The thrill is gone and SL is sliding away. East to predict. Watch Sun's version. The break point will be the ability to collaborate deftly.

Reentering SL, writer finds it pretty vacant now that gambling's been banned and the adult interactions have been moved to another space. Comments suggest that there are still events going on in academic spaces.

We ran this session more like a participative workshop (hence the lack of suitable recording) in which we asked the audience members to identify the current issues facing the deployment of Virtual Worlds in education (not just Wonderland).

We broke the audience into three user categories: educators, developers and learning technologists and asked them to identify the issues particular to them.

Here's the Educators' list of issues:

People who are "radically co-located" - working together in the same space - are almost twice as productive as those who are distant. This is due to awareness of others actions, gestures, and gaze, as well as the ability to have impromptu conversations. In real life, we judge how to behave towards others based on the distance they stand from us when talking coupled with other subtle social cues, such as eye gaze.

The strength behind Croquet is the shared distribution of worlds: not centralized, but peer to peer. Croquet works by employing the principle of replicated computation (synchronization) together with a peer-based messaging protocol that makes it possible to coordinate the activities of people within virtual worlds without the requirement of maintaining central server resources (other than those needed for specialized data and institutional middleware services).

Croquet's wiki. Videos, projects, links to and lists of other sources.

Brief consideration of open source immersive environment. Don't buy an island; buy a new server.

how can faculty reveal more about themselves without compromising professional roles and responsibilities?

Miln - abstract to come

As informative are the comments on this article.

50 minute feature

"But are those campuses attracting enough visitors to make the investments worth it?" The issue need to include whether study is making any inroads. 'Course, it's cheap to simply visit SL to chat. No campus necessary.

A pretty good recap of some of the issues re: second life and interaction there. By the sound of it, SL just gets boring to work in.

The focus is on business, not education, where lots of space can be a virtue.

CDB Barkley: But with all the activity people put into appearances, does it feed the perception of Sl as something silly?" Some interesting observations about reputation - and just as hard to read as any MOO transcript.

I should have looked here earlier: This a del.icio.us collection maintained by Pathfinder Linden. Focus will be on the positive side of things and limited to Linden's sense of topic, but it's a starting point.,

A general blog on SL, but includes sidebar links to newbie and educator resources.

Since Calse western, using SL as a recruitment / orientation device has become de rigeur. All the trendy universities are using it. But who's going to be around in rl?

Blog documentation of an educator's immersion in SL. kjarrett.

SL for promotional events, part 2.

An account of setting up an hosting an event in SL, with a focus as a practice run for teaching how to stage virtual events. One aspect of SL is promotion, and one educational aspect it to teach virtual promotion. Watch for The Virtual Apprentice

Why? Because "Overall, citizens of EU states make up just over 51% of the 4.275 million members of Second Life." US is only 31.19%. But review the comments for some critiques of the space.

Not sure what to make of HP: Is this an attempt to up the caché of SL?

The high cost of doing business in SL. What's happening to the institutions that are investing $30k into the place?

"Administrators at Case Western recently built a virtual version of the campus in Second Life" for campus tours. $30k, with no evidence that the sim increased enrollment. Unis are about pedagogical innovation.

Another response to Shirky, and a consideration of the cultural importance of SL "I am pretty sure that the value of the web/net lies in asynchronous communications and that real time interactions -- whether we are talking 3d or skype -- will always repr

An anthropologist tarts with Shirky to compose a critique of SL finds it vaporville, "a stage without actors."

This is hot in discussion on tech rhet for the moment. I'll wait for the evidence of the study.

The Open University's entry to teen and adult grids, and support sites for SL.

More balanced than I expected, the article is generally touts "the future's so bright" but it does touch on pragmatic concerns.

ABC documentary of SL including interviews w/ the major players and support material.

Second Life's servers - which are hosted exclusively by Linden Lab - can only support between 50 and 100 avatars in one place at one time.

SL reflects a slice of life: a very white, Protestant, progressive, bourgeois slice. I can't recall if it was in Paul Fussell's Class, or Lisa Birnbach's The Official Preppy Handbook that I encountered the fine observation that it is the upper middle clas

"It becomes a kind of vanity fair," and Fantasy playgrounds actually don't work particularly well as social networks, and Still, immersion has its whole-hearted backers. Sarah Robbins, an English instructor at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., sees

ITC library stores most of the educational resources in SL

s a volunteer for the Second Life Library, I staff the main library on Info Island I for two hours once a week, greeting visitors, giving mini tours and answering questions.

Adam Pasick, 31, is the Reuters bureau chief in the virtual world of Second Life. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, h