Games – Thinking outside the box

Jesse Schell’s talk on the future of games, and the blending of real life and fantasy life.

Second Life Viewer 2 – 1 day later

Yesterday at the SLPro conference Linden Labs announced the “beta” version of their new viewers. Suddenly everyone at the conference was emailing and twittering others to download and test this new “game changing” viewer out. Please note: THIS IS BETA — if you do not like to deal with problems, do not download it. I crashed twice just trying to upload a texture.

So today, I want to summarize some of the comments by others. Most of these comments are from people who have been in Second Life for some time. And this is where we are going to have to relearn something. This will be easy for “newbie”, but old timers are getting frustrated.

Invisible prims are not needed, there is a new tattoo and alpha layer. Invisible prims, hid part of a mesh in an that you could not get rid of. This way you can create other than human like avatars. The new alpha layer is “mostly for the ability to mix’n’match skins, tattoos, and makeup”

One of the biggest changes is “html on a prim” or Media On A Prim (MOAP). Any media with an URL can be put on a prim face. Or multiple prim faces. You can put two or more prims next to each other and play a game online or collaborate on Google Docs in real time. It also works with Flash, javascript and embeded videos! The viewer is open source so it is easily scriptable. Educators should love this.

More on MOAP at Youtube. A very interesting mashup can be viewed at the blog “Life at the Feeding Edge”

Snowglobe 2 is a open source version of this viewer. By the way, Linden Labs now will is going to control viewers and what they can do. Linden Lab told us at the conference, who are mostly content creators, that they are going to take copyright violations seriously.

Second Life has also changed the search options making it easier to find places, people and things.

Second Life viewer forum is a great place to make comments and look for help in resolving issues.

Pictures of interface:. Help can be found at the Quick Start Guide and video tutorials.

Download the new Viewer 2 (Beta).

Good luck, and be calm….breath!

Conviction and Teachers

This was a typography assignment. Not that this was well done, but the poetry is what I found interesting. Taylor Mali is one of the top poetry slam artists in the world. But he is also a teacher. After the typography assignment is his Youtube video on teachers.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Valencia Community College in Second Life

Valencia is doing this pretty well.

James Paul Gee on Global Kids Island.

This was created in 2007, but I just found it. Global Kids is on Teen Island. There are fifteen Youtube videos. I am only posting one.

Part 1 of 15
Part 2 of 15
Part 3 of 15
Part 4 of 15
Part 5 of 15
Part 6 of 15
Part 7 of 15
Part 8 of 15
Part 9 of 15
Part 10 of 15
Part 11 of 15
Part 12 of 15
Part 13 of 15
Part 14 of 15
Part 15 of 15

Second Life Learning Curve

All of us in Second Life were “newbies” at one time. Second Life is full of people who will help “newbies”. If you are a company or university who wants to start using Second Life it is very important to make it “comfortable” for newbies.

Joe Sanchez in his blog The Educators Coop” discusses his and his students adventure into Second Life.

Web 2.0 – Math

“Web 2.0 has the potential to change the way we learn and teach mathematics not unlike what Apple Computer did back in 1984 with their launch of the Macintosh, which changed the way everyone uses computers today,” according to Ihor Charischakof CLIME Connections, the Council for Technology in Math Education (2009). However, math education has not kept up with Web 2.0.

In this article of THE Journal (Transforming Education Through Technology) Patricia Deube talks about what can be done to improve the teaching of math. She links and discusses many great websites.

Natural Math
Social Math

She also mentions Scratch which is a programing tool for kids created by MIT Media Lab.

This site is full of links, if you teach math, or just want to learn more for yourself, this is a great site.

MaMachinima International Festival (MMIF)

This weekend is a unbelievable Machinima festival in Second Life.
http://MMIF.org
http://mamachinima.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/Mamachinima

Stop by and check it out…

School of the future.

Looks like Finland is attempting to do thing right.

Learning in 3D – talk at Metanomics

The video is up at the Metanomics site. If you were unable to be in Second Life, this is worth while seeing. Tony O’Driscoll and Karl Kapp’s new book is a necessary reading if you are at all interested in virtual worlds for learning and teaching.

As Roland Legrand says in his blog:
“In my experience many young people do use social networks such as Facebook, but they don’t blog, don’t know what a wiki is, don’t use RSS-feeds and are bewildered by Twitter, let alone that they have the faintest idea of how to use a virtual environment for learning….That does not mean we should not use social media tools to facilitate learning, and immersive environments are such a tool.”

According to the Information Solutions Group (ISG)

More females play social games (55% vs. 45%).
– In the UK, the percentage of female social game players is slightly higher at 58%.

Social game players average 43 years in age. 20% are less than 30 years old, 21% are 30 – 39 years old, 20% are 40 – 49 years old, while a total of 38% are at least 50 years old.
– Social game players in the US tend to be older than those in the UK with 46% at least 50 years old, compared to only 23% in the UK. The average age of US social gamers is 48, while UK social gamers average only 38 years old.

Less than half (43%) of those in the US who play social games are college graduates with 28% receiving a 4-year degree.
36% have completed some college or trade school.