This morning's Linden Lab blog shares some details about a science education initiative in Mexico that I hope you'll find informative and know you'll find interesting. And my group at MUVErs released a demonstration video this week, which will play in high definition, full screen for you if you click the little "HD" in the video toolbar then go fullscreen. The link for the first is https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/education/blog/2009/04/24/national-autonomous-university-of-mexico-education-and-training-around-the-world

and the link for the second is http://muvers.org .

:) Cheers,

Scott

Scott Merrick

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”--Kurt Vonnegut, from "Cold Turkey"

http://scottmerrick.net

Earth Day Posters at ISTE Island

G'day, ya'll (sort of a down under down south greeting, dontcha think?)!

We get accustomed to oddnesses in SL, and so when I arrived very late to an event and chatted away in text to find no one responding, I simply assumed no one was watching the text display. My second clue was plethora of overlapping conversations going on in voice. Now, this cacophonic symphony of convos can be off-putting to someone not clued-in to the SL voice-chat control feature that allows one to mute individual conversations, though it's a simple thing to do once you know how (isn't everything?).
As I didn't have my headset handy and was only going to be able to be inworld a few minutes, I didn't mind, as I set my Ctrl-Shift-S fingers to work with my Alt-Arrow keys to snap some pics.

Here's the event announcement from ISTE's site:

April 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 5:30 SLT

EVENT: Celebrating Environmental Education!
LOCATION: ISTE Island, Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/94/84/31
DATE: April 23rd (the day after Earth Day)TIME: 5:30pm-7pm SLT (5:30-7pm Pacific Daylight Time) 
ISTE and HP are collaborating on a special celebration of Earth Week on April 23rd. We’re putting together a social event and poster gallery that highlights projects relating to environmental education, environmental science, or environmental studies in general. Please join us in this celebration!

It appeared to have been a rousing success, and a benefit of my status as listener was overhearing the "debriefing" going on between our own Kittygloom Cassady and a rep from HP. Kitty checked her visitor counter script and saw that there had been 67 unique avatars on the property in the last two hours. That's good turn-out, enviable inworld by any standards. So much gets in the way of our participation, you know, and not just "real life." For myself, the rl factor had been family, but on Monday night, at the CSO Talk Talks session, which was really quite fun despite the light turn-out (3 other avi's and me), the factors influencing the low turn out had likely been the stellar Will Richardson's talk at DEN, and (I know for a fact from conversation with session attendees) the Web 2.0 session at Atlantis Seekers. I shrug.
Anyway, I'm uploading my pics here in the hopes that someone might comment about one that he or she learned something about during the session my own life was too busy to get to on time  :) (The posters will be left up for around a week, SLurl above in the announcement!)

Second Life "Quickstart Guide" is HERE!

Woot.

Second Life Quickstart Guide Second Life Quickstart Guide Torley If you're new to Second Life or simply want to refresh yourself on the essentials, we've freshly published a Quickstart Guide PDF! Perfect for perusing and printing (to paper), this elegant, stylish doc will prime you on basic Second Life skills while making you smile in 7 pages.

True Love at a Distance?

One Jessica Bennett has written a fascinating and straightforward account for Newsweek Magazine, simply titled "Digital Love." It is refreshingly devoid of the kind of sleazy journalism that often underlies accounts of virtual relationships, and (at least for now, and by all indications for quite a while to come) the story has a happy ending. Read about Rhonda in California and Paul in Wales, and their honest attempts to allow a meaningful relationship blossom in "real life" and "inworld." It's a worthy read. What do YOU think about all this?

Meditation in Trabushkja

Second Life is about more than leveraging the platform for teaching and learning, or utilizing it for extending one's Web presence or expanding one's professional/personal learning network. These things are by-products of Phillip Rosedale's primary motivation for creating Second Life in the first place (and I'm paraphrasing here because I'm too relaxed and lazy at the mo' to go look for the accurate quote--feel free to comment and correct me if you have it at hand): "If you make a place where people can create, and you give them the tools to create, they will be creative."

I just spent an hour on my home-office step machine, racking up 4300 step sets in 60 minutes, 30 seconds, and listening to Loggins and Messina Live on vinyl while reviewing Quest submissions my 4th graders sent in over the weekend: They've been working at home in their free time on an amazingly empowering 3D platform developed over 6 years by teams at Indiana University, Quest Atlantis. When I was through, I sat down at my desk to cool down and logged into Second Life to my little 512 homeplace in Trabushkja.

I made the place just for fun, and now I'm ready to invite the world to enjoy it. Here's the SLurl:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Trabushkja/80/104/32

Down below is my "Web presence extender" build, with links to pretty much everything I do that's mine.

