I was recently sent a few links to a number of recently published documents about the virtual world Second Life.

The first is from a group called JISC.

From their website:

“JISC Board and its Sub-committees are senior managers, academics and technology experts working in UK further and higher education. These experts determine JISC’s programme of work to reflect the present and future needs of the education and research communities.”

The document itself is at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2009/08/secondlife.aspx

The 32 page booklet is designed as an introduction to Second Life, from an educators point of view.

The first few pages are written from the angle of a newbie who now knows better – in a lot of cases, pointing out the negative experiences many users have had – right from the start – the introduction doesn’t paint a very good picture of the Second Life new user experience.

After the initial section – the guide picks up, becoming a useful and informative guide to the basics of SL, covering how to sign up, creating an avatar, basic movement and communication. The guide shows some basics of interacting with objects and highlights areas where users could explore themselves. I feel as though a few basics of building wouldn’t go amiss, or at least a “how to delete this wooden block I keep leaving everywhere”.

The guide then jumps about a month or two forwards in the reader’s on-line activities, assuming that the reader has been taught enough to use SL to teach and deliver content.

In reality – from my experiences with the MUVEnation groups – the teachers need to be confident in their environment before they can begin to teach. A certain level of respect must be gained, and it could be hard to protray a good self image when you are incapable of steering your avatar, you dress in freebies and just give off the odor of newbieness, regardless of how intelligent the user is – the avatar projects stupidity as an initial impression.

Within 2 pages of the guide introducing the concept of using SL to deliver content – it’s back to the negative waves of “Common mistakes and assumptions”, and “Practical concerns for your institution”.

Overall – the guide paints a pretty bleak view of what can be a very stimulating environment – maybe next time – explain the “Do’s” not the “Dont’s”.

Maybe take a look at the new SL website and their “What next” section: http://secondlife.com/my/whatnext/?lang=en-US including their new PDF of  getting started: http://static-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/en/Second_Life_Quickstart.pdf

The student summer ship is underway and starting to pick up some steam. Currently; me and Darren have been working on reviewing the long list of tools that people have collected during the the projects, Classifying, adding a picture, writing about functionality, and usually, a bit about our own experiences with the tools. The first few were pretty easy, tools that I’d used in the past and had some experience with. However as we narrow down the options, I’m having to find use and learn about the tool personally, before writing about it. I’m currently working on the “Open Loft” system, and while it’s free, I think personally, it’d be a lot easier just to pay for one that works out of the box The thing has php scripts to post to an external server, then starts to complain if everything isn’t perfect, it’s good when it does work, but very twitchy and so often doesn’t.

Looking forward to creating tools, I had a few ideas after looking at the types of tools that people have used most, and rezzers for setting up scenes seems to be a big one – I might have a play with setting up some kind of lecture area rezzer, customisable options and the like. Thought about making a presenter screen too, but we’ll have to see how it goes. If all else fails, I’ll look at the tools that people like, but cost money, and make a free version

Second Life is a Metaverse created by Linden Labs. But what actually is it?

• A method of communication
  I think connecting people is the most important things of Second life. The 3d environment that makes things highly customisable does make the experience much more intense. As for experience, it really leaves behind E-mail, forums, and even instant messaging. However there is a quite steep learning curve, and the computer and internet connection requirements are quite high, especially in comparison of other ways of communicating.

• Entertainment
  Feeding people positive emotions. This is only reason and right of existence for Second Life. These positive emotions can be anything from shopping, listening to music, make and maintain friends or even to find love.

• Business Opportunity
  Although only a handful of people will ever be able to make a living out of buying and selling stuff in Second life, Second life gives the opportunity to live the “American Dream” Anshe Chung being the living embodiment of it, as the first person who ever achieved a Millionaire status from trading in Second Life

• Platform for creativity
  For many artists Second Life can be a platform for artists: musicians, photographers, painters, programmers and even sculptors can recreate their work in second life. It also gives the possibility for rapid prototyping, especially where design is concerned. (Image is of the INSILICO sim – one of my personal favourites)
  

  Click for full image

• Learning aid
  Although I don’t see Second life as a replacement for real classes, there are certainly ways in witch Second Life can improve learning and there are many groups inworld connecting in this way, such as MUVEnation.

• A game
  For some, Second Life is just a game. The problem with this is that it sounds like being disrespectfully for other peoples emotions, Like it really does not matter if I blast two people talking with a weapon, because it is ‘only’ a game. However theyre are many areas where this is acceptable and sl, like the intrenet – has something for everyone if you look hard enough.

There are many advantages and disadvantages of Second Life, The problems it creates with regulating between freedom of people and the internet, The laws of other countries, and the terms and wishes of big investors. This metaverse, while not unique any more, is still ground-breaking on many fronts.

After a wave of DM’s and phishing sites hitting high profile users of Twitter, did they:

a) bury their head in the sand and ignore everything short of a nuclear explosion outside their office
b) give a half hearted press statement claiming “the problem has been fixed” while their users suffered severe burns and lacerations after a botched security update
c) immediately put up a blog post about the issue and – wow! – stick a clear warning message under the “What are you doing” update box so nobody would miss it?

Amazingly, they did indeed run with c).

Click to view full image

Yes, pick yourself up off the floor. We actually have a web 2.0 site taking care of their users and, you know, doing something about a problem. Going off past experience, you normally need to hit those web 2.0 sites around the head with a brick a few times before they’ll do anything approaching common sense.

