Rural-urban Learning through Authenticity Symbiosis in Agritourism

Georgeous Parx (George Pop - RL), a Tourism Marketing Masters student from University of Surrey, will be presenting "Rural-urban Learning through Authenticity Symbiosis in Agritourism", on Tuesday 2nd September, 2008, 12.00pm SLT (20.00pm UK) at the Virtual Congress Centre on Eduserv Island.

He will focus on agritourism, analysing authenticity demand and supply, authenticity through complexity, learning free will interaction with mutual knowledge and expertise exchange.

Everyone welcome.

Sloodle Island coming soon

Dan Livingstone of the Sloodle project (which we happen to fund :-) ) has made the following announcement to the virtualworlds@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list:

Hi all,

For information, the Sloodle project (http://www.sloodle.org/) should have its new island open within the next few weeks. Plots of land will be available free to educators who will be using Sloodle with their classes. Sloodle features a number of tools which integrate learning and teaching activities across the open source Moodle VLE and Second Life (chat, blog, quizzes, 'choice' voting tool, glossaries and gradebook courseworks)

If your institution does not use Moodle, or if you ar unable to have Sloodle installed we may also be able to offer support with Moodle hosting for your classes.

If you are interested, please reply here:
http://www.sloodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1772

regards,
Daniel

Three panel sessions at the Chilbo summer fair

In a way, I wish I was part of Chilbo - part of me is dead envious cos it looks like a fun community.

As part of their summer fair there are three interesting looking panel sessions coming up - the first tonight. I'm guessing that they will all be well worth attending.

Identity, gender and death

We make money not art has an interesting piece about the work of Marc Owens, including a description of a RL virtual transgender suit and an facility known as Second Death which will terminate your avatar after a random amount of time in-world (terminate as in permanently delete the account).

The first would probably go down a storm at SLCC?

The second is quite interesting. One might say, I suppose, that our avatars die when we do, or when the virtual world(s) in which they are manifested die (whichever comes first)? As I've argued before, I think the personas we see in our avatars are bigger than a particular avatar in a particular virtual world and I'm not sure I have a particular desire to feel virtual grief in the way described here anyway. But it's an interesting project nonetheless.

Incorrect behaviour?

Interesting post on the OpenHabitat blog (OpenHabitat is a JISC-Funded project) discussing an in-world meeting that went "wrong" and the coping strategies that attendees adopted to cope with the "wrongness".

The tentative conclusion is that in-world voice should be used to augment in-world chat (i.e. that chat remains the primary communication method but that the noises-off provided by voice can be used to indicate the status of the various participants).

Nice idea... especially for those, like me, who don't like in-world voice much.

It reminds me a little of the story we heard at the wrap-up meeting of the Learning from Virtual Worlds: Teaching in Second Life project about students who self-organised themselves into using in-world chat for communication and in-world voice to share music with each other.