Arwenna Stardust’s Second Life Blog

I am currently attending the Tertiary Education Libraries Special Interest Group’s (TELSIG) biennial meeting In Palmerston North - once again, a friendly interesting conference with some very interesting speakers, particularly Ass Prof Mark Brown of Massey University views on emerging trends in eLearning and some useful information on such things as recent developments in NZ copyright law and institutional repositories.

Not a conference that I would usually have attended but one where I had been invited to coordinate to session on Second Life in education and its potential for libraries in particular. Having been given a 2 hour session, we managed (with valuable assistance from Tim Darlington and Rob Mooar - thanks guys!) to create a truly inter-world presentation!

I provided a short overview of Second Life using in a standard form (i.e. powerpoints and speaking to the RL audience) but then it got interesting! Having mentioned the value of real time interaction, we were able to move almost seamlessly to Jo Kay in Sydney or rather to Jokay Wollongong on Jokaydia in Second Life. With the assistance of Timothy Greig’s avatar Aramis Maginot, we were able to project Jokay on to the screen while she showed us around the Jokaydia islands, talked to the audience about what we were seeing, and answer questions put directly to her. Impressive technology indeed!

We then moved to Emerald Gerant (in real life Kathryn Greenhill of Murdoch University in Australia) for an insight into libraries in Second Life and for a quick view of what Murdoch are doing. The audience was also treated to a little view of themselves as Timothy had taken a photo of the conference which he then uploaded to SL and which Kathryn then used to decorate a cube which revolved beside her as she was speaking! She had also arranged for her webcam view to be projected into Second Life - cool!

At the end of her talk, Emerald then teleported to Koru where Aramis Maginot was waiting to present his slides both to an inworld and a real world audience while Timothy provide the voice over in the conference room transmitted back into Second Life. His talk based on the work from his Master’s thesis was very interesting and hopefully he will find time to give us some help with the SLENZ project.

I finished up with a very short conclusion on the future and our SLENZ project plans. By far and away the most complex technical presentation that I have been involved with, and I am still a little in awe that it worked with so few glitches!

Everyone seemed to have found the presentations interesting and thought provoking and much of the rest of the day and evening was spent answering sl questions! Exactly what I had hoped for!! Sure hope some of you will find your way into SL!!

Conference season has arrived for those of us in New Zealand and it has been my pleasure to be involved with two so far with one more coming up next week.

The first conference on my list was ICCMSN2008 (International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking) held at the University of Otago, in Dunedin - a friendly stimulating conference and even the weather behaved!.  Others have blogged in more detail about the conference itself and a number of resources from the conference are available, including the slides of my presentation and thoughts for the panel on Online Identity. The conference organisers are intending to bring everything together from the conference website soon.

For me it was a very stimulating conference and a very useful networking opportunity.  I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions as I often found myself involved in long conversations with people instead.  It was such a pleasure to hear the opening address by Martin Purvis and to re-make contact with him.  I am certainly hoping that we will be able to provide support to each other in our investigations of virtual world environments.

It was also a highlight to meet Malcolm Shore of Telecom NZ and University of Canterbury.  One very  productive conversation lasted two hours and we are now SL friends! Once again we are both hoping for opportunities to work together in the future in helping to create a NZ virtual community.

It was fascinating to hear about the strengths and weaknesses of LSL (Linden Scripting Language) from Robert Cox and Patricia Crowther of the University of Canberra.  There are too few LSL experts down-under! Wonderful to meet them in real life and to have acquired two more interesting, stimulating and helpful SL friends!

I came back buzzing with ideas and am currently still frustrated by not having had the time to really get going with some of them.  Never mind!! Not long now.

I became aware today of a conference being hosted by the University of Otago in June 2008 which I thought might be of interest to a number of people.  It is the International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking  (more details here) and in the call for papers they say this (among other things!)….

“An important new platform technology where all these developments come together and which has inspired many expert observers is that of the new virtual environments, such as Second Life and There, which enable people to meet and engage in virtual, three-dimensional social interactions. The future of SNS will certainly be played out on these platforms, and their scalability can only be tested presently on high speed networks.”

Unfortunately paper submission closes on March 9th and I don’t think I will have anything ready in time for that, but nevertheless I am going to try to attend, if only to network with another (mainly university I expect) community that is interested in virtual environments for education.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, for a conference in this area there doesn’t appear to be any intention to use Web2.o to broadcast the conference out beyond those who are physically attending! But maybe I’ve missed the information *grins*.