Playing with Picnik

On Eduserv Island
Originally uploaded by Art Fossett

Torley recently announced a short video tutorial showing how to use Picnik to take snapshots of Web pages. Over Twitter, I asked him how he moved SL snapshots into Flickr and he replied saying that he used SLBuzz, which can receive images direct from SL using email and which has an option to forward on any images to your Flickr account.

I joined SLBuzz a while ago but then forgot about it. I just tried again, and getting snapshots from SL into it seems very straightforward. I haven't got the syncing with Flickr to work yet - not sure why? But it doesn't matter too much because I've also installed the Firefox Picnik add-on which allows me to right-click on the image in SLBuzz and take it directly into Picnik.

Once there, I can edit it as I see fit, then save direct to my Art Fossett Flickr account.

From Flickr, I can blog the image directly into here, via my Blogger account.

Everything happens without touching my laptop disk drive and without having to run Gimp. Don't get me wrong... I like Gimp and use it all the while. But the, save to disk, load into Gimp, save to disk, upload to blog routine was getting pretty tedious.

I'll try the new process for a while and see how I get on. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than what I was doing before.

Spring 2008 snapshot of UK educational activity in SL now available

The second in our series of three snapshots of UK higher and further education activities in Second Life is now available. This is significantly longer than the previous snapshot(s), reflecting a growth in the level of use and development around Second Life.

The snapshots have been funded by the Eduserv Foundation and undertaken by John Kirriemuir (Silversprite Helsinki). As John notes in the introduction:

The number of UK academics who are developing or operating teaching and learning resources in Second Life (SL) has grown rapidly in the last year. While an accurate figure is difficult to determine (partially due to the non-public nature of some developments), as a rough estimate some three-quarters of UK universities are actively developing or using SL, at the institutional, departmental and/or individual academic level. Of these, many institutions support several ongoing SL developments, often involving groups of people rather than individuals. However, the proportion of UK FE institutions actively using SL was much smaller.

75% of UK universities is a pretty significant proportion - though, of course, the range of activities and level of investment that represents is very variable:

Academics described a very wide range of SL activities spanning teaching, learning, research, performance, construction and demonstration. The key advantage of SL in teaching and learning is that there are many activities in which the student must be more than a passive learner in order to progress. The student has to develop “stuff”, collaborate and participate. Before these can occur, he or she has to master a new and transferable skill set, meaning that, in SL, learning is done more by participating and doing than by listening and absorbing.

Though use of SL in UK HE/FE is growing, many academics are not “welded” to it, being aware of its deficiencies and open to moving to alternative virtual environments, especially open source and more localised versions, in the future.

Overall, and perhaps not surprisingly, the three most mentioned requirements of UK academic SL developers are:

• more funding opportunities
• more time to develop
• better technical facilities within SL, or a viable alternative environment.

Impact report now available

I blogged a while back about the work that Silversprite Helsinki (John Kirriemuir) is doing for us looking at the issues around measuring the impact that SL is having on education. This is part of the series of snapshots he is doing for us... but helping us to move beyond simply counting beans, instead looking at whether whatever is happening in SL is having any useful impact on learning.

A report entitled Measuring the impact of Second Life for educational purposes is now available.