Crash Thibaud from Monroe Community College invited me to attend a demo of Instructional Tools for Second Life created by Eloise Pasteur. Here are some of the things she demonstrated: Not-yet-released: Histogram plotter — she used Google stocks as an example — Crash typed in the stock code and the Histogram “scraped” the web and…
Category: Second Life
An Open House in Second Life
We held our Open House for the EICCD Virtual Campus in Second Life on May 1st. We had some CCC students, and several others present representing faculty, administration, and staff. I saw that my Boise State friends, Dalai and Geneva were online so invited them, too. They came to the Student S.N.A.P. (stands for Student…
Making an Instructional Game as Inviting and Addicting to Play as W.O.W.
I ask my studnets, “How can I make an instructional game that will teach you networking concepts as inviting and addicting to play as W.O.W.?” The response I received was, “Well, I don’t know, maybe you could come up with something like a Super Mario game,” replied one student. When I probed, he indicated that…
Auto Scripting
Script Me! This seems to be a very useful site; not only for the scripts you can have generated, but for the knowledge you can gain from looking at the scripts it generates! This was written by Ann Enigma and is released under creative commons license. You may wish to donate to the site to…
Building in a Holodeck — Project Progress
I found a great YouTube video from Inside this World about their Holodeck. That looks pretty neat for developing my project — I will need to purchase the Production model for this. As I was experimenting with the Demo Holodeck located in a skybox above our virtual campus, I inadvertently changed the main teleport for…
Gaming in Teacher Ed
I thought the SimSchool and VirtualU projects sounded fantastic for teaching new teachers. First of all, I never trained to be a college instructor! I was a product of an A.A.S. degree at the community college, and I went to work immediately – actually while still attending school full time! I saw that advancement in…
Critical Friends
We had a unique experience last night in our weekly meeting in SL. After our group discussion, we broke into two groups. My group went off to discuss our projects using a technique called “Critical Friends.” In our group, one person “talked” (we used text chat so that we could log our discussion easily —…
Teachers and Students Who Game
There seems to be a divided camp between the "serious" games and the games that "entertain." Why can’t both sides see that serious games entertain, and entertaining games teach? Here are the four fundamental characteristics that need to be present for learning to be facilitated (Gibson, p. 179 in reference to Bransford, Brown, and Cockling,…
More Comfortable with People
I hate to admit it, but I have been kind of a hermit in Second Life. I know, it is supposed to be immersive and social and interactive with other avatars. My problem has been that I have good computer access around 4am CST. I find that there aren’t as many people on Second Life…
Holodeck in Second Life
After the class last week, I really want to explore creating a holodeck! I was wondering just how much you could do in a small space — like on First Land without land tier fees (512sq m). I went back to work and used one of our newest computers with our T1 connection. WOW what…