ISTE Speedchatting Session TONITE!

http://www.iste-community.org/events/speedchatting-roundtable-with-1?rsvpConfirm=1 will tell you all about it, but I want to personally invite anyandeveryone who might be interested in our new SIG at ISTE, SIG Virtual Environments, to drop into Second Life tonight at 5 pm SLT and gather around the table in the Skypark, at which will sit a dozen or so of the founding members of this newest of the only 20 Special Interest Groups at the International Society for Technology in Education. An experimental roundtable session will ensue.

If you get there late or can't get in, we'll be archiving the "speedchat" and with any luck recording the audio for edit-down later.

Cool.

ReactionGrid Opens Up New Vistas for Teaching and Learning

If you follow my blog Oh!VirtualLearning! you may already know that I have been appointed facilitator of the new ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Special Interest Group for Virtual Environments. Certainly you know of my interest in this amazing, complex, fascinating (and enabling on so many levels) development in online communcation. As SIGVE "Poobah," I enjoy the company of a great many educators more capable than myself in our effort to help make some sense out of all the myriad virtual worlds out in the metaverse, to assess their value (or lack of it) for learning and teaching, and to collaborate on innovative efforts that leverage their functionalities toward the betterment of education.

At last year's National Educational Computing Conference, or NECC, in Washington, D.C., it was announced that future conferences held by ISTE would do away with the NECC name, that the next annual conference would be named "ISTE 2010," establishing the new naming convention for future years, and that it would be held in one of my favorite cities in the world, Denver, Colorado.

I am excited to be planning already for ISTE 2010, and even more so that I received in my email this morning the notice that my Presenter's login is now available, along with a link to it and to my presentation, the Virtual Environments Birds-of-a-feather session, so that I could provide a description for the program. Another email contained news that friend Jan Zanetis's proposal for a "panel of experts" on Distance Learning has been accepted, and she's somehow managed to add me to that panel. I truly do always tell people interested in virtual environments that there is no such thing as an expert, and if you are talking to someone who claims to be one, the best course of action is to run screaming from the room. Still, I'm flattered, of course, and it'll be fun to join Jan, Kecia Ray, Scott Parks, Howie DiBlasi, and Cathi Swan for an hour of fast talking about the future of distance education, and to do it for a target audience of school and district administrators.

If you've read this far, you deserve a little "Easter egg," and here it is: I've entered OpenSim's ReactionGrid by purchasing a region of my very own, and I'm calling it "Scottsperiment."

Here's a SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Scottsperiment/128/128/26 . Note that you must be logged into ReactionGrid to make that link work. Visit ReactionGrid's website to download a viewer that is compatible with OpenSim and come explore. I'll be posting more information as soon as I've finished my initial terraforming and land parceling. It's going to be fun...

Cool Cat Teacher is December's Blog-o'-the-Month!

Congrats to Vicki Davis for her Cool Cat Teacher blog's impressive victory in the race for December Blog-o'-the-Month at the ISTE Island Blogger's Hut! CCT will be featured in the auto-updating RSS feed at the Hut for the entire month of December.

Polling is now open for the Blog-o'-the-Month for January, and there's an impressive group up for the honor this month. Each and every one of them has been culled from the Second Life Bloggers' ning and each one has a unique perspective on the Second Life experience.

The Cindy Kesey Show (Cinderlla Kesey)
since July 2007, abounds with detailed musings about the relationships between Second Life and, well, relationships...One of her earliest posts is entitled, "Is Second Life a Guilty Pleasure?":

Second Life at hand (Sofian Mannonen)
since November 2007, works "in finance, Hence I need escaping a little from numbers" and lives in Talouse, France. Her blog posts are often populated with machinima or snapshots from her explorations in Second Life and she enjoys significant traffic, illustrated in this recent post highlighting her Clustrmap:

Mariko Nightfire, a Virtual Life (Mariko Nightfire)
since new year's eve, 2008, shares the reflections and journal of this self-described "19 year old...student at a large Northeastern university." The quality of her writing certainly evident in this recent post about the Mont St. Michel in France and its rebuild in Second Life:

Dusan Writer's Metaverse (Dusan Writer)
since at least 2007, this prolific blogger is a veritable fountain of information and opinion about Second Life. From his "about" statment, "Dusan Writer is my avatar name in virtual worlds such as Second Life where I like to wander, build, explore, and buy stuff. Interested in the metaverse and identity, education, visualization, and collaboration. This post from November 2007 highlights his commitment to education in Second Life and his sharing nature:
(note: this post resides at a Wordpress archive site, Dusan's current blog is at http://dusanwriter.com

Have a great month!

