NMC Campus Observer

Who’s Who On Campus?

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jun 30, 2006 04:16pm

Our campus techs have been busy building some new tools here at the NMC Campus Observer. You may or may not know this, but the NMC Campus is not something anyone in Second Life can find by wandering around– it is a “private” island. When first opened, it was set up so Campus Administrators had to manually add individuals to Second Life Groups that permitted them to find the campus.

After some intense committee meetings (I think they were conducted floating around on inner tubes by the lagoon ;-), it was decided that we want more people to make use of NMC Campus, so while you still need to be in an NMC group to teleport here, the groups are ones that anyone can join.

The way this is set up is when you follow the top join link from the NMC Campus Observer, you just need to fill out a four-item web form, and then we email you the instructions. That should be the easiest college registration form anywhere!

The cool part is we are storing that information in a database, so now we automatically have an NMC Campus Directory, now to a top green button link from the Observer:

This directory is dynamic, and always shows the total number of people who have joined us. As a sidelight, when we sent out an email announcement last week to the NMC listserv, the first person joined less than 6 minutes after the e-mail went out!

The default view of the directory will list all individuals in alphabetical order by their Avatar name. You can do keyword searches on all fields, or just within, say, the Real Names or Organizations. And if you click on any headings in the results, it will sort the data by that field.

Pretty slick, eh?

And there is one more thing you can do– a special link will display the directory sorted with the most recent additions first.

Check out the NMC Campus Directory at http://www.nmc.org/sl/directory.

Story filed under: Campus Headlines, People, Places, Things, Resources & Information

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)