Online Education and Second Life

So, this is very interesting and right up my ally. Apparently there is a large community of Educators that are involved with providing content for the virtual world called Second Life.

Second life is: " Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents." The difference of this 'virtual world' and say World of Warcraft, or Everquest, is that though users could build game content, the content itself is not included. Rather just the tools to create are provided.

This allows people like educators to put together classes, and schools even in this virtual world.

here is a little 'intro video' for a course that a Harvard Law Professor put on last semester in Second Life: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/ (or try: Video Link for the video)

This is something that I have just started looking over the past couple of Days, however, I am very exited about the possibilities. For now, and from what I have seen so far, I'm not sure that this will be 'THE' big Virtual Learning environment, but what ever it evolves into, I am totally convinced that it will definitely play a large part in forming the landscape of Virtual Learning Environments for the future.

Wade / Zak Vacano <-- My online Avatar's name. -out.

Summary of events for the past while:

I made a post on a gaming forum to a group that I've known and played with for several years... it was a decent summary of some of the things I've been doing the past few weeks sooo, I figured I'd post here:

Posted by zWolf on the EZCO guild forums 12-07-06:

Good News n Not as good News

So, Good news. Imperial Asphalt (my Dad's company that I'm managing sales for,) just won it's biggest contract ever. The 'not so good' news is that we could have put another 20K in and still won it. But se la vi, the 167K will keep the doors open during the winter. Boise is 4 hours away, but it's a bit better climate so you can work all year around, winter is normally a time we close up shop due to weather around southern ID where the main business is based.

Oh well, the extra 20K sure would have been nice, but we knew we were going in cheap. When it's the difference of having work or not having work then you bid to win ya know? We ran the #'s and we'll still make decent $$, just not plasma TV buying 'extra' $$'s.

Imperial Asphalt will be doing quite a bit of winter work in our State capital again this year, this will make 7 out of 8 years that we've won the contract, so it's no new thing for us. Just that this is the first year I'll have been directly involved from the beginning.


Heh, I guess this isn't really 'game related' but over the years - a guy feels like he can share stuff he's exited about in hear ya know.

Wade -out.

Thank you,


zWolf

zWolf@level20.com
http://www.wadehone.com

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posted by Aztlan 12-07-06:

cool zwolf! congrats bro! how's everything else going?

-Az

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posted by zWolf 12-07-06:


hmm Every thing else is going pretty good - recent events include:

Moving a brother from one home to another in the same town (same Day)

Moving a brother from one town to another (different cities different days,)

Moving the rest of my crap from Boise to my new place. (the boxes are still stacked in the dinning area though...)

Conference trip to run a booth at the Idaho Highway District convention in northern Idaho, I didn't see any Skin heads - but was sick most of the time I was there. heh, my voice was gone most of the whole time which really sucked cause I was supposed to be talking to all the road managers.

Thanks Giving goodness - at the parents house- mmm mmmm Mashed Potatoes n Gravy! -added- Also that evening a movie with my Dad, Brothers and good friend Danny - it was something with Denzel Washington and someone that I thought was Hally Berry (but someone said I was wrong... n I havn't been to IMDB yet to find the truth.) -end-

2 Baby Blessings - (My brothers are very prolific....)

A Brazillian Dinner @ Rodillio Grill and a Symphony Excursion with a good friend (who happens to be an X-GF.)

Trip to Boise to Bid that job we won.

heh over all that's allot of Travel time. You can see by my X-player Icon I've taken pretty much 0 time to play anything.

Oh lets see I was able to write a multi page manifesto on some internet deployed and distributed employment model... but I was high on a 'RockStar' Tripple Shot - so I'm not sure how coherent it is....

hmmm then several other odd's n ends 0 hey this is a pretty good little summary... I think I'll pop it up on my blogg - heh.

I've been reading about WoW and the latest updates though... I may not be able to hold out till mid January on getting back in... it sounds pretty cool.

z -out.

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Over all, it's been a fun past few weeks. I got to see lots n lots of Family, I have the coolest Nephews and Nieces in the world! I sure miss my Sister n her Family though, living in London just gets to be too far away once every one's close together where we can have regular family get-togethers ... in those times the absence is really missed. but at least she keeps up a great Blog! and I get to see sweet pic's of my Niece Samantha. that's very cool.

I'm definitly looking forward to the next couple of months too, I'm jst getting over a long ole cold, and I can feel the energy of being healthy surging through me just waiting to invest in accomplishing my goals.

I'll be reviewing a priority list with Dennis later today to go over where to focus my sales at this winter. Guess you could say we were going over our strat-ee-ger-y for the next few years.

My thoughts on Nancy Grace from CNN

I wrote this to CNN a while ago, then ran across it in my old documents. I saw her on TV again (not sure why she's still on CNN and not some late night low budget cable TV channel but oh well...)

I just thought I would post this here in my blog.

Letter to CNN:

I just wanted to comment that I normally just change the channel when Nancy Grace comes on due to how emotional and bias that she seems to get once she decides to take a side on an issue. I just thought that was part of the theme of her show, a sort of ‘shock em to entertain em’ shtick. Personally when I look for news stories I look for reporting, not soap boxing. Then I saw a clip of her claiming that her show sought to present just the facts. I don’t recall the particular quote, but it made me feel that she was attempting to argue that her show was one that didn’t show bias.

I just had to write in at that point. It’s one thing to run an entertainment show that uses the news as it’s source material, The daily news on the comedy channel, and many other shows like it, are quite successful at entertaining. However, It made me wonder how stupid she thinks that her viewers are if she thinks she’s shooting straight news and not mostly entertainment. If she’s trying to do news, she needs to practice not raising her voice so much and practice not getting so emotional about issues, as well as learning how to look at both sides of an issue and not joining one. If she’s going to continue with the entertainment shtick, then she shouldn’t try to persuade her viewers that she’s doing the news. For myself, I’ll just continue to change the channel when I see her yelling questions at her normally respectable guests. For others that may be insulted by her trying to fool them into thinking that they are getting real news, she may want to tone down her claims of reporting the news.

by,

Wade Hone.

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