Open Learning: Podcasts

Want to learn about the Foundations of American Cyberculture, Existentialism in Literature and Film, Brain Structure and its Origins, or Quantum Entanglement? OpenCulture has linked to collections of open course material from a number of institutions including MIT, Berkley, Stanford, Oxford, University of Glasgow, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, University of Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Harvard and Carnegie [...]

Webcasts from the MIT Media Lab

There are links on Bob Sutor’s blog to the webcasts from the Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge Conference, presented by IBM and the MIT Media Lab in June of this year. There are some interesting thoughts on how virtual worlds will change how we think of identity in the future. While [...]

SL Quirkyness in Meatspace

Thank goodness meatspace doesn’t suffer from the same buggy afflictions often encountered on the Second Life grid. If it did it would certainly be as humorous as this video spotted on YouTube:

Find Voice Enabled Parcels in SL

The Voicemap is available now at secondlife.com and allows you to see which areas have the voice feature enabled. There are a number of locations already and more are added each day. One thing that caught my attention about this map is that it is using the Google API.

TeacherShare.org

TeacherShare is a proof-of-concept site where educators can share links and learning resources, similar to how social bookmarking services like del.icio.us function. While the learning repository concept isn’t new, this implementation as a collection of shared links has some interesting social features like ranks, comments, and recommendations. It also makes use of a tag cloud [...]

FlickrSLiDR for Your Site

FlickrSLiDR, a little app by Paul Stamatiou, enables you to create sets of Flickr photos to place on your web site – like this: Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR. Don’t forget to check the Creative Commons license before you use images from other users before you do.

SL Framework for Drupal

Looks like a Drupal Second Life Framework will be released in the near future. The release is dependent on the release of the web site (and web app) of the company which sponsored the development. Framework by 2bits.

Exploring the World of Kaneva

Yesterday I met up with Rich Weil, Director of Community Relations for the World of Kaneva, for a guided tour. He was wonderful and showed me around while he talked a little about what is happening in Kaneva now, as well as what is ahead.

Touring Kaneva

What – Kaneva is an online virtual world (currently in live beta) where participants can create a free account and download client software to log into the world. It is not a game, it is a virtual, social world – like Second Life, Active Worlds or There.com. When you create an account a space on Kaneva’s community web site is also created for you that operates similarly to MySpace.
Where – My initial foray into Kaneva was unaccompanied and I missed a lot of what was happening – having no idea where to go. Upon logging in I found myself at the mall, the default location for everyone’s first visit to the world. In the mall you can buy clothes, shoes, and a few other things to further customize your avatar. Things that you purchase are stored in your inventory until you are ready to use them. Although there are plenty of people who are happy to chat with you in the mall there are other places to visit too – this was the piece I was missing.

Rich showed me how to search for hangouts and people and use the Travel button to get to places I find (like teleporting in SL). Now Kaneva was beginning to feel much larger…

Learn a Second Language in Second Life

LanguageLab.com is now open for beta testing. Students will be able to sign up for language classes that meet entirely in Second Life. Classes are small, generally 6 to 8 students, and run for 50 minutes. Events are larger scale learning experiences that allow students the opportunity to practice their new language in realistic settings, [...]

Twitter Through Imified

It is now possible to send Tweets to Twitter through the Imified service. Why would you want to do this? Maybe the Twitter chat bot is down and the Imified chat bot is up. Or maybe just to keep your options open? Imified is a handy tool and it is great to see its functionality [...]