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” [...]

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 [...]

Testing embed code for a Google map I created that shows the real life locations that I have visited to give presentations or learn more about Second Life, virtual worlds, and Web 2.0, and social media. (Hint, they’re all the same thing.) The lighter blue markers are places I traveled to “virtually” to attend [...]

Many thanks to Tish Shute (SL: Tara5 Oh) for bringing this to my attention, there is now an audio recording of the Open Source Virtual Worlds panel I mentioned in my last post at Ugotrade. Tish writes:
Some people may have walked away from Virtual Worlds 2008, NYC, thinking the vision of the metaverse has [...]

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 [...]

The metaverse ecosystem of virtual worlds continues to grow and increase in complexity and differentiation, so even though I spend quite a bit of time working in Second Life, I also try to make a point of visiting other virtual worlds as well.
This past week I visited two virtual worlds - VastPark and vSide:
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