Haphazard Journey by Starlight

Second Life Education Events
The Second Life Education Event Calendar provides a full overview of all educational conferences, training, discussions and events taking place in Second Life
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=f3b7ubjteso0776u83v4i38qm8%40group.calendar.google.com

Instructor Training Programmes
TUI Free Training and Instructor Career Programme
Second Life 101 for Educators: a 4 session course that introduces librarians and educators to the basics of SecondLife: orientation, appearance, shopping and places to visit.
https://www.eventville.com/catalog/eventregistration1.asp?eventid=1003298
Elven Institute
The ELVEN institute is conducting a series of 2 hour workshops known as the ELVEN Prek-12 Educator Workshop Series which aims to equip you with the basics of Second Life, including communication, clothing, shopping, using your mouseview to explore, editing your appearance, and how to find useful freebieswhich but which is open to anyone.
Virtual World Courses for Librarians and Educators run by Illinois Alliance library System
http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/programs/cpd/VW/
http://elveninstitute.org/workshops.html
Boise State University semester long graduate level course EDTECH 597: Teaching & Learning in Second Life
SURL

Free Second Life Teacher Tools
New Media Consortium Orientation Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Orientation/69/107/32/
ICT Library on Infoisland, includes an archive of Second Life and Virtual World Research, many free and cheap instructor tools
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/54/239/43/
Ivory Tower - for loads of free building resources and tutorials
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/204/70/25/

Great Second Life related blogs, wikis, guides and experts
101 Educational Uses for SecondLife in the College Classroom
http://trumpy.cs.elon.edu/metaverse/gst364Win2005/handout.pdf
SL Education Wiki
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki
Simon Stevens: Second Life Accessibility Expert, Owner of Wheelies and Second Ability (the disability Sim)
www.simonstevens.com
EduServe blog
New media Consortium blog
http://sl.nmc.org/
New Media Consortium "How-to" delicious tags
http://del.icio.us/nmc_campus/howto
Learning from Online Worlds: Teaching in SL
http://learningfromsocialworlds.wordpress.com/
Diane Carr's NOOB Diary
http://learningfromsocialworlds.wordpress.com/game-diaries/

Second Life Email Lists
SL Educators List
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators
SL Research List
http://list.academ-x.com/listinfo.cgi/slrl-academ-x.com
SL Jiscmail
SECONDLIFE@jiscmail.ac.uk

Second Life Educational Locations that are worth a visit
An excellent place to start is the full list of locations on the Second Life for Education Wiki
http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/educationaluses
An automated tour of the top 20 educational locations in Second Life can be picked up at the ICT Library on InfoIsland
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/49/200/34
The Accessibility Centre on InfoIsland
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Healthinfo%20Island/59/72/26
Grendel's Children
A great place to pick up very cheap avatar outfits including bumblebees!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Avaria%20Sav/166/203/250
Wheelies Nightclub owned by Simon Walsh (Simon Steven's in Real-Life)

Posted by Celinelj at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About a year ago a fanatstic MMORPG expert spent a day with Ron and I initiating us into the ways of World of Warcraft. I was impressed by the beautiful landscapes, especially the detail and the level of social interaction that was going on between guilds but I had two reservations. The fantasy and the look and feel were still very much of the elves, dwarves and *lands of yore* that I'd come to recognise from the RP table-top games I was introduced to as a teenager and the primary game-play involved battles. I've looked for alternatives, but unless you call Second Life and other MUVEs "games", there was nothing else out there.

Ren Reynolds of Terra Nova just drew my attention to a new virtual world in development, which may yet fulfill my desires for a really unusual, beautiful, mind-expanding, non-combative MORPG: Lila's Dreams.

It has the same surreal "inside your head" approach that so appealed to me in Psychonauts. The graphics are expressive and loose (let's hope they can hold on to that when they get converted into the digital - there's a good possibility since they'll be flash-based), the game-play involves monsters and some combat but the designers talk about they wish to avoid it where possible, and alternative activities include growing a garden...

