JISC

ALT-C, Crowdvine and (social) tagging

The Crowdvine social network for next week's ALT-C Conference is now available and delegates are signing up apace. One of the interesting things ab...

Geek 2.0

Brian Kelly has a post on the mainstreaming of the "2.0" label, Citizen 2.0, Strike 2.0, David Cameron 2.0 and Coldplay 2.0. A while back I made th...

Rural-urban Learning through Authenticity Symbiosis in Agritourism

Georgeous Parx (George Pop - RL), a Tourism Marketing Masters student from University of Surrey, will be presenting "Rural-urban Learning through A...

Lost in the JISC Information Environment?

Tony Ross, writing in the current issue of Ariadne, Lost in the JISC Information Environment, gives a nice summary of some of the issues around the...

Sloodle Island coming soon

Dan Livingstone of the Sloodle project (which we happen to fund :-) ) has made the following announcement to the virtualworlds@jiscmail.ac.uk maili...

Web futures - who ordered the pragmatic semantic organism with fries?

In the first of his Ten Futures (which is an interesting read by the way) Stephen Downes suggests that the Semantic Web will never happen and that ...

ARG (as opposed to Arghhh)

I'm not a big gamer and never have been (brief flirtations with Space Invaders and Pac-Man way back when, Tony Hawks Pro Skater on the PS2, Guitar ...

Two-thirds of UK homes now online

More background news about the penetration of Internet access into UK homes, this time from the Office for National Statistics, via the BBC.  ...

Directory of repository-related blogs

The JISC-funded Repositories Support Project has developed quite a nice list of repository-related blogs (and other RSS feeds). Worth taking a look...

The right time for outsourcing

Paul Walk has an interesting post, “Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”, questioning whether the time is right for universities to start o...

Three panel sessions at the Chilbo summer fair

In a way, I wish I was part of Chilbo - part of me is dead envious cos it looks like a fun community.As part of their summer fair there are three i...

The importance of non-literals to linked data

I'm less involved in Dublin Core metadata discussions than I used to be but a brief exchange on one of the DC lists caught my eye and reminded me h...

Social media and the emerging technology hype curve

I've noticed two behavioural changes in myself over the last while... Firstly, I'm trying to do less work at home outside of normal office hours.&n...

What Web 2.0 teaches us...

Preface: I've had this post on the back-burner for a while, worried that it might cause offense to various colleagues/friends/readers.  It's i...

Student part-time work offered: controlling the VC's avatar

A nice quote in yesterday's Times Higher by John Coyne, VC at the University of Derby, in an article about transliteracy:"While I was on the walkab...

Preserving virtual worlds

The BBC have a short article about digital preservation entitled, Writing the history of virtual worlds.  Virtual worlds and other gaming envi...

Identity, gender and death

We make money not art has an interesting piece about the work of Marc Owens, including a description of a RL virtual transgender suit and an facili...

Incorrect behaviour?

Interesting post on the OpenHabitat blog (OpenHabitat is a JISC-Funded project) discussing an in-world meeting that went "wrong" and the coping str...

No tweets by SMS in the UK

Twitter is no longer delivering tweets by outbound SMS in the UK.  This doesn't bother me, since I've never wanted to clutter my mobile phone ...

Ofcom UK Communications Market Review 2008: Interactive Key Points

Ofcom's Market Review for 2008 has been released, with a new interactive view of the key points being made available separately allowing people to ...

BRUM ReJiG

We funded the one year BRUM project back in 2006 as part of our programme of small-scale information literacy projects.  I've just noticed tha...

Metadata and microformats

<shamelessPlug>I happened to notice earlier on (OK, I admit it... I was checking at the time) that my Does metadata matter? slidecast has bee...

Digital literacy anyone?

The Information Literacy Section of IFLA has announced the winner of a competition to design an "information literacy" logo.The aim of creating th...

OpenID and usability

Hot on the heels of my own post about the unsatisfactory nature of usability within Shibboleth-based federations, Mike Ellis has a nice post about ...

Unleashing the Tribe

A final quickie before I go on leave for a week... I just wanted to highlight Ewan Macintosh's keynote, Unleashing the Tribe, on the final day of t...

SEO and digital libraries

Lorcan Dempsey, SEO is part of our business, picks up on a post by John Wilkin, Our hidden digital libraries, concerning our collective inability t...

Bye, bye Athens... hello UK Federation

It's a big day today for federated access management in UK academia with "nearly 500 institutions and organisations [completing] the transition to ...

