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” [...]

Julynn Lilliehook, Dean of the soon to be opened Second Life Law School, spoke at the “Educational Possibilities of Second Life” series, sponsored by SL’ang Life magazine.
“I have found in both RL and SL that people are very uneducated about the laws that affect them,” she said, “In SL it’s [...]

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 [...]

Sarah Robbins (SL: Intellagirl Tully) of Ball State University chairs a panel with Jeremy Kemp (SL: Jeremy Kabumpo) of San Jose State University and Jeremy Hunsinger (SL: buridan Simon) of Virginia Tech about the future of education in virtual spaces. As long term veterans in SL education, Jeremy Hunsinger points [...]

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 [...]

On the third day of the vBusiness Expo in Second Life, IBM’s Sandra Kearney, Global Director for 3D Internet & Virtual Business, speaks about the evolution of internet technology and the potential of virtual worlds for work and collaboration. She sees an ecosystem of technology tools, platforms, and services that [...]

Benjamin Duranske moderates a panel about virtual worlds and legal issues that arise from working in them, and Dave Elchoness (SL: Da Etchegaray), Executive Director of the Association for Virtual Worlds, brings up an important point - if a company hires a builder or scripter in Second Life, what are [...]

From the vBusiness Expo in Second Life - On-boarding new hires with virtual worlds, John Boring, Accelerate
John reports on study to gauge barriers and interest in virtual worlds from corporate sector, sneak peek from the report:
Top 5 Barriers to Adoption of Virtual World Tech
1. lack [...]

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 [...]