Archive for the 'Virtual Worlds' Category
Building buildings in Second Life
A couple of weeks ago I was musing on the worth of creating buildings in Second Life. There’s too many empty buildings and not enough interaction with the user . Rob Wright emailed me the example below. Watch the first vid before viewing the second and so if you can figure out what’s going on….
Also [...]
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Move over Second Life here comes Entropia
A virtual world is to be set up in China by a partnership involving Sweden-based Entropia Universe. I’m not sure whether users will be able to create objects as in Second Life but it will be a cash-based virtual economy which suggests this is planned. Of note is that it will be designed to handle [...]
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Web 3D on the way?
Attaching 3D models to Google Earth has been achievable for a while. It’s interesting since to you can ‘fly’ though cities, explore spaces etc. Its adoption has been somewhat sporadic but recently the city of Berlin released around 44,000 3D building models (approx 10 percent of the city). The video below is essentially a recorded [...]
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Defining and Understanding Virtual Worlds
By Karl M. Kapp
If you want to gen up on virtual worlds and their possible applications to learning this article is good starting point.
Second Life of course gets a mention together with some examples. IBM for instance use it for mentoring and orientating new employees. IBM have more than one island and am currently having [...]
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Top Ten Missing Features of Second Life as an Educational Simulation Platform
Okay so another item for you Second Lifers and virtual world enthusiasts. Clark Aldrich in his blog has posted a top 10 list of MISSING features in SL as an educational platform. A couple of interesting ones include:
# Dynamic AI Characters, with which participants can repeatedly try new behavior to see how they react (see [...]
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A second look at school life
By Quin Parker,
More Second Life. Love it or hate it (well perhaps ‘hate’ is too strong, maybe a case of not appreciating it as being applicable to your teaching) it does raise a lot of questions with regards to teaching in virtual worlds.
This article explores the OU’s Schome project in which involves teaching 13 - [...]
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Virtual worlds and the ongoing rise of Second Life
First off a brief BBC news report on the worth of virtual worlds.
“More than 10 million people will subscribe to MMOGs by 2011, and many millions more will play online games driven by other payment schemes, such as advertising and virtual purchases, the report predicted.”
MMOGs: massively multiplayer online games. e-learning is increasingly focusing in this [...]
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It’s a world of possibilities
UK press are really starting to pick up on Second Life now. Here’s something from the Guardian. It’s a shame they didn’t pick up on our efforts so far…
Anyway it’s actually a pretty decent article which covers a number of issue and highlights one of the main benefits of SL and that is in brining [...]
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Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning
Well I’ve been away for a while, mainly working on a guide on how to use wikis in education.
Anyway as per usual I’ve have a huge backlog of stuff to add to the site and thought I would kick things off with the article on Virtual Worlds below.
Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning
By [...]
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Collaborative Building in Second Life
Great, great video of educational activity in Second Life. Essentially the video is a time lapse move of student collaboratively building a house from a set of blueprints (on the ‘ground’ beneath their virtual feet). Remember the figures you see are avatars - they represent the students, and you can see how they manipulate the [...]
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