Mariko Nightfire: A Virtual Life

Wow. I just logged into Second Life, stepping to John Prine's 1971 eponymous vinyl LP, gently exercising to "Hello in There," an ode to empathy for the aging. Catching up on instant messages, I got a "hello in there" from someone I haven't met, a self-described "student at a university in the northeast," who asked me to consider her blog for the ISTE Island Blogger's Hut. Her blog is entitled "Mariko Nightfire: A Virtual Life."

Click.

Wonderment.

Some readers may know that I've been exploring other worlds, most recently Twinity and OpenSim, and I've not been in Second Life much lately just because no matter how many "mes" there are there is only one "me," and though I can (and have been, actually) be in three or four places at once with the magic of multiple display windows and a monster hard drive, I can only give my attention, truly give it, to one experience at a time. Tom Hayes, in Jump Point, calls attention "the aphrodisiac of the future." (I think that may be Hayes citing someone else, but I don't have the book at hand. Correct me if I'm not giving credit where due.) I'm not sure it's all that sexy all the time, but that characterization does underscore the role of attention as valuable currency now and in the future.

Giving some attention to Mariko's work, I can see that she's only been blogging Second Life for a little over a year. It's already an impressive, refreshing, inspiring body of work. I hope she keeps it up. Rarely do I visit a blog that knocks my virtual socks off immediately, and this one leaves me barefooted and wide-eyed. It's an enthusiastic, open, and thoughtful collection of explorations in Second Life and I heartily recommend you visit it.

If nothing else, it will remind you, as it does me, that Second Life sets the benchmarks that all aspiring virtual environments must aim to surpass. So far, though I've seen a number of promising attempts, a blog such as Mariko's reminds me that none have so far succeeded.

Here's what the author says in her introduction:

Welcome to Mariko Nightfire: A Virtual Life.Mariko Nightfire is the name of my Second Life self. Mariko is also my name in real life. I’m a Japanese-American girl from Hawaii and a student at a university in the northeast. As an extention of me, so is Mariko Nightfire. But, she is far more than an extention. She is the Mariko in Wonderland. This blog records her adventures in wonderland and my thoughts on Second Life's culture and development. Her's is truly a fully realized life being lived in that alternative universe of pixels...

Go visit Mariko Nightfire, a Virtual Life.

ISTE SIGVE Tour of ReactionGrid this Monday!

Hey, all,

I don't want to crash any sims here, but I do want you to know that we've been invited to drop into Core1 at ReactionGrid on OpenSim Monday, 5 pm EST (that's 3 pm Second Life Time and my CST 4 pm) to take a brief tour with the owners, Kyle and Robin Gomboy and Chris Hart.

I would suggest not waiting until then to go scarf your new avatar (I chose to maintain my SL avatar name, Scottmerrick Oh, in RG/OS, but you go for it if you wish and reinvent your identity all over again!) to go 'splorin' yourself. Simply visit http://reactiongrid.com and sign up just like the n00b that you are, dress out your n00b avi, and drop in. I've been doing my own advance scouting this past week or two and here are a just few things I've discovered as the new "me." Oh, pay no attention to the n00b hairstyle--I've fixed it. Sort of.

--A fine and complex project to honor the 1939 New York World's Fair (maybe these will soon be called "Worlds' Fairs), see a flickr slideshow here
--A budding Michigan pioneer village at My Michigan
--Our own fave Aussie Jokay further expanding her virtual education empire, Jokaydia
--the Greenbush CSI, yes, Crime Scene Investigation

--CoolCatTeacher Viki Davis engaging her Georgia students with virtual world challenges
--a wonderful art gallery with thought provoking displays of eclectic art
--dozens of educators flexing their perceptions of what learning is and how best to share it with their students

There's more, and there will be more, take my virtual word for it. See you then, or see you sometime, somewhere, on OpenSim!

OpenSim Hypergrid!

Okay, ya'll.

I don't really get this yet? But I will. The analogy is that I've cracked open this door. I see amazing things through the crack. And I so can't wait to share it that I turn around and run to the phone on my wall to call everyone I know.

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid

ISTE SIGVE in "soft opening" mode--join now!

Hey, all, I'm pleased to (quietly, shhhhh) announce that the newest Special Interest Group for the International Society for Technology in Education, SIG Virtual Environments, is slowly but surely ramping up its efforts to build a new and comprehensive community of educators who are doing great things with virtual worlds.

While the formal SIG membership within ISTE is of course an option only open to ISTE members (and we highly recommend you join ISTE--it's a wonderful community of over 85,000 members from all over the world), the wiki and the ning is open to all educators who are interested in how 3D virtual environments, primarily, are changing the landscape of learning and teaching.

While its origins are in Second Life (and there's also a Group there) we want to welcome thought leaders and followers from all virtual platforms.

Visit the wiki to start, and dig deeply. We need you.