NMC Campus Observer

All we need is you!

Larry Pixel (aka Larry Johnson) : Jun 26, 2006 02:57pm

This week, after many months of planning, design, building, and testing, we opened NMC Campus to the greater NMC community. Those of you who attended the summer conference were treated to a special session with the builders of this remarkable space, and now all of our testing and tweaking is done!  It is ready for all of us to use!  

The virtual 3-D interactive laboratory is available to NMC member institutions and their faculty, who may use the resource freely as a benefit of membership.  Friends of the NMC are welcome as well — see the “JOIN” pages for details on how to get in, and check back here often for updates on events we are planning with our new calendar function.

Expressly designed to encourage explorations both formal and informal, traditional and nontraditional, real and surreal, and serious and playlike, the multitude of spaces on NMC Campus are intended to be flexible and to lend themselves to creative uses, including those yet to be defined. 

Located in the virtual world of Second Life, NMC Campus has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3-D space.  The campus has a variety of places for these interactions, from the serious to the fanciful, each designed to support an optimal group size; these range from 2 to more than 75. 

We have piloted the space now with more than 20 graduate and undergraduate classes, and have held about a dozen larger events, including some that took place simultaneously in both Second Life and in a real-world forum, streaming live content in both directions.  There are many many possibilities here.

What we need now, more than anything else, however, is you! 

You’ll find that the campus supports a wide variety of traditional media, including posters, PowerPoint slides, photographs, charts/graphs, videos, and weblinks.  You can use any of these to support your classes or activities. 

We’ll be rolling out an NMC Campus faculty certification program in the next few weeks to help you master using these tools if that is of interest to you.

To give you a better sense of the NMC Campus, we’ve created a short video, “Seriously Engaging.” Just as any campus is simply a collection of gardens and buildings until it is filled with faculty and students, so is NMC Campus. 

We at the NMC plan to host some activities there, but the resource is primarily meant to be a space for *your* activities.  You can reserve the island for large events.  If you want to do that, let us know.  We can help you with special needs.  There are dozens of spots, and lots and lots of room!

We started an NMC Campus wiki, with lots of useful starter tips — it is meant to be a companion tool we hope users will help us to grow.  And of course, there is this blog….

Look for announcements in the short term of some special events we plan there — upcoming this week, for example is a recap of the NMC Summer Conference’s Poster Sessions, as well as a viewing of some of the wonderful stories that were produced in the Digital Storytelling Institute. 

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