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Showing posts from October, 2007

Webheads in Second Life Monday Tours (again)

Tomorrow from 20.00-22.00 GMT (Monday 29th October) we'll be meeting at the Webheads HQ @ Edunation for another Monday night SL Webheads tour. This time it'll be a visit to some Second Life quests followed by a discussion of how something similar may be exploited for language learning. Using Second Life as a platform for games is becoming more popular, with the recent 'CSI' and 'I am Legion' game launches. How feasible is it to do something similar (albeit on a smaller, less ambitious scale) for language learning? So much for being able to keep up a weekly Webheads tour / meeting in Second Life - workload has meant it is impossible, but hopefully a once monthly meet is possible for me to organise. So, after being contacted about this by by Seth Dickens , who is bringing along some colleagues tomorrow, we've decided to restart the tours / discussions tomorrow. What's the theme this time? Rather than explore more real life cities (by no means exhausted,

Second Wind for Second Life?

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Second Life ( SL ) seems to be back in the news, thanks to the TV programme CSI:New York , which has featured the virtual world in some episodes and also launched a Second Life game based on the show ( see video below ). As there are competitions to solve crimes and track down murderers by finding clues and filing reports, it could be interesting to English language learners (I've only just joined in so I'm not sure how valuable it is yet). (above - the CSI SL game also has its own SL viewer and simplified SL orientation to help players with the interface and the game. More photos here ) This transmedia storytelling ( thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the link ) seems to be something we'll be seeing a lot more of, and Second Life is an attractive option because it is cheaper to build a game using this platform than starting from scratch. It also takes advantage of its existing user base. Could this prove to be a second wind for SL, now that the hype / criticism cycle of the vi

Webheads @ Edunation - 1st October 2007

Yesterday's Monday night meeting of the Webheads in Second Life was supposed to be an introduction to the new Webheads HQ @ Edunation III . Eveything was set for 20.00GMT - I was waiting there for people to arrive when the region started logging out (this 'rolling restart' to regions happens occasionally when servers are reset etc.) . I was teleported to another sim and couldn't find my way back for another twenty minutes! Finally, I managed to get back to Edunation , but not to the Webheads HQ , which remained inaccessible for the rest of the evening. Not able to proceed as planned, as people started to arrive, we sat back in the comfy bean bags and chatted, watched a Teachers TV podcast and then Dudeney G demonstrated the fabulous new Flickr in SL tool that he has been developing. How does it work? Well, you can type a tag and then when you touch the too it displays an image from Flickr that has been tagged with this word. We all got carried away trying it out