Art at Scottsperiment--an Update

I took a few minutes the other day to add a new art installation from my school, University School of Nashville, to my ReactionGrid island, "Scottsperiment." I hope you'll take a look. I also hope you'll take a minute yourself to add some comments here, or even better, at Scottsperiment itself! You can get an avatar for free and Scottsperiment is easily found once you login and land at the welcome site.


Find more videos like this on Virtual Environment Education Videos!


This one is a replication of the real-life showing of incredibly talented photographer Leila Grossman, of Grannis Photography, spent months photographing each and every one of our Lower School children's faces, then a goodly amount of time in the studio, before all of her work was assembled by parent volunteers under the direction of my lovely wife, Lee Ann Merrick in "The Faces of Lower School" in the Christine Slater Tibbot Center for the Arts at USN. There'll be a reception for the artist today in the gallery, after school, and I'll try to get some pics there to add to this post.

The project is a fundraising effort by the USNA, the parent association about which you can read more at the Parents and USNA public webpage at usn.org. Parents can purchase their child's photo, and even own the digital one for a small additional fee.

Shameless SP

Are you an ISTE member? I'd GREATLY appreciate your vote at http://tinyurl.com/voteforscottm

I wonder if my networks and your networks can help carry the day there before voting ends April 12. And best of luck to my worthy foe, Howie! Please share as you will and can!

Video from the 1st SIGVE ISTE Speaker Session!

I just stumbled across this and want to share it out. Very neat. Our man Andrew hard at work. MUCH thanks to Kevin McLeod for his machinima'ing! It's the first 15 minutes of a full hour session, and having the video here will give those of you not yet on board in Second Life an idea of what the rest of us are learning! Complete audio of this session and more can be found at the SIGVE wiki at http://sigve.iste.wikispaces.net!

NEW: Volunteer to help and/or to present at ISTE 2010's SIGVE Virtual Environments Playground simply by visiting the wiki and the appropriate pages linked in the sidebar! Cool!

Find more videos like this on ISTE Community

Welcome to Reaction Grid, VWBPE

Wow, we just concluded a fun little 'speriment in ReactionGrid for the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference.

Basically set up as a kind of a scavenger hunt, sort of, kinda, folks in SL were directed by our own Roxie Niero to download the Hippo Viewer and head on into Core 1, the newly redesigned default landing zone for new avatars in ReactionGrid. From there, they were directed to Roxie's new home at "Edovation," and asked to pick up a notecard full of landmarks and pics and a link to the online presentation that would drive their explorations.

It's pretty clear that there was much more on the "hunt" than anyone could finish in our one hour, but between the presentation and the card (the latter created by Haley Dunning for the event) it is also pretty clear that no one had the opportunity to get bored!

There are pics, and I'll add them soon here. Here's one for a placeholder!



Cheerio!
Scott

Wooot! Peggy/Maggie Rules the Bloggers Hut!

At the end of the day (the last day of February, that is) the March Blog-o'-the-Month honors went to our own Peggy Sheehy, she of the WOW in Schools movement, for her long-standing, informative, and inspirational "Suffern Middle School in Second Life" work. Linden Lab, clearly preoccupied with the recent release of Viewer 2 Beta, failed to win out the vote. I'll certainly renominate that effort again, but for now, dear readers, it's Peggy all the way for the merry month of March!

Drop by the Bloggers Hut in Second Life to take advantage of the new V2B (my new shorthand for Viewer 2 Beta) release capabilities: I'm working on mounting live html-on-a-prim for all previous Blogs-o'-the-Month and it's 'way cool how if you set those little things to non-autoplay but yes-autozoom if you click on the newly rectangular (formerly spherical) little objects in the Windows on Blogs you just zoom right in. A little alt-uparrow action and you are positioned to scroll and read. Wow. Just like the internet. Wait. It is the internet!

By the way, if you are using V2B, be sure to set your prefs so that you do NOT automatically play media. There has been some serious discussion of privacy invasion with information-gathering scripts enabled by auto-playing Web pages, and now that you can have dynamic html-on-a-freakin'-prim object those can actually be functioning on prims so small they can be worn. Scary, eh? Not really. Not if you're not doing anything immoral, unethical, unkind, or stupid. Still: Protect yourself.

Deep thoughts aside, drop on by the Bloggers Hut and treat yourself to Peggy's musings about her work (and more importantly, her kids' work) on the Teen Grid. She's a really good writer, and that's what blogging is all about, now, isn't it?

While you're there, please vote for one of the April offerings. We've got some doozies this month, and here's the breakdown:

Red

My Island View--Educational, Disconnected Utterances

http://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/

Tom Whitby, New York St. Joseph's College

Green

Free Tech 4 Teachers

http://freetech4teachers.com

Richard Byrne, Maine

Yellow

Ed Tech Administrator

http://edtechadmin.blogspot.com/

Sandy Wagner

Blue

justincc.org

http://justincc.org/blog/

Justin Clark-Casey

That's it! More later, God willin' and the creek don't rise!