F-ALT

Anyone planning on attending ALT-C in Leeds this September might be interested in the F-ALT fringe event which includes various "WTF?" sessions on ...

Stop the Web, I want to get off...

I used to be happy with Facebook and Twitter and regularly updated my statuses in both... for a while at least! Then Facebook got a bit stale, star...

Cory Doctorow on open licences

The Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast from Wednesday this week contains a brief but interesting interview with Cory Doctorow (about 21 minutes into th...

Barriers to innovation

Steven Warburton has a nice post on Liquid Learning discussing the barriers to innovation in virtual worlds in the context of teaching and learning...

Education panel at Virtual Policy '08

I attended the first day of the Virtual Policy '08 conference earlier this week to take part in a panel on Education, Learning and Virtual Spaces.&...

Virtual Policy '08

Apologies for the cross-post, but I've written up my contribution to the education panel session at Virtual Policy '08 on eFoundations.

MySpace does OpenID

TechCrunch report that MySpace will become YAOP (yet another OpenID Provider), bringing the total OpenID-enabled accounts to over 500 million. The ...

Submit your machinima to 4mations

4mations, an animation company based in Bristol, UK and backed by Channel 4, Aardman Animations and Lupus Films, will start offering cash prizes ne...

Calling all environmental students or other interested parties...

I blogged about Carbon Goggles the other day.Coincidentally, I bumped into Babbage Linden at the Virtual Policy '08 event in London on Tuesday and ...

Prim toes!

Some of you will know that I use a Second Life alt to run an in-world shoe business, BB Shoes. Note that I'm using the words 'run' and 'business' v...

PsychoPod: conversations in cognitive psychology

At the beginning of 2007 we funded a small podcasting project called PsychoPod, undertaken jointly by Nigel Holt and Jim Crawley (Bath Spa Universi...

Virtual Goggles and carbon emissions

I meant to blog this a while back but never got round to it. Carbon Goggles is a novel experiment by Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab that allows people ...

Virtual Policy '08

I'm taking part in a panel session at the Virtual Policy '08 conference later today. The conference is being held in London over the next two days ...

Does metadata matter?

This is a 30 minute slidecast (using 130 slides), based on a seminar I gave to Eduserv staff yesterday lunchtime.  It tries to cover a broad s...

A wet day out at Thorpe Park

I took Stan and one of his mates to Thorpe Park on Sunday. It was pretty wet but we had a great time. Here’s the evidence… The pictures...

Updating your Technorati blog thumbnail

A quick howto… in case anyone else is struggling to work out how to update their blog’s thumbnail image on Technorati. The thumbnails a...

Where are the new approaches?

Stephen Downes (rightly) complains that we spend too much time in Second Life (SL) blandly re-creating what we would do in real life - particularly...

Uptown top banking

According to the AvaStar, the banks are back, though only those that have been accredited by Linden Lab.Can anyone explain what the use-case is for...

Dorkbot

The Dorkbot session that has been arranged for 6 July 1:00 pm PDT / 22:00 CET at the Odyssey Simulator sounds good, particularly to people with an ...

Catch you on the flip side later - improving the federated user experience

My colleague, David Orrell, gave a presentation to the JISC Federated Access: Future Directions day in Birmingham earlier this week.  Here are...

Snatching success from the jaws of failure

What is Twitter's most notable presence on the Web right now?  The Fail Whale of course!  The Fail Whale is the graphic that appears eve...

Can you show them a better way?

I don't know... you wait ages for a competition and then two come along at once :-) Hot on the heels of Elsevier's Article 2.0, the Show us a bette...

Article 2.0 contest from Elsevier

This is interesting...We’ve worked hard to build the Article 2.0 dataset, and now we’re opening it up to developers via a simple, straightforward R...

Doin' the Museum Mash

The Eduserv Foundation has a programme of sponsorship and I'm pleased to say that we sponsored the recent Mashed Museum 2008 event, just prior to ...

What makes a good tag?

Yonks ago (that's... like.. you know... quite a long time ago) I suggested to the web-support@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list that we needed an agreed ...

Information Card Foundation - second attempt

I've been doing some work recently on a draft blogging policy for Eduserv staff and one of the things it suggests is:Don't pick fights, be the firs...

Putting the 'new' into New South Wales' schools - outsourcing email to Google

So schools in New South Wales become the latest area of education to migrate their email from an 'in-house' solution (Outlook and Exchange in this ...

Information Card Foundation

Yesterday, Kim Cameron noted the creation of the Information Card Foundation (ICF).  Here's the start of the press release:An array of promine...

