Arwenna Stardust’s Second Life Blog

Koru has been the busiest yet as the venue for Zotarah Shepherd’s fascinating build on Multiple Intelligences. Zotarah has been an active and long standing member of the Kiwi Educators group and although not a New Zealander has always been keen to help out. In return, we were happy to make some land available for her to place her ‘build’ so that it could be seen and graded by her Professor (she is in the final stages of her master’s degree). A big thank you to Isa Goodman who arranged for her to use some of his land (and prims!).

Beth Ritter-Guth was an early visitor and encouraged the members of the SL Education list-serve to visit and little did we appreciate the interest and traffic that Zotarah’s build would bring to the island (145 in just a few days, many staying half an hour or longer) and it has been wonderful to meet some of those visitors and to know that they are also enjoying the ambience of Koru - one visitor said to me ” if NZ is really like this I better put it on my holiday list!” Perhaps we should be asking for support from the NZ Tourist Board too!

I won’t try to tell you too much about the work underlying Zotarah’s build as Zotarah does that herself very well in the notecards that you receive when you visit and also through the interactivity of the exhibits. Let me just say that her work is an interactive explanation of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. She has build a number of ’stations’ to represent the different ‘intelligences’ and then provided relevant activities to illustrate them. The stations are :

The red circle represents Kinesthetic intelligence.
The orange circle represents Interpersonal/Social Intelligence
The yellow circle represents the Literary/Linguistic Intelligence.
The green circle represents the Naturalistic Intelligence.
The teal circle represents the Spatial/Artistic Intelligence.
The blue circle represents the Mathematical Logical Intelligence.
The purple circle represents the Musical Intelligence.
The white circle represents the Intrapersonal Intelligence.

Can I encourage you all to come and see Zotarah’s build - as I think it is going to be known!

The Second Life demons were playing with us on Friday evening but still an eclectic group met around a campfire on Koru and told some of our Second Life life stories. Unable to successfully record the audio stream, the event was largely ephemeral but those of us who were there had a wonderful time. Iphigenia illustrated hers with photos while I was able to pass around Arwenna’s story on a notecard while other, friends both old and new, delighted us with their thoughts. For many it was the first time we had shared stories in this kind of forum, in either life, and the sense of connection and community was strong. Even better was to discover later the truly global nature of the experience that we had helped to create.

It may have been a small beginning but roll on next year! And in the meantime keep the stories flowing.

May 16th seems to have come round VERY quickly!

The Kiwi Educators group invites everyone to come and share their Second Life lifestories on Friday May 16th 8pm (NZ time)  (thats May 16th 1.00am PDT) at the Kauri grove on Koru in celebration of the  International
Day for Sharing Life Stories.

We’ll be using Voice chat to share our stories in a storycircle.  Be prepared to speak for no longer than 5 minutes and IM Arwenna Stardust inworld to arrange for the display of any images you would like use to illustrate your story.  With your permission, we’ll record your stories and have them ready to share later.

Even if you prefer just to listen (we’d love an audience!) come and join us!

What a party! It may not have lasted that long but it was a huge buzz. The first time we managed to stream our own live music from Nelson, New Zealand into the Kauri grove on Koru. (OK nothing new for SL but new for us!).  The occasion was a surprise Kiwi Educators party for Isa Goodman’s 2nd rezday (He’s now one of the terrible twos!) and we used it as a reason to finally make the music happen! What a great start to NZ Music month.

Toddles Lightworker kindly lent us the use of his streaming account, Thelonius Ra was the engineer and Mandosam Carter played guitar, mandolin and sang and oh we all danced! A very big thank you to everyone.

So will we be doing it again? Oh yes! We have PLANS. We hope to have Mandosam again, other musicians too, and eventually we hope to offer SL as a live performance venue for students on the RL Diploma of Contemporary Music Perfomance here at NMIT. And wouldn’t it be great to be able to offer the winners of the Smokefree RockQuest a gig in SL as one of their prizes? How about it Pete?!

So once again a special thanks to all those who put up with my nagging and made it all happen - it is very much appreciated - and tired though he was I hope Isa liked his little surprise. We wouldn’t be here today without you Isa - so a very BIG thank you to you too!