NMC Campus Observer

Symposium on Creativity: Monday Highlights

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 13, 2007 10:25pm

It’s going to be a challenge to provide comprehensive coverage of this week’s Symposium on Creativity given… there’s so much going on! Sadly, I am not able to be at all sessions, and we are counting on people at the sessions to be blogging, taking photos, and tagging everything with slcreativity.

Starting off today, Emby Semaphore (aka Michael Berman, Art Center College of Design) ran a session on Taking the Mystery Out of Scripting – A Hands-on Workshop (see below for audio recorded from the session).

Taking the Mystery Out of Scripting

This workshop was meant to provide people new to scripting a taste of the process, but also to instill a sense of understanding of good programming design as they learned bits of Linden Scripting Language (LSL). It was a great opening, and exemplified what we hoped for in the Symposium, that participants would be on their feet, creating, doing, and interacting.

During the morning, participants continued to explore the exhibits in the Grace Hopper Exposition Center, pick up the freebies in the store at Farnsworth Station (where everything carries a price of $0), and people in the studio sessions were working over at Research 4 on their projects.

In the late afternoon, Larry Pixel provided a sterling keynote on Why Creativity Matters which is available now as a video.

The action continued at 5PM where Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Heidi TeeCee (aka Heidi Trotta, Seton hall University) led a large group of people through Second Life Educator’s Skills Series: How to Make a T-Shirt and Gift Bag.

We’ve seen a lot of these new, self made t-shirts around the Symposium. You can find their resources on the NMC Campus wiki at http://tinyurl.com/2a5feo.

Right after this, the hands on action continued with Dancin’ with Wolves: Lyr Lobo’s Guide to Creating a Custom Dance Device:

So not only did Lyr share/give away her amazing script device that can animate up to 25 avatars with a series of different dance styles, she showed participants how to get inside the scripts, and customize the devices, and in the same time, learn a bit more about working with interactive Second Life objects.

And the day was not over! At 7:00 PM Sage Duncan (aka Stacey Fox, University of Kansas) showed a group of us how to Be a Rock Star in Second Life:

She not only gave us a “Gig Bag” with guitars, drums, animations. Sage also provided an overview of how streaming audio and video work in Second Life, and some pointers for doing live performances.

And while this was going on, I missed the DanCoyote Exhibition Opening on Arts and Letters, an immersive artwork that fills the entire volume of a sim– I’ll be aiming to get over there soon with the camera.

And yet, there was still more going on! As I thought I was wrapping up the day, I could not resist an IM from Desideria Stockton to check in on the the Studio session she is running with Eloise Pasteur, Teaching Environments: Thinking Beyond Prim and Mortar:

The participants fortunate enough to have signed up for this session will learn first hand the strategy, ideas, and visions for the duo that have created some of the most immersive activity education builds anywhere, e.g. Dante’s Inferno. Their session started with an exploration of a cave Des and Eloise built that demonstrated their method of creating exploratory environments built around themes in literature.

Tonight was a group discussion on Creating Pandora’s Box, on a floating platform on Research 4:

and participants are engaging in documenting their work in the Pandora’s Box blog and accessing all of the resources in Pandora’s Box wiki.

This was just one day of a full week’s worth of action at the Symposium.

Story filed under: People, Places, Things, What's Happening
Tags: slcreativity
See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)