. A big thankyou to Jutta for organizing the event!

Since the round table has a business focus, most of the participants came from companies or agencies active in Second Life or – as in my case – are interested in the educational potential.

Because of the success of this first evening, the event will in the future take place monthly on every second Thursday, alternating with Duesseldorf (every fourth Thursday).

If you’re interested, I suggest joining the Second Life group called “SecondCommerce Cologne/Duesseldorf” and take a look at Second Commerce in XING.

I have just had my first interview about Second Life. Actually, it was supposed to be in Second Life as well, but since it’s Wednesday… Need I say more? Boy, am I glad that we’ve chosen a Friday for our seminar (and that was before I knew about Wednesdays in SL, too).

So we used Teamspeak to communicate and talked about the plans for our seminar, the contents and setting.

Here’s the image I sent to them beforehand as a talking point:

My interview partner is a member of the Second Life seminar at the Graduiertenkolleg E-Learning of the TU Darmstadt. They’re looking for SLeducators willing to be interviewed. Why, of course!

As soon as the inteview recording is made available to me, I will post it here.

I’ve just come across an article at Second Life Talk on the Cologne SecondLife Roundtable on July 12th, 2007. I cannot say yet whether I’ll have time to go, but I’ll definitely try.