What I've been doing

I finished getting my course DETT 611 ready for UMUC's "pre-week" which starts Tuesday. I'm celebrating by looking for some interesting K-12 virtual world activities for a presentation I'm doing for an ed tech grad class in a couple of weeks. I found an old Second Life Teen Grid project - Knowclue's Greek Gods. Sixth graders developed commercials for the Greek gods: One god must be kicked off the island. the students were charged with creating persuasive commercials to make the case for a particular god or goddess. Eighth graders were charged with providing the sets and managing the projects to create the machinima for the commercials as ordered by the sixth graders. The 2011 project: Audition videos for the Egyptian Gods Hall of Fame. The 2011 work has been done on astragrid powered by Aurora-Sim. I'm betting the ed tech grad students are going to be wowed by these projects.

Greg Lastowka Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds

Greg Lastowka was on On the Media (September 24, 2010) discussing issues of justice in virtual worlds such as Second Life. More about Greg Lastowka at http://www.chaihana.com/pers.html. His most recent book is Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. (Yale, 2010). It does not appear that the book is available online. Where's the Kindle version?

(The site for On the Media notes that the RMT - real-money trade on virtual worlds could be as much as two billion dollars. See a 2007 entry on the Virtual Economy Research Network.)

Second Life Education microsite

Linden Lab announced a link for information about education in Second Life at http://education.secondlife.com/ including a helpful FAQ at http://education.secondlife.com/whysl/faqs/. They are also requesting help building a directory at http://edudirectory.secondlife.com/.

Two Minute Suvery on What's Happening in Virtual Worlds

Alan Levine reports on a quick and dirty survey on what's happening in virtual worlds. Not surprising to some of us, interest in virtual worlds among educators is strong. See more at http://www.nmc.org/2minute-survey/virtual-worlds

Teaching in Second Life

Joe Essid (University of Richmond) posted a chat with Dan Holt about his advice for instructors new to Second Life. See http://iggyo.blogspot.com/2010/02/dan-holt-advice-for-first-time-sl.html and look for the chat transcript at the end of Joe's blog entry.