My friend Giannina gifted me with her own version of some very lovely meditation bowls we found at the Supportforhealing Medtation Area. We had agreed we liked them, but that they are priced a bit high for what they do. I tricked them out a bit more, then I had a notion to space them out around my chat area (already featuring a giant cocktail glass with bubbling champagne that one may lounge in and chat with a friend), put a meditation zafu in the middle of the room, and drop a rotation script into a meditation poseball.

Why would I do that?

You see, the spheres are each scripted by Gia to lift into the air upon click and emit a lovely tone unique to each bowl, colored as they are in the essential color of the 7 chakra's. Each has a floating text to illustrate a meditation concept: Do, Be, Speak, Love, Feel, Know, and See. Activate one sphere or more, then sit to rotate and click on your own avatar so that your camera rotates your view. As it does, the activated spheres grow louder as your camera view passes closer and softer as it moves away. Be sure to go into Advanced settings and Character/DeactivateLOD so you don't get auto-logged out.

My gift to the citizens: Gia's creative re-tooling of the creative work at Healing, my little tweaks, and now you have a new place to go meditate peacefully. Please enjoy and share. And be sure to take out the trash when you leave :)

Trabushkja's a nice little sim, btw, with some reasonably priced land still available if you wander around it. Enjoy!

Cheers,
Scott-o

Got Me! SlideShare Pulls a Funny Fast One!

I got an email from SlideShare.com yesterday that read:
Hi scottmerrick,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of
views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right.
;-)
Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we
can track the conversation.
Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

When I visited the slideshare site to check my view count, I was amazed to see that it had garnered over 20,000 views in less than a month! Wow! I of course got all excited and emailed my Vanderbilt CSO team the great news that my Second Life slidecast, the entire 45 minute online version of my presentation "Why Second Life" had become famous!

Then this morning I visited SlideShare again to find my view count had been reset to its actual (and still moderately impressive, I'd submit) 246. What happened? Ah, I thought, googling "slideshare april fools." The result?

Happy April Fools day
Apr 1, 06:12 am PST
We celebrated April Fools Day with a little prank: views on your presentations have an extra two zeros on them. We hope you find this funny. Your views will be rolled back to normal in a few hours.
You can see tweets about this prank on twitter …
we asked people to mark their tweets with #bestofslideshare
in an email we sent out. We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.
Update: We’ve always loved our users and will continue to do so in future,
the joke notwithstanding. If our prank upset you, we’re sorry.
Update Again: Actual view counts have now been restored. Its all over and back to normal!

Funny! Excepting, of course, for my having to pump out another email to my group apologizing for my gullibility. Ah, well, good job SlideShare!

April Blog-o-the-Month!

Hey, ya'll!!!

Congratulations to "In a Strange Land," Iggy O's wonderful blog, for its selection as April, 2009, Blog-o-the-Month at ISTE Island's Blogger's Hut!

For this month's nominees we're going to heat up the vote by bringing back some old contenders who because of stiff virtual competition did not make the top spot the month or months they were featured nominees, as well as a couple new ones that might oughta shoulda already been nominated.

Get ready.

Fire up your alt.

Go.

Help yourself to a look-see from the urls below, then simply visit the Blogger's Hut (SLurl) and touch the appropriate color on the polling object to vote....uh-uhhhhh!, only one vote per avatar!!!

Discovery Education Second Life--Nancy Sharoff et al
http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/secondlife/

The Educators Coop-Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon
http://educatorscoop.org/blog/

The Islands of Jokaydia--Jo Kay
http://jokaydia.com/

and

New World Notes--Wagner James Au
http://nwn.blogs.com/

In the event of a tie I'll find some groovy randomizing SL tool to choose the winner! Any suggestions? Leave 'em in the info dropbox!
Past Features:

Second Life in New Zealand, John Waugh, Terry Neal, et al
Hey Jude!--Judy O'Connell
Learning Games--Daniel Livingstone
Learning Visions--Cammy Bean
Dr. Z Reflects--Leigh Zeitz
Hendron's Digest--John Hendron
Phasing Grace--Grace McDunnough
From Mr. A to Mr. Z--Jeff Agamenoni
Around the Corner--McGuhlin.net
Fleep's Deep Thoughts--Fleep Tuque/Chris Colling
NMC Campus--New Media Consortium
PHSPrincipal Blog--Dave Meister
Teaching Math Technology Blog--Maria Anderson
2CentsWorth--David Warlick
The Story of My Second Life--Kevin Jarrett
Oh! Second Life (now Oh! Virtual Learning)--Scott Merrick :)