Creative borrowing?

Charles Arthur, What's the right way to talk about copyright stuff? (Guardian Technology, June 23 2008), asks, "How do you describe it when someone...

SLEDcc2008 on Twitter

I blogged SLEDcc2008 a while back... if you are interested in keeping up to date, note that the organisers have now set up a Twitter feed.

Happy SL5B

Today is Second Life's 5th birthday - a substantial milestone by any measure. Congrats to Linden Lab and the wider community for getting us this fa...

Orange Island Photo Week

This caught my eye, partly because I'm an Orange customer in RL...Orange are running a photo week on their island this week. Sounds interesting.

Immersion and embodiment

I touched on "embodiment" in my last post which was something that also came up in discussion during the Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In S...

Virtually educated - the reality of using Second Life and other virtual worlds in FE

I gave a presentation at the JISC RSC-SW Summer Conference a couple of days ago...Not my best ever presentation, partly because I'd structured it i...

Web 2.0 and repositories - have we got our repository architecture right?

For the record... this is the presentation I gave at the Talis Xiphos meeting last week, though to be honest, with around 1000 Slideshare views in ...

Father’s day paella

I invited my dad over for lunch yesterday and we had tapas (including barbecued asparagus with goat’s cheese and apple balsamic vinegar) foll...

Open Habitat

I mentioned the Open Habitat project in my last post but didn't highlight their blog (because I hadn't spotted it!). There's some interesting stuff...

Playing with OpenSim

I'm on the advisory group for the JISC Open Habitat project which is doing interesting things with groups of art & design and philosophy studen...

Playing with Picnik

On Eduserv IslandOriginally uploaded by Art FossettTorley recently announced a short video tutorial showing how to use Picnik to take snapshots of ...

Chat logs and live blogging - to publish or not to publish, that is the question

IYan Writer argues that publishing chat logs of meetings is not only unhelpful as a record of the meeting but downright harmful (because it pollute...

Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life

A live blog from the Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life final project meeting, held at the London Knowledge Lab on 13 June 2008. ...

Scenius and innovation

Kevin Kelly, over at the Technium, has an interesting piece about the "extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes"" can occasionally generat...

Great expectations?

Another interesting looking report from the JISC, this time focusing on how well UK universities are meeting the ICT expectations of new undergradu...

SLEDcc2008

Planning for the Second Life Education Community Conference 2008 is underway. See the wiki for details. Volunteers wanted!SLEDcc2008 is part of the...

Talis Xiphos Research Day

This blog entry was used to host a live blog report from the Talis Xiphos Research Day, held at the Talis offices outside Birmingham on 10 June 200...

Twitter and Second Friends

Twitter is mildly borked right now which has interrupted the flow of tweet bubbles from my Second Friends Tweeters. In dealing with their performan...

ReLIVE2008 - second call for abstracts

The Open University is pleased to announce a second call for abstract submissions for the international conference for Researching Learning in Virt...

Second Friends reaches 1000

I've been AFK for a week or so, on RL holiday, which means I missed the 1000th Second Friends registration.Looks like second friend number 1000 was...

UK identity management future directions

In the run up to a meeting organised by the JISC, Federated Access: Future Directions Day, (at which my Eduserv Foundation colleague, David Orrell,...

Is DCMI hiding its light under a bushel?

Good grief... Dublin Core gets some bad press at times - some of it justified, some of it not - and I have a tendency to blow hot and cold on the s...

Second Friends tweeter now available

In general, I'm going to try and do better at making my in-world stuff available to other people. To that end, I've made my Second Friends Tweeter ...

MeetingPod now available

The MeetingPod was one of the first significant things I built in Second Life, so I feel a certain fondness for it. It's a small, floating, meeting...

W3C Technical Architecture Group recommends against XRI

I've previously noted my concerns about the introduction of the XRI into the OpenID 2.0 specification. In a message to the W3C Technical Architectu...

May 2008 "snapshot" of UK HE and FE development in SL

The second in our series of three snapshots of UK higher and further education activities in Second Life is now available.  This is significan...

Spring 2008 snapshot of UK educational activity in SL now available

The second in our series of three snapshots of UK higher and further education activities in Second Life is now available. This is significantly lo...

Learning to teach in Second Life

The Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life project have a draft report available entitled Learning to Teach in Second Life. Looks int...

Streaming media from the symposium now available

All the streaming media from the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008 is now available via blip.tv.  See the symposium presentations page for a f...

Identity crisis?

