It seems that there is so much to learn about second life!
I attended part of the ACHUB Spring Festival on Friday. I went to the session about SL and Health Education. (Includes a link to the slides & a transcript of the chat) It’s the ExPERT Centre that are funding the research we’re doing, so it needs to reflect their interests, as well as ours. Though the ExPERT centre has quite a wide remit, much of the work at present is concentrating on the medical simulation – where we have a ward with adult and child simulators, an operating theatre and a few other facilities. I’m more involved with looking at online support, so I found some of the ideas that were being discussed at the ACHUB session very relevant. Some people are using it for simulation, but rather than a high tech mannequin (with an operator behind a screen), they have SL avatars playing the roles. Definitely cheaper, though clearly a different sort of experience. Another idea that I rather liked, was the idea of having 4 sims (e.g. islands) together to form an interactive body, though I wasn’t quite sure how that would work.
[Screenshot of the discussion]
The second session that I attended was Barbie with Brains: This wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was worth attending. Beth Ritter-Guth had spent 30 days working as a lapdancer in a SL nightclub. She acknowledged that it wasn’t a proper research project (in part, she doens’t know that much about real life lap dancing clubs). What she was really looking at was how the dancers interacted and communicated with the customers. The discussion looked quite a lot at gender in SL in general, and what the potential for research would be.
Finally, on Sunday, when I thought that I could have a day off … I picked up the Observer, turning, as I generally do, to the travel section. The lead article was “My Virtual Holiday” I’m afraid that I rather like “real” travel too much, so I can’t quite see myself getting green and reducing my carbon footprint in that way! I might, perhaps, take a tour at some point.
Hello Emma,
Unfortunately I can’t find another way to contact you, therefore I’m commenting on this entry.
As we have noticed that you are blogging about educational technology we thought the following might be of interest to you.
As you know classroom blogging has become increasingly popular over the last year. 21Publish has seen more and more teachers setting up Classroom BlogPortals for their students with the possibility for each student to set up an individual blog. Therefore, we asked educational blogger Will Richardson to consult us on specifications for a new product especially designed for teachers and their students.
Here are some of the key features of the new 21Classes that we will be officially launching on Thursday:
Key features of 21Classes
* Class homepage to communicate with students
* Independent yet inter-connected blog accounts for students
* Central console to manage students accounts with control over accounts and content
* Multiple Options for registration process
* Review capabilities of student entries
* Upload images or insert videos
* Make all or selected students’ writings private
* Selection of templates or your own CSS editing
* Customizable headers
* Hosted application no installation, automatic updates, no hassle
* FREE SERVICE with on demand upgrade options
Please take a look and let us know what you think. Your feedback to me is will greatly be appreciated. And if you like what you see, please help us spread the word and write a short blog entry about it.
We will send out a press release on Thursday this week.
Thanks and best regards
Marcel
____________________________________
Marcel Dembach
21Publish Inc.
phone: (718) 395-2192
email: marcel.dembach@21publish.com
homepage: http://www.21publish.com
You might like to have a look at the post I made called Ning a few days ago. I’ve not had time to look fully at 21publish – but I’d be interested to know how it compares to say Elgg.
From the notes that you have given, it strikes me that one thing that it has that Elgg doesn’t is the ability of a teacher to control their students – at least, I’m assuming that if you have a school, several teachers can set up classes, and each be responsible for their own classes. From what I’ve seen with Elgg, there’s lots of scope for things like community creation, granularity of who can see posts (decided by the poster, rather than the teacher), but teachers / community owners don’t have control over users (just admins do!)
On a quick read, I’d have thought that 21publish could have useful features for schools, whereas for me, at University level, I think that the students need more personal control.