NMC Campus Observer

Late Night With The Aussies

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jun 20, 2007 11:04am

This dog was up late last night to participate in a live event from Australia, Showcasing Australasian Educational Projects in Second Life. Hosts and planners Jo Kay (aka jokay Wollongong) and Sean FitzGerald (aka Sean McDunnough) set this up to highlight some Australasian educational projects currently being using Second Life.

While not technically being part of this region, from our great collaborations with our colleagues there, and as a prelude to a RL visit I am doing in October, I was put on the agenda for a 10 minute segment to talk about NMC activities, with my slot being at a little after 7:00 PM Sydney time, working out to be about 2:00 am local! This was more than fair, considering many of the events NMC has run this year where our friends from down under have made their own late night appearances.

It was a great lineup of projects shown, some via slides, others via video. The original plan was to use live streaming audio, but the stream got “hijacked” and we all moved into sharing via text chat mode. It’s not easy for any project to summarize in 10 minutes, but all did very well, and there was a great audience of about 40+, and a few of them were just starting in SL that very day, while others were extremely experienced.

In my slot, I tried to give a run through of our activities this year, touching on the Teachers Buzz group, the October 2006 Digital Media Symposium, unique performance events like the ZeroG Skydancers and Red {an orchestra}, plus the work of our Virtual Worlds group in building edu sims and offering rental parcels. In doing chat discussions, I try to sketch out remarks on a text file I can cut and paste (these dog paws are bad on typing but also interject a few spontaneous lines. You can find more in my notes and links .

Congrats again to Sean and jokay for a fab event! With some last minute SL client challenges, annoying lag, the mixup on voice we all eventually had a big laugh. We are hoping to have them join us in the next few weeks for a discussion at the NMC Campus teacherss Buzz group (we are working hard on a July-August schedule- if you want to be a guest, just let me know!)

Keep an eye on the event site for posting of links to the videos and a transcript (likely in progress now).

Story filed under: What's Happening

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