Wagner James Au has an interesting blog post, Web 2.0 Is The Bridge Between 1st And 2nd Life Identity, suggesting that:a tremendous level of Second...

Leeds voice session

I did an hour long talk to staff at the University of Leeds earlier today. Most of them were fairly new to SL. The talk was done in-world on Educat...

NOAA survey

Want to help NOAA decide what to build next in Second Life? Take this short survey...

Facebook blocks Google Friend Connect

I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, There's gotta be a little rain sometimes. (I Never Promised You a...

Teach online to compete...

An article in Tuesday's Education Guardian, Teach online to compete, British universities told, caught my eye - not least because it appears to say...

JISC IE blog, Val Doonican and *that* diagram

A very quick note to say that the JISC Information Environment team are now blogging... good stuff. And while I'm on the subject of the JISC IE, I ...

Love is...

You wont be told a story, but you will get to live one. Its not what is given to you its what you do when you hold it. The more you give to more yo...

Virtual learning, real prizes

The NMC have announced $100,000 worth of prizes (yes, that's US dollars, not L$!) intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learnin...

Google Friend Connect

This did the rounds fairly extensively on Twitter yesterday but is still worth a mention here... Google have announced Friend Connect (currently on...

An @foo convention for blogs

I've noted before in this blog that Twitter has a very simple convention for prefixing someone's Twitter account name with '@' to indicate that you...

Podcasting in teaching and learning

Andy Ramsden and Lindsay Jordan up at the University of Bath have made a nice little presentation available on Slideshare providing an introduction...

Symposium thoughts

Some brief thoughts on the symposium which happened last Thursday... Overall, it seemed to go well I think, with relatively few hiccups.  We h...

Grants - lack of feedback

We have just passed the second major milestone in our rather lengthy and convoluted research grants application process.  The 14 people who go...

Seamless textures - part 2

My colleague, Peregrine Juneau, laughed at me the other day for producing a seamless cucumber texture. Quite right too! What was I thinking? Can't ...

Making a seamless cucumber image

I've always wondered how to make a seamlesse texture - i.e. a texture that can be repeated/tiled with no obvious lines between the repeats.Actually...

Land issues resolved

With reference to the last post and my collapsing 'For Sale' sign... my land issues have now been resolved.I bought some land on Sinfro a while bac...

...or this

You ain't seen nothing like the mighty prim

I've been having fun with a very simple scripted prim idea. Take, one scripted Mighty Prim, copy it as many times as you like, position the resulti...

SWAP and ORE

There's an interesting mini-thread on the jisc-repositories list, started by the announcement by Google to drop support for OAI-PMH which Paul Walk...

Inside out - symposium update

Our annual symposium takes place next Thursday (8th May) at the British Library in London: Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the...

Microsoft makes history in SL

Hah! That's very funny...Once again we are poised to make history for Microsoft by holding the first ever full-fledged Launch event in Second Life....

Slideshare, Tibet, China and DoS attacks

I Twittered briefly (yes, I know that all tweets are brief by definition) this morning that Slideshare appeared to be down again.  Within minu...

Insert cock up

I'm embarrassed :-(. I announced my recent improvements to Second Friends on the SLED list yesterday only to find out today that new registrations ...

Myself to myself - What not to Rez follow-up

I went to the Emerge event.I turned up incognito - it was a party at a conference about online identity after all.I kept myself to myself by and la...

'What not to Rez' fashion show

The JISC Emerge project are hosting an evening of entertainment, What not to Rez, on Emerge Island later this evening - 7pm UK time.

Second Friends profile images

One of the original design features of Second Friends was that it would re-use people's in-world profile image as the image displayed on their Face...

Jorum to move to open access

The JISC have announced that Jorum, the national learning object repository hosted and run jointly by MIMAS and EDINA, is to move to an 'open acces...

Libraries of the future

There's a special supplement in tomorrow's Education Guardian (Tuesday, 22 April) looking at college and university libraries of the future.  ...

Second Friends news

I've added a couple of new features to my Second Friends Facebook application...Firstly, it now offers a My friends' friends feature, allowing you ...

UKOLN 30th Anniversary video

I just know this is what you've been waiting for... The images are on Flickr and my Facebook profile.

Shibboleth Technical Reading List

Simon McLeish at LSE has produced a nice (and compact) list of technical reading material for those who are new to Shibboleth and the UK Access Man...

UKOLN's 30th bash

Pete and I are travelling up to London later today to attend UKOLN's 30th anniversary celebrations, being held at the British Library.  30 ye...

