Fleep’s Deep Thoughts

I was hanging out with @malburns and @tarayeats yesterday evening in Chilbo and we were having a wide ranging discussion of all things Second Life, Web 2.0, and virtual worlds more generally, when Malburns mentioned this cute little program at http://weblin.com. He was describing how it gives you a little avatar and you “teleport” [...]

Courtesy of the Ohio Fair Schools Campaign comes a summary of recent news articles with information about Gov. Strickland’s plans for reforming education in the State of Ohio.
There has been a flurry of news reports about Gov. Ted Strickland’s education reform plan. According to an article in the Columbus Dispatch, the governor [...]

I came across a couple of great thought provoking things yesterday, all come from Twitter friends - @gsiemens, @Larry_Pixel, and @lparisi.
First up, George Siemens shared his presentation from the Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching & Learning Conference in Spokane, WA. When thinking about where all of this digital connectivity is heading and [...]

Life4u reporter Draxtor Despres just sent me an IM about his latest report on the past week’s vBusiness Expo and Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds in Second Life. I was a speaker for the Education track at the vBusiness Expo and Draxtor interviewed me afterwards. Look ma, I’m on virtual TV!

What follows are some thoughts that have been percolating since I read Peter Ludlow’s critique of virtual campuses in Second Life (Chronicle article) back in early December (talk about a long tail, eh?) and recently re-sparked by some conversations on the SLED listserv. In any case, the question about traditional learning spaces keeps coming [...]

Aleks Krotoski from the University of Surry and Mark Bell from Indiana University discuss best practices for performing survey research in virtual worlds like Second Life. One key affordance of doing research in virtual environments is the ability to capture reams of data, not just from the avatar, but [...]

As promised, I finally got my photos from Virtual Worlds 2008 uploaded to Flickr, better late than never, right?
As I went through the images, I tried to remember exactly what about the event left me so.. cold. It wasn’t really the people, I was thrilled to see many friends again, Aldon Huffhines from the [...]

Representative Ed Markey presides over the virtual hearing in Second Life. Photo courtesy Rik Riel.
Update: Alan Levine at the New Media Consortium’s site just posted an audio link of the hearing. Thanks Alan!
TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2008
Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet Hearing
9:30 [...]

Thanks to Howard Rheingold for this video, MIT Prof Henry Jenkins talks about a vision of DIY media and how it may impact democracy and the cultural production of knowledge that thankfully does NOT include the phrase “social media”.

I am cross-posting a comment I just made on a 400+ thread at the broken toys blog because I think buried in a bunch of really ugly muck is an extremely interesting question, and I’d rather participate in a conversation that is moderated.
The background of this very extensive conversation can be found here:
* [...]