VEPlayground, Ya'll!

Just been over to VEEM, tweaking membership options and approving new memberships. http://virtualenvironmentvideo.net is the new URL for this online network now 354 members strong. I also placed a call to those folks to contact me if interested in providing content for the ISTE Conference 2010 in Denver, Colorado this summer: Our Special Interest Group for Virtual Environments will be facilitating the newly christened Virtual Environments Playground for the entire run of this 85,000 member international organization's annual convention. I'll paraphrase from that call to participate:

If you are an educator, a developer, or an educational content creator in any virtual environment, please contact me with the subject line "VEPlayground" if interested in providing content either onsite or remotely for the ISTE Conference 2010 in Denver, Colorado this summer.

Have a very very safe and happy New Year! See you in 2010!

Only a Few Days Left to Vote!

It looks like a VERY tight race between front runners "Dusan Writer's Metaverse" (blue bar) and "Mariko Nightfire, A Virtual Life" (yellow bar) at the newly remodeled Bloggers Hut on ISTE Island in Second Life. Voting ends at noon December 31st and the results will be posted soon after for the very first winning "Blog-o'-the-Month" for 2o10! Who will it be? Which one of these two very different blogs will be featured all January in the Bloggers Hut, just as Vicki Davis's "Coolcatteacher" has occupied the throne all December? I can't STAND the suspense! Go make your voice heard, but do it quickly! Here's your SLurl!

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!