Brief grants update

Three of us - myself, Pete and Ed - have now deliberated, cogitated and digested the 128 short proposals (2 sides of A4) that we received under thi...

Powerhouse becomes first museum to join the Commons on Flickr

Via Seb Chan I note that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia is the first museum to join the Commons on Flickr:In the tradition of ’slow fo...

Comments and spam

A couple of you will have noticed that I’m not very quick at moderating comments on this blog. Why? Because my spam to comment ratio is very ...

TwitStory #3 - memories

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen. http://twitter.com/photomatt Finding it amusing and yet slightly disturbing that I recite the Patapon ...

Here comes everybody... well, some of us anyway

Writing in the Times Higher Education, Tara Brabazon (Professor of Media Studies, University of Brighton) provides an interesting review of Clay Sh...

Tech support via Twitter

I spent a few hours yesterday copying-and-pasting text from PDF into Powerpoint in order to create my Slideshare version of the Byron report summar...

Changing perceptions...

It's funny how our interpretation of design and text layout changes over time and is influenced by the Web. Looking at one of our current paper fl...

Re-purposing the Byron report for kids

Via Dan Livingstone on Learning Games I note that that the Byron Report, Safer Children in a  Digital World: the report of the Byron Review, h...

TwitLyrics - 3rd April 2008

Space travel’s in my blood / And there ain’t nothing I can do about it / Long journeys wear me out but / I know I can’t tweet wit...

Fan sites thru the ages

The earliest list of SL fan sites (as listed on secondlife.com) that I can find in the Internet Archive is from Sept 2004 - about three and a half ...

Clarification of branding guidelines - the mud is clearing but it's still mud

Linden Lab have issued some clarification around their new branding guidelines.While the clarification is welcomed and provides some useful... err....

Eye in hand

Interesting resource about the use of 'eye in hand' imagery in various cultures:Eye in hand - the study of a multi-cultural icon

Congressional hearing on virtual worlds

I watched the bulk of the congressional hearing on virtual worlds earlier today but ultimately gave up before the end... frustrated at the directio...

Kiva.org - loans that change lives

I occasionally use kiva.org to make small loans to people in developing countries. Seems like a nice thing to do. What follows is the text that Kiv...

[Un]limited ?

Approximate quote from the Florida representative at the congressional hearing on virtual worlds today:The possibilities offered by virtual worlds ...

What LL did next...

There's a nice comment by Deltango Vale on Reuter's EXCLUSIVE - Rosedale to step down as Linden Lab CEO story from which I quote a fairly substanti...

Dance Umbrella

Bath and North East Somerset hold a dance festival every year, aimed primarily at schools, though there are also some dance clubs taking part. This...

Open cultural heritage

JISC have announced five new digitisation projects, funded jointly with US’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Looking at the announceme...

Science Museum Library & Archives now open in Swindon

New facilities to house the Science Museum Library & Archives are now open in Swindon:After several years of intensive work, the project to rec...

Unfit for purpose?

According to the NASUWT I am unlikely to be “fit for purpose” in my “well-meaning” role as chair of governors of my local p...

iProjector

Via Andy Black’s blog, I note that you can now buy a projector for your iPod. Pretty cool… and would almost make me buy one - the iPod ...

InSL?

I knew I was in the wrong when I used Linden Lab's hand/eye logo as part of the logo for my Second Friends Facebook application. Dunno why I did it...

Self assessment

The Self Evaluation Form (SEF) is the mechanism by which schools in the UK judge their own performance and capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. ...

OpenID review

The JISC are currently funding a review of OpenID, looking at its potential use in higher education.  The review will do this by:Determining p...

TwitLyrics - 19th March 2008

the more i tweet you / the more i want you / somehow this feeling / just grows and grows

TwitLyrics - 15th March 2008

rise up this morning / smiled with the rising sun / three little birds / tweet by my door step

Shrinking governing bodies

I noticed in the Guardian earlier on this week that the government is thinking about entering into a consultation period about whether school’...

Bass guitar hero

Stan’s just bought himself a copy of Guitar Hero III for the XBox. Nice. Call me weird, but I want to play Bass Guitar Hero III - I can’...

The 5 Ps of e-portfolios

I'm not sure whether this is helpful, and I'm possibly guilty of simply making up words for the sake of it, but having listened to Graham Attwell's...

HTML on a prim vs. Texture at a URL

Kisa Naumova tweeted this earlier today: If there was one thing I would like from SL, it would be to be able to use external images as textures, an...

