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

Lagging & Other Problems in SL

I got an invitation to join in to an interactive presentation and dialogue with Mr Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer, Sun Microsystems, titled "Virtual Worlds and Social Gaming: We're Just
Getting Started." The title of the presentation was interesting so I decided to teleport myself to Dr Dobbs Island where it had already started. Once I arrived there I noticed the big auditorium was full crowded: there were over 100 avatars sitting and chatting each other while Mr Chriss Melissinos was giving his presentation.

Violet1 sent me an IM and I invited her also. He told that she had never seen that many avatars at the same time. Well, I must say that I could not have even imagined there might be so much avatars at the same place at a time. After seen what was happening Meil1 teleported Giovanni and Txell also from ESL school to join us. They were surpized also about the amount of the participants in the auditorium.

It was actually interesting, but really frustrating also. Only some avatars were rendered thoroughly and most of them were not. So it was not so good looking visually. Also the walls and ground around was really fuzzy and could not have been seen properly.

It seemed the avatars were chatting what so ever, sometimes even out of the issue. And I could not hear the voice of the audio conference speeker. After some minutes Violet1 understood what was wrong. She noticed that it was not an audio confernece at all but a live audio streaming broadcast. Still I could not hear any voice from the amplifiers. At last Violet1 told me to unmute the volume and then I could hear at least something...but the presentation had finished until then! :(

Well, in anyway it was a nice experience in despite of the problems! After questions and answers most of the audience soninued in a tour of Sun's new Supercomputing exhibit and a networking session in Sun's Club Java. Violet1 teleported me to one garden so that we could test my audio settings. Finally, I learned something new again.