A 10 minute summary of the Eduserv Foundation's activities in Second Life

I've prepared a short video summarising what we (the Eduserv Foundation) are doing on Eduserv Island. The main point of doing this was to have something suitable for streaming onto our stand at the Second Life Best Practices Conference. Note that I threw this together fairly hastily so don't expect anything too polished - but I think it gets the main points across.

With apologies to Jeremy Kemp, off of whom I nicked some ideas for the video!

Eduserv Foundation at SLBP2007

The Eduserv Foundation will have a presence at Friday's Second Life Best Practices in Education 2007 conference - stand 5 in the Non-profits area to be precise. I'm not sure how much of the time we'll actually be on the stand - but feel free to drop by and have a look.

Symposium presentations now available

As blogged here, all the streaming media and most of the Powerpoint presentations from the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 are now available on the Web and in-world. Enjoy!

There were 6 presentations, so we have 6 files of mp4 streaming media. I wasn't sure how best to handle this in-world? A single screen with scripting to switch between the different presentations? 6 different screens, one per presentation?

In the end I opted for the latter, on the basis that there might be contention issues over a single screen. I've therefore created six small land parcels alongside the Virtual Congress Centre, attaching one of the streaming files to each.

It should work OK I think.

Competition over :-(

Luther Meriman sent an IM to my alt earlier today, using the required phrase "you are Art Fossett and I claim my L$2000".

I'm duly L$2000 poorer :-(

Serves me right for making a hash of it and not covering my tracks properly.

Eduserv Island update

I've been developing Eduserv Island over the weekend, working on various things including our SLashup Space, a game called the SLeakest Wink, a new exhibit in the Avon Gallery and an array of new offices that I don't know what to do with yet. Oh, and a secret (well, kind of secret) cave.

I'll post about each of these things separately in due course...

I note that Pete has posted recently about SLashing it up on our main eFoundations blog, and that he now appears to be writing to a blog called Peregrinations. Nice!

On names...

Second Life tends to make you look at RL names (and other things for that matter!) somewhat differently, in the sense that every so often you come across a name in RL that makes you think it really ought to be an SL avatar name! Take Fenella Fudge for example, a BBC newsreader.

Similarly Artemis Cropper (known as Arte), who has one of the nicest names I've ever heard of, currently the Events and Marketing Manager at UKOLN.

Shoes

OK, so it is now fairly public knowledge that I'm a cobbler in SL. (Yes, I'm aware that some people think I've talked cobblers for years!). News about this seems to cause much merriment for the people who know me in the education community. I'm not totally clear why, but I can see the funny side.

For example, Lisa Gray from the JISC came up to me the other day and said she had been hearing strange rumours about my activities in SL. Blimey... I think I could be doing much worse things!

For the record, I started making shoes simply to see how easy (or not) it is to make money out of SL. Answer: yes, it is possible. I'm not making a fortune, but I am covering Art Fossett's subscription and land use costs pretty much - which can't be a bad thing.

As far as I know, I've so far managed to keep my Art Fossett identity completely separate from my other SL identity (my cobbler 'alt') but I could be wrong. No-one that I know of has worked out who or what my virtual shoe business is. And I'm happy to keep it that way. There is, I think, one public bit of information out there on the Internet that joins the two together. I'm not going to say what, but it shouldn't be too hard for some budding Morse to work out.

How about I give L$2000 (roughly a pint?) to the first person that IMs my other avatar with the statement "you are Art Fossett and I claim my L$2000".