Using SL for student recruitment

19th March 2008 will see a world first when Liverpool Hope University throws open its doors for students from across the world to visit its virtual...

Impact report now available

I blogged a while back about the work that Silversprite Helsinki (John Kirriemuir) is doing for us looking at the issues around measuring the impac...

Response to grants call

The response to this year's grants call has been pretty overwhelming - 128 bids were received by the close of play on Friday (about 30 more than la...

e-Portfolio development and implementation

This is quite old I think (middle of 2007?), but none the worse for that and well worth sharing here... On the face of it, this video by Graham Att...

IMLS Study on the use of libraries, museums and the Internet

IMLS have released the results of a large-scale study looking at current use of libraries, museums and the Internet.The study concludes that “the a...

Hiding Magna Carta on the Web

The BL have made a digitised copy of the Magna Carta available on the Web: Magna Carta is one of the most celebrated documents in history. Examine...

Technologies for open social networking

Over on ReadWriteWeb, Sean Ammirati provides a quick introduction to four of the key technologies that underpin open social networks - hCard, XFN, ...

Hack Day: and now for something completely different

Friday was Hack Day at Eduserv, an internal event that allowed some of our techies to take time away from their normal day-to-day activities in ord...

HTML on a prim takes a step closer

I'm not as convinced by HTML on a prim as I used to be.... nonetheless, the announcement by Linden Lab that it is now possible (albeit with some li...

Smoking my cigar

Oh dear! It really was a Hamlet moment and if I owned a cigar I would have ended up smoking it.Whilst I applaud the SL Shakespearians for their att...

A sorry state of affairs

I don't know the full details but this story seems like a sorry state of affairs to say the least :-(

On gender...

There's a short piece in today's UK Guardian (the online version is longer) by Bobbie Johnson (who is one of the speakers at our symposium this yea...

That Hamlet moment...

Read this humming Air on a G String...Joff Fassnacht has sent an email to the SECONDLIFE@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list, announcing various performanc...

Crushed velvet curtains and lava lamps

In a provocative post on the Ancient Geeks blog, Martin Poulter decries the current emphasis on research into Second Life as being irrelevant to th...

Sunday night work

Sigh… it’s Sunday night, 11pm, and I find my self writing emails about repositories and the like. Actually, I’ve done pretty well...

University of Surrey on Eduserv Island

I'm pleased to say that staff at the University of Surrey have taken one of the offices in the Office Space on Eduserv Island on a temporary basis ...

Educause SW - does your campus need a Second Life

A useful blog summary by Topher Zwiers covering the Second Life session at the start of the Educause SW Regional Conference, which I attended virtu...

Brain control headset for gamers

Another story from the BBC, this time about brain control headsets...Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their though...

Billion-fold increase in the price-performance of computers in the next 25 years

So says a report from the BBC."Computers the size of blood cells will create fully immersive virtual realities by 2033"leading inventor Ray Kurzwei...

MBA role-play on Eduserv Island

I was really pleased the other week when Simran Grewal in the School of Management at the University of Bath asked if she could use the offices on ...

Eduserv Island - Office Space revamp

I've recently been revamping the Office Space on Eduserv Island, primarily to allow someone from the School of Management at the University of Bath...

Dept. of Public Works

According to Clickable Culture, Linden Lab is creating a department of public works to:beautify and improve the virtual mainland of Second Life by ...

Alts and identity

There's a lot of discussion on the SL Educators list at the moment about the use of Alts (multiple avatars) and their role in allowing people to fo...

PHP = Philip as Hitler Parody

Lol... (Note: this is not how I see the world... but it is very funny).

Thinking about learning 'impact' of Second Life

We held an invite-only meeting on Eduserv Island on Wednesday discussing issues around the impact of SL on teaching and learning and, in particular...

Trademark claims and land use bots

Two unrelated posts on New World Notes recently caught my eye...Firstly, the suggestion that building an in-world prototype of a real-world object ...

SaLamander on the menu at the NMC Teachers Buzz

Today saw another well attended Teachers Buzz at NMC, this time with Wainbrave Bernal talking about the SaLamander project, bringing together a pip...

Special issue of ALT-J

LEARNING AND TEACHING IN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL WORLDSA special issue of ALT-J, Research in Learning TechnologyImmersive virtual worlds (IVWs), such as ...

Houston, we have a problem

My second life is briefly on hold (well, hopefully it'll be brief)... I dunno quite what happened but one minute I was at SloodleMoot chatting to s...