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Deep Thoughts / Education / Legal Issues / Metaverse / Second Life / Technology / Virtual Worlds — Comments Off on SL Events: BlogHer, ISTE, & Virtual Policy 2008
22
Jul 08

SL Events: BlogHer, ISTE, & Virtual Policy 2008

So many things happening right now, I haven’t had time to even blog about them all! Two events happening today and one archived event below.. hope to see you in-world!

ISTE Speaker Series Event
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 – 6PM SLT/9PM EST

ISTE Auditorium

ISTE Speaker Series Event: Metanomics: bridging the virtual worlds of business and K-20 education
Location: ISTE’s new four-sim auditorium: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island%203/17/237/25

Robert Bloomfield (SL: Beyers Sellers) is the host of Metanomics, a weekly broadcast (Mondays at Noon SLT/PDT) focusing on current trends and developments impacting vitrual worlds. Their archived events listing powerfully illustrates the depth and breadth of their weekly productions. ISTE is proud to be partnering with Metanomics to bring our audiences together in the hopes of facilitating dialogue, networking, information sharing, and join innovation in Second Life. Beyers will be joined by our very own Chris Collins (SL: Fleep Tuque, a correspondent for Metanomics) in a lively, open discussion surrounding the question, “How can Metanomics, and the Metanomics archives, inform K-20 educators, librarians and instructional technologists who would like to use information about business and policy in virtual worlds?” This will be a voice presentation, please be sure you have a working voice setup prior to the event!

Virtual Policy 2008: A conference on innovation and governance in virtual worlds
London, England – July 22 & 23, 2008

Virtual Policy 2008 in Second Life

SL Location – Serious Games Institute hosting on SGI Nexus island: http://slurl.com/secondlife/SGI%20Nexus/91/100/24
Schedule: click here

Virtual Policy 08 is set to be a land mark event focusing on global virtual worlds sited in a European legal and regulatory context. The key policy themes for this year’s event are:

• Intellectual property rights
• Financial transaction
• Child online & education
• Governance frameworks & Innovation

The event is targeted at industry representatives, legal scholars, policy makers and regulators from around Europe and the rest of the world and is a unique opportunity to interact directly with key stakeholders.

Virtual Policy is organised by the Virtual Policy Network (tVPN: www.virtualpolicy.net ) in conjunction with The Department of Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform with New York Law School providing program support.

BlogHer 2008

BlogHer08 - Education & Training in Virtual Worlds Panel

This past Saturday, I participated in a BlogHer panel in world. The conference took place in San Francisco and in Second Life and our panel covered Second Life as an Educational & Training tool. Scan the liveblog notes for the highlights on the panel.

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Deep Thoughts / Media / Memes / Metaverse / Technology / Virtual Worlds — Comments Off on Google’s “Lively” Virtual Chatroom
09
Jul 08

Google’s “Lively” Virtual Chatroom

Yesterday Google released a 3D virtual chatroom application called Lively that can be embedded into a webpage. A bunch of folks from the Second Life community headed over to the Linden Lab chatroom to check it out and I grabbed about a minute of machinima to give a sense of the visuals.

At the moment it isn’t Mac compatible and I couldn’t get it to work in my Firefox 3 browser at all. On IE7, it said “Joining…” for about 5 minutes before my avatar appeared, but eventually I was able to see and communicate with the others in the room.

My first impression is that this is very similar to IMVU, it’s a 3D chatroom with some options to “decorate” the space, but doesn’t appear to support any user generated content or even import Sketch-Up objects, which is surprising since that’s a Google product. The range of avatar choices is very limited and I didn’t see options for user customization there, either, though I assume that will change since all the research points to avatar customization as a key to engagement, immersion, and “stickiness” for virtual worlds.

On the plus side, these lightweight web-based applications only highlight the growth of 3D spaces online and it’s a nice transition point for people to get their feet wet with virtual spaces without having to download, install, and run something as resource intensive as Second Life. It was also easy to embed a YouTube video on a player in the room for a shared media experience, and decorating the space with the given inventory seemed fairly simple.

I can’t see any 3D virtual space impacting education if there aren’t options for instructors and students to create their own content, but I’d guess that will be an upcoming feature when they tie Lively to the Sketch Up object repository.

Certainly an interesting development, and I’m surprised Google was able to keep this under wraps so tightly! The rumor mills were going back in September of last year, but otherwise not a hint until it was released – impressive!

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