Learning more about machinima

In my quest to find out more how things are done on Second Life, I attended In Kenzo's meeting on machinima last night. I had a lot of trouble in the afternoon trying to find Amo Island. The Second Life search engines drive me crazy. I know something's there, but I never seem to hit the right search terms - and yes, I'm a librarian, so that's disturbing! - or perhaps the search engine is just flakey at times. It can't be ME, can it?? A message to SLED (the Second Life educators discussion list) indicated that the magic trick: Use the "map" button and then type in AMO - though I'm sure I'd tried that earlier in the day. Anyway... I did manage to make it to the location! and it was worth the trouble! I read some of the posters about machinima. Once more avatars arrived, In got a Skypecast going - and of course I mixed up the numbers at the end of my Skype ID since I don't use it very often and had to go look THAT up - and she proceeded gave us a lot of information in the space of an hour or so. We were encouraged to just go ahead and try recording some of the session. I was somewhat flummoxed by the inability to note if the Second Life onboard camera was off or on and managed to get NOTHING while we were in session, but went back later and managed to get a little clip of no merit, but it worked! And Windows Media Player was happy to bring up the resulting AVI file and play it! Ok!! ( P.S. One piece of info that seemed particularly useful: During filming, save the movie onto an external device.) Of course I don't have all the necessary tools - no editing software - and I gather that it would be nice if a copy of Camtesia would fall off a truck onto my computer - and and and - (sigh) - but I can see that you can do SOMETHING fairly easily even if it's not going to be the snazziest production on the block.

Best Practices in Education In Second Life

I stood around at an inworld meeting planning for the up-coming "Second Life International Conference: Best Practices in Teaching, Learning and Research" ( http://slbestpractices2007.wikispaces.com/ )(May 25, 2007). Desideria Stockton (SL name) and a few others spent a couple of hours organizing themselves and other volunteers into groups, discussing how to honor their sponsors, etc. What struck me (and why I stuck around even though I didn't have a specific role to play) was the amazing energy of this group of self-starters. I'm guessing that none of them went to an administrator asking for permission to spend their time on this conference. I'm guessing that they see this as an excellent way to spend their professional time and are in "Just Do It" mode. That's one of the nicest - and most unsung - attributes of Second Life educators/librarians/others: Dream up something that seems interesting and just go ahead and do it!

Meebo adventures

Our library decided to try to go with the flow and experiment with IM in place of the chat service we've been using from RightNow Technologies. We started our experiment this week with Meebo. Too early to tell if users are going to like it better, but from our end as agents it's been sooooo annoying it's unbelievable! It's been erratic: Sometimes it loads. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it likes Firefox. Sometimes it doesn't seem to want to load. Sometimes it likes IE ok. Sometimes it says we're offline when we aren't. We haven't got a way to tell each other if we're in the middle of a chat so that the next librarian can take over. We've taken to pretending we're the public and letting the librarian on duty know that the next person's ready to take over. We can't log on more than one of us as an agent at a time. Since there's no encouragement for users to leave us their email address, if a session gets dropped or we think of something to add to our answer after the session's over, there's no way to get back to the patron. There are no chat logs. There is no automatic way to keep statistics. Running Meebo as a sidebar in FireFox is sort of ok, but it's hard to make Meebo fit in that area very well. If more than one chat comes in, the little Meebo screens just topple over each other making it hard to switch back and forth. We don't have sound cards at the PCs at the Reference Desk so there is "beep" to let us know that someone wants to IM. Meebo doesn't pop up with a window so it is difficult to multitask and remember to watch the screen to see if someone wants to IM. We can't tell when users disconnect. THEN.... to add to the technical issues, we find that we are not doing well at IM. We're not fast enough. If we tell a patron to wait a minute and let us check on something for them, it turns out that they are often gone when we get back.

Second Life, New Media Consortium, Learning

Second Life, New Media Consortium, Learning,
originally uploaded by ilenefrnk.

The New Media Consortium has a number of islands on Second Life.

Designing Better Libraries

Steven Bell and John Shanks new blog Designing Better Libraries
http://dbl.lishost.org/blog/

Librarians have been discussing what Web 2.0 means for libraries. Have Web 2.0 concepts had an impact on how reference librarians operate and do their work on behalf of users? I don't know... It all seems a bit much and overblown to me. Putting up a web page, putting up a blog... Of course it helps, but does having information online solve all user problems? It doesn't seem so to me. My sense is that we're answering a lot fewer factual questions than we might have in the past, but at our busy academic library, we are still doing a lot of one-on-one instruction. We still have a lot of the "How do I find peer-reviewed journal articles on (fill in the subject)?" kind of question. Do we have information about that online? Sure! Could we present that information in a better way? Probably. (It's the old problem: What do we call an "online indexes that contain at least some online full text articles with our SFX linking tool helping ferret out additional items that might not be available in the database you decided to search but at least you can limit to peer-reviewed journals with are journals where the articles are read by a panel of experts before publication and aren't the same kind of periodicals you find in your dentist's office?") I don't think it matters how "in your face" we get with our online "how to's", there are still going to be users who need contact with a human.

New things

Ok - I'm just plain stealing here - Who knows what languages on Second Life? From Yohan Althouse (SL name) . I'm interested in tracking info about Portuguese because I might get to go to Brazil in November and I know nothing.

Here are some links that may help...

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Languages_spoken_by_Volunteers

Portuguese Forum

http://www.forumpt.com/2/modules/newbb/viewforum.php?forum=4
PSDB Sim

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Delphi/37/84/26/?&title=PSDB+-+Diretorio+SL
Brasil Sim

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Brasil/128/128/0/?&title=Brasil

In world helpers
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Inworld_Locations_for_Volunteers#Portuguese

I am not a blogger

Well, I guess we get the idea: I'm not a blogger. I can't seem to get here every day or so and post the things I'm working on... But...our library has made a decision not to support web pages for librarians - and I've been tussling with myself about moving all my stuff and getting something set up on my university's student/faculty web space... not sure I'm up to that though I did save myself some space there...! (Also too lazy to rummage around and find a good non-university web space to use..) .So I'm going to try using this as a way to stash links to interesting things... Not perfect, but let's see what happens. I'm going through my email and saving things... (I listened to McPhail's post about Tumblr.com - Went to look.. .That's a possibility... de.li.cious? Doesn't quite seem like it'll do it either... Maybe... Oh well - Here's some interesting things:

Open Learning Resources:

Connexions
http://cnx.org/
The ability to create free customizable textbooks? Now there's an idea!

OER Commons
http://www.oercommons.org
I like idea of this... but I've noticed in the past that at repositories like Merlot the creators don't keep their modules updated. Buyer beware!


Blogging IT and EDucation (List of 3D worlds)
Emma Duke-Williams
http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2007/03/09/virtual-worlds/

Damaka
http://www.damaka.com/
Another IM tool.. We're looking at various chat software at the library. Our web person is pushing Meebo which looks soooooo... incredibly basic... that we'll be giving up some capabilities we have right now with our RNT software. (I'd try adding it to a personal web page if I had one.) The main "pro" seems to be that users would not even need an account on another IM service - They can just start typing. And we'll have NO information about the chatter - No option for them to put in their email address unless we ask and save the transcript - no automatic statistics gathering. No easy way to save and search transcripts that I can see. Why not try something like Trillian that might make chat easier on many many of our users and allow us to try some additional functionality for at least SOME users? One of these days users will stop being shy about using VoIP, etc...


7 things you should know about virtual worlds
http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI7015
I like the non-hysterical approach in this short piece. Virtual worlds - interesting - might do some things well - might not always be the answer - keep an eye on them - sort of tone.