Tomorrow Night, Paul Preibisch (Fire Centaur) in Second Life and Elluminate!

From my LearnCentral listing of the event:


Second Life is a powerful meeting place for educators interested in learning, teaching, and having fun with other educators. The International Society for Education recognizes as one of its 20 "SIGs" the Special Interest Group for Virtual Environments, and our group hosts the SIGVE 3rd Tuesday Speaker Session in Second Life every month.

January 18th host Spiff Whitfield's (Andy Wheelock in real life) guest is none other than educator Paul Preibisch, (Fire Centaur in Second Life). Come join us an hour before Paul's session for a SIG meetup either in Second Life or at LearnCentral over Elluminate, then stay for the 7 pm Speaker Session as SIGVE broadens its reach to embrace educators not yet in SL.

Time(s):

Meeting: 4 pm SLT (Pacific), 5 pm MT, 6 pm Central, 7 pm ET
Speaker Session: 5 pm SLT (Pacific), 6 pm MT, 7 pm Central, 8 pm Eastern


Registration is not required, so join us as you can and will!

Second Life SLurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/201/46/23

Join us either in Elluminate or in Second Life!

Blue Mars and the Future of Virtual Worlds

Thx to Gia Rossini, I just digested two good reads about the announcement from Blue Mars, just today, that they are pulling out of the PC platform and planning "to focus solely on Apple's iOS. As a result, Blue Mars is now Blue Mars Mobile.

That quote is from the announcement on Massively, which is just that, and interesting; but the more intriguing read is at Andromeda Media, from Will Burns, aka Aeonix Aeon. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Virtual Worlds for education or any other reason.

While citing Blue Mars for "memory loss," for failing to recall the mistakes of virtual worlds platforms and developers over the past couple of decades--primarily "centralization," it's interesting that Burns doesn't really mention OpenSimulator, the offshoot of opensource Second Life, where the movement is really more toward collaborative decentralization. Maybe there's hope for OpenSim where the others have all but abandoned all of that commodity.

Check out http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/01/16/second-life-competitor-blue-mars-drops-pc-development-for-apple/

and
http://cityofnidus.blogspot.com/2011/01/requiem-for-blue-mars.html

To see what I'm talkin' about!

Cheerio,
Scott

First Student Blog Feature at the Bloggers Hut Blog-o'-the-Month!

Hey, ya'll!!!

Announcing January's Blog-o'-the-month! Jazzing Up Eighth Grade is a student blog from 8th grader "Abbey," and it was also nominated this year at edublogawards.com as student blog of the year. This is the first K12 student blog ever featured at the Bloggers Hut. Maybe it needs to be the first of many!

During the month of January in the Bloggers Hut, will be choosing which educational blog we want in the RSS feed for the entire month of February. This month we're going off the beam and looking at blogs from three arenas we haven't really featured in the past. We've got cooking, music, art, and just to keep it off-balance (since we can't get too conventional, even when we go all thematic), math.

If you'll look at each one of these blogs you'll see that the authors share one thing--a passion for their topic. How to vote? How to vote? That's for you to decide. Read:

Red--Jane Gaither's "Gourmet Gadget Gal"
http://gourmetgadgetgal.blogspot.com/

Green--Natalie Wickham's Music Matters Blog
http://musicmattersblog.com/

Yellow--"Ebony's" Art Teacher Blog
http://art-teacher-blog.blogspot.com/

Blue--Ms. Cookie's Math Teacher Mambo
http://mathteachermambo.blogspot.com/

Nominees can pick up "NOMINATED!" badge for their blog by copying this image:

Happy Exploring! And don’t forget to vote!!!

Would you like to see a theme explored here? Email scott@scottmerrick.net with the theme or anything else you would like to suggest to make the Bloggers Hut mo' bettah.

Previously Featured:

EducationWeek's "Teacher Beat"
KZero, Inc., "We Are Worldswide"
Engage Digital--(formerly Virtual Worlds News)
Virtual School Meanderings--Michael Barbour
Blogging ISTE (special compendium page at iste.org)
The Dariing Librarian--Gwenyth A. Jones
Why Technology in Education Rocks in Virginia--various VSTE writers
Free Tech for Teachers--Richard Byrne
Suffern Middle School in Second Life--Peggy Sheehy
OpenSimulator--assorted authors
Dusan Writer's Metaverse--Doug Thompson
CoolCatTeacher--Vicki Davis
EdTechJen--Jennifer Roland
Clive on Learning--Clive Shepherd
Technology and Learning--Lee Kraus
PESD Island--Noreen Strehlow
In a Strange Land--Iggy O et al
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 :)