So a big clap for Twitter, because it’s nice to see someone doing the right thing for a change. Going off past experience, they’ve acted extremely quickly when I’ve contacted them about issues.

If only all the 2.0 sites were like that…

Well – I fought my way through upgrading this hideously out of date blog, to the new, shiny wordpress, with spam filtering working now, I’ve opened up comments to everyone

Seeing as I dont as yet have much to write – I’m just going to share the following link…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBeebies#Presenters

have fun all.

There you go, This blog appeared on the dailyWTF and Digg!.
People are actually spending time to read my brain splurge and mindless drivel!

This site has just undergone a massive sorting out and, in the process, I broke loads of stuff, including this blog. Huge thanks go to Tordoff and James for sorting me out.

Anyways, the other day, our school canteen sunk to a new low; This is what chocolate eclairs should look like:

This is the school canteen offering:

Here’s me posing with said “eclair”:

This “eclair” was actually a stale bread finger with brown icing on top to simulate the chocolate. `Nuff said.

There’s nothing fun about “fun size” candy bars. Chomp, gone. What could be less fun? I think they should rename the little candy bars to “person who is not hungry size” and make a totally new — big — size of candy bar they could call “fun.” I’m talking about a Yorkie the size of a loaf of bread. That is a fun size.

rant/

So I hate Apple.

I’m tired of those who have no idea how to use a computer spouting off that their Mac is better then a PC (Windows or Linux). So I have put together this top list of why a PC is better then a Mac. Enjoy and long live Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates.

• Macs are ridiculously over priced.
  • Macs have to have such high prices because they share a very small market of the computer market; the monopoly of course belongs to Windows. For example, you can get a £500 Compaq Presario notebook or a MacBook with the same specs for £1200.

• PCs are expandable and upgradeable.
  • PCs have a larger cross section of parts available that are as good if not better then those provided by the manufacturer.

• AAC sounds like shit, and so does mp3.
  • AAC sounds more like your listening to music at a dance club. Way to much treble and bass not enough mid range sounds. You really have no other choice in codec’s. So your pretty much screwed.

• Options
  • With a PC you get options. Don’t like Windows Media Player then try VLC, don’t like that then try something else. With a Mac there’s… well iTunes. The biggest pile of crap I have ever seen. Always screws up your file structure. Pain in the ass to work with when trying to copy over files to the iPod. All in all it just sucks.

• Customizable.
  • You really can’t do any cool customizations to a Mac. You can what… change out the Apple colours. With a PC you can do sweet mods like shoving a computer into a pumpkin just for the hell of it, or even making your laptop look like the souls of the dead are trying to escape. You never see any of this stuff for a Mac because it would be a waste to try. It’d be £2k just to do something small, and if it breaks, you’re screwed. With a PC you would maybe spend £400-£500 on a base computer. If you have monitors.

• Maximizing.
  • In windows when you maximize it take up the screen. On a Mac it leaves holes and gaps everywhere. All this means is when I click some place I’m more likely to pull up another window that I didn’t want. I don’t know about you but at any given time I have probably 8 windows open and that’s not counting my FireFox tabs. And when you get on a roll writing some code the last thing you want is to click something and have it appear right in your face and make you loose your momentum.

• Closing Programs.
  • When you go to close a program on a Mac it doesn’t really close. What this leads to is wasted CPU processes and resources. When I close something I want it to close not just sit there.

• Alt-Tab(command-tab).
  • When using alt-tab on a Mac it only shuffles the minimized programs not the current displaying programs. So for if I’ve got 5 chats open and I want to switch. You take this and the closing programs and you got a pain in the ass as well to try and switch quickly between programs.

• Too many command keys.
  • Function, control, alt, option, and command (which used to be called open apple and is sometimes referred to by its symbol). Which one do I use to right-click again? Which one makes the delete button delete? Surely we can get rid of one or two of these.

• No dedicated Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys.
  • Enough said. How can you not have those keys. If you work in a terminal at all they are so nice to have, or if you have to go through pages of documents. You just can’t have them.

• Clock sucks.
  • It really sucks. Sun 10:00 AM. I want to know the date – I know it’s Sunday, for crying out loud. Maybe I can change the format. Let’s go look. Nope, but I can add seconds or flashing separators. Who needs the date when you can make those colons flash?

(My Linux clock not only shows me some useful information, but I can also get a quick glimpse of the calendar by clicking it. Sorry Mac, but the Linux clock kicks your clock’s ass.)

• Safari Sucks.
  • Safari was released three years ago. I still can’t tab to a select list. But, to be fair, that’s probably really hard to do.

• Games.
  • This would be my number one reason I hate the Mac. There are zero games. Yet alone you really have shit for graphics processing to handle the games. The last real game was World of Warcraft that you could play on the Mac and even then… meh. Personaly I would want to be able to play a game on a computer that I paid that much money for!!

/rant

Wtf is going on with the school puddings? They call them homebaking bt most of the time the things arn’t baked! I had a cookie yesterday that looked ok, picked it up, paid for my food and buggered off to the common room. Ate my meal, then tucked into my cookie only to find it was just cookie shaped dough! Pfft!

Well that was an eventful weekend! bad stuff 1st – me an rae have split up. Hmmph, there, i said it. Pretty gutted to be fair bt hey, life goes on. Before that happened tho, our team got silver overall in edinburgh, beat andys lot on the incident hehe, party was a bit naff, mainly cos parents an bro were there so couldnt get pissed, the dj had a thing about david hasslehoff tho! U had to b there!