A short quote from the blog

" There are no elves, dwarfs, or other Tolkien-derived player races. There are no dragons, orcs, or other Tolkien-derived creatures. There’s no magic. Well, there are “powers” that might be analogous to magic spells, but in terms of the setting they are psychic powers and not spells. So, there’s no magic. :P

There is no level grind. Level grinding is when you do boring tasks like killing cellar rats over and over to watch your game character become more powerful so you can kill bigger cellar rats. I personally do not like level grinding, and I think that it puts the focus of play on the experience of grinding rather than on the experience of the game world. I am working hard to design systems that do not require grinding so that the game world itself is the focus of fun."

Posted by Celinelj at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to Leonie Ramondt for this fab image and powerpoint

I would thoroughly recommend this presentation by Leonis Ramondt on the value of MMORPG's fpr learning, collaboration, and fun. http://homepage.mac.com/leonie.ramondt1/Sites/mmorpgs&learning.htm Ironically I'm not a great fan of MMORPG's, mainly because of the kinds of quests involved, but I am utterly sold on their value, thanks to this presentation. My only hope now is that in the near future other quests will start to emerge that don't involve killing or defeating, and that they'll find a way to integrate physical exercise and natural sunlight!

Posted by Celinelj at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Something I'm always struggling with: How to find the good stuff in Second Life. Surely in a play world I should have stumbled on a few unusual games by now? I haven't! SecondLife need some kind of 3D Google to help us all get around....for the moment, I rely on the 2D web, and in particular the Second Life Games blog which provides a comprehensive synopsis of all the great games you can play in your Second Life.

Posted by Celinelj at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is probably one of those times when I should think before I write......but I never listen to my own advice...so I'm just going to ramble this evening....

I've been thinking again about passing location-based data into Second Life....Is there are point? Well some of the newest SL mash-ups use location-based data fed in from the real world...you can walk across a map of the united states in SL and see live information about the US weather system directly over the top of your avatar...using SL to be able to play with the scale and then experience that data in a 3D embodied, ALMOST physical but certainly immersed way.

And then thinking about the SGI plans..I definitely think it'd be interesting to walk into the Virtual SGI and see avatars - like strange ghosts representing real people walking around the virtual building...why? I think there's an element of voyeurism there...getting to see what everyone's up to...even behind the closed doors. Or at least seeing where they are - like a security guard sitting behind her surveyance cameras. But more fun because you can walk amongst them...and they'd be totally unaware...unless there's some way using projectors or sounds to let the people in the real building know there are virtual visitors nearby.

I can see the potential for a simple "collision" game. Come to think of it, Blast Theory's "Can You See Me Now" uses this kind of model - but in a less pervasive, more event driven way.

I can also see the potential for cross-breeding style games in which virtual SGI is filled with primordial soup....the real-life people who work there are all represented in the virtual world as amoebas (I don't mean that to sound rude!) outside visitors bring in extra cross-breeding material and new exotic genes to add to the pool...maybe the structure of the Amoebas DNA is somehow related to something simple like where someone has travelled from, or the letters in their name.....and then as people's paths cross, day in and day out, the amoebas are cross-breeding, maybe inbreeding...and of course some activities in real life will be very repetitive and lead to very distinct breeds, less frequent activities would introduce new strains...and just like Spore, the amoebas are developing into races, complex beings....

OK, that's not so much a game as some kind of odd experiment or simulation but it'd be fascinating to watch the beings develop as an SLer and equally curious to see how your actions, habits, everyday behaviour as a real-life-er is effecting the development of a species...I have a feeling you'd learn something about social networks through this.

SL is always aware of every movement that every avatar makes as my last post testifies..that information is easy to get hold of. Is there any way to make a game IN SL out of THAT information? I think a better question might be...what kind of game could you create if you sometimes REVEALED data about everyone's location to everyone else in SL? And even more interesting, if you sometimes hid or offered incorrect information...

Posted by Celinelj at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was looking to set up a new Second Life account and I spotted that there was a new surname......"Llewellyn".

There really aren't that many Llewellyns in this world and I have never found evidence of a Celine Llewellyn-Jones anywhere in first-life so I thought it would be amusing to recreate myself right down to the name in Second Life. Imagine how I felt when "Celine Llewellyn" was already taken! What are the odds? All of a sudden I feel as if I have a dopple ganger....running around living a parallel life under my name....slightly creepy. This crossing of worlds feels a bit too close for comfort!

Posted by Celinelj at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)