Tutoring my colleague

One particularly nice person, Midsummer Moomington, a librarian of our Adult Education Centre was in troubles last Thursday in the EduFinland island. She needed some help in her very first steps in the virtual world of SL. First there was a problem of getting inside the open learning center house in the island: the door just did not open at all in first attempts. We noticed finally that it needs to be opened by touching the window - not the wooden parts of the door.

After a lots of efforts trying in (lol) I suggested that she might want to sit down in the bubble chair. It was not so easy either cause it usually needs to click on the right mouse button, not left.

Then nothing happened: no actions taken on her avatar. I asked if everything was alright or not. She just got a customer in first life so she could not concentrate on the second life. So after she finished with the customer we continued our tour inside the house. We found a very nice blue laptop in the table. She got a copy but could not find it from the inventory. Instead of the laptop she found a mug of chocolate which she took in her hand with my help. I also gave her an animated cup of coffee, which was nice looking.

After some cups of coffee we learnt how to zoom and pan in t the SL. That was all for almost one hour. The skills will be improving gradually.

Meeting in the University of Helsinki in SL

I was making a task list for the group meeting of the Adult Education Center's "Social Media -project" persons. The meeting was to be held Wednesday the 18th of June 2008. I were taking a deep look in the EduFinland island and suddenly saw there was an announcement for a meeting of the ICT designers of the University of Helsinki in SL which was just about to start. In despite of I do not belong to the staff of the University I decided to stay in the island for a while to see how the meeting would go.

Gradually about 20 avatars teleported themselves into the EduFinland island and the meeting started. First we were just gathering the avatars into the small auditorium and introduced ourselves. Afterwards we were walking around to get known about the island, specially the University's area in it. Then we devided into two groups and were chatting about SL's possibilities in eLearning genre. Finally we reflected with each other what we had chatted in the groups.

The meeting took about one hour and 15 minutes and there were some good ideas. We also chatted about the problems of SL and compared it on the other communicating systems. Everyone agreed that there are many challenges if thinking about using SL as a learning tool. The immersivity of SL makes it both interesting but also addictive.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Avatars have dreams in first life also

I teleported to ESL SL School (English as a Second Language in SL) and chatted with Johnius Petrov who is a member of a Help Team there. He is a russian who lives in Ukraine. He seemed to be a very nice person and had an interesting dream in the real life. He has a master degree of Computer technology from the University but wants to be a psychologist and to study abroad. He needs some money for that. The average salary in Ukraine is 300 USD so he has a dream to work in Canada and study later in England.

It was my first visit in the ESL SL school since about six months. The building itself had been changed: has now some more luxury comparing on the past seen :). I asked about Violet Meili, my first SL friend, who had also been working as a member of the Help Team in ESL SL school but Johnius had not seen her for a long time. I wonder what has happened to my dear friend Violet...maybe she has been concentrating in the first life like me recently.

Kirjoitettu Flock-selaimella

University of Joensuu in SL & RSS

The first Finnish University has established an own island in Second Life. The main aims are focusing in the pedagogical use of virtual spaces in the genre of ICT. The island will be used also for training.

I visited in the island on Saturday morning. It was really calm: no one there. Well...it was a really sunny and warm day in the Frist Life, so no wonder :). The structures in the island have been very well done and there are some really nice ideas there.

There are now six different houses or rooms for different activities including House of best practices, Reference library, Show room, Movie theatre and Pod casts. Also the Sand box for building practices is handy.

Since last visit in the Second Life it has been improving I can see. In this island there is for example the possibility to feed real time RSS from the Internet (see the screen capture). Also the interface itself has been improved: now it includes the search possibility in the upper right hand corner and the auditive Chat bar in the lower right hand corner.

Kirjoitettu Flock-selaimella

Back in the Grid

After a very long pause I am here again. So, there will be something new soon...

Kirjoitettu Flock-selaimella