A recent article about the premier SL businesswoman: http://news.com.com/Virtual+magnate+shares+secrets+of+success/2008-1043_3-6144967.html

On another side of things, my commercial moodle side let me know about this: http://events.internet2.edu/2006/fall-mm/sessionDetails.cfm?session=2877&event=258

d.i.

Alrighty then- I went to create this blog, and realized I'd already done it!!

My mind is scattered, but I purport that anyone who's mind is NOT scattered are themselves boring, or not busy enough... ..

So earlier we got the go-ahead to start experimenting and get a couple premium accounts- and that we did. I've spent a number of hours exploring and learning, and boy is there a lot to learn. Now I feel like an old hat, and have walked folks thru a number of things, and get more excited as time goes on.

So the latest mandate- we got a small innovations grant to do an island, and a huge strategic plan from the dean, which i'm working to convert into a workable checklist... you know, when you convert a paragraph into nouns and verbs and such so that you can break it into discrete tasks and concepts. When I do that, the list gets REALLY long, and I'm going to need a lot of help.

But here's a quick summary of some things I've picked up and learned:

You need a magic feather to fly over 250 or so meters.
You can't usually teleport over about 300M.
Scripting teleporting is a pain in the butt, and has something to do with radians - so that rotating an object that teleported you to a point fine, will then cause you to shoot out on your ear, or miss your target, or whatever.
There's a setting to have the default "sit" action occur when you left-click instead of the normal right-click- which is cool becuase it means faster teleporting (I'm all for less clicks).

Two people i'm very intrigued by that I came across:
- ariane brodie at http://virtualunderworld.net/arianeb/secondlife.htm
She seems very smart - with skills and scripting, and has included some interesting initial tips and scripts. She also seems to have some pretty amazing modeling skills.
- Kisa Naumova http://www.flickr.com/people/eyefood/ has some amazing art, which you should look at. It's not clear to me whether the cool architecture within SL is hers, but seems clear that much of the art is... another ubergeek with scripting and design skills.

In addition, there are a few notable people that have already been invaluable to me and our efforts:

-Mari Asturias - my first helper, who showed me the SDSU campus, and spent time patiently explaining many things to me, including what "cybering" is - and no, we didn't. Her friend gave me a magic feather for flying, and some related tips.
-The robot guy who was building part of a library on NMC (or was it?) who gave me my hard-hat, which now universally has folks asking if i'm one of the village people.
-Gary... who quickly put some teleporters on my land for me, but more importantly put a link to HIS land, which i've taken scads of people to visit, since it's just way cool- the dome and the butterflies, especially- plus the idea of up/down televator buttons.
-Dagmar Kojishi - the first other Community College person I met (that I knew of) and who's been helping me with this and that.
-Liam Kanno who has a really cool gallery, and who I hope will help us with building designs with his degree in industrial design.

And everyone else.

So now, before I forget, a few things my memory banks will lose if i don't note them:
- putting a panorama on a curved wall (the inner side) makes a cool effect, and creates a panoramo in SL without needing a helmet. You can use such curved "walls" at the tops of spiral staircases and such for interesting architectural designs.
- ramps work just as well as steps, but steps look cooler - see shinsa 232 85 58 for a cool spiral stairway
- for videos/slideshows, you can have rows of benches facing in both directions
- you can buy a stargate that jumps you around, or randomly jumps you to another stargate... gimmicky or cool? You decide - certainl LOOKS cool, but a bit much work for a basic teleport. Conceptually like a webring, actually...
- cool pink building at : shinsa 232 85 58 (actually not there, but look for starkissed studios)
- can do long videos, which look good. Need to take our SGD and other vids and bring 'em into SL. Wonder how...
- there are a LOT of art galleries in SL- each with something to offer
- a hedge maze might be an interesting way to demo things (drawbridge 17, 229)
- near that point is part of a building that looks a bit like our levine campus
- levine campus might actually be a good one to build to match RL- unlike most of our other buildings...
- can we use picture of our statue to build a statue like it?
- at gallinas 178 32 i bought some animations.. way cool... and made me laugh out loud
- it strikes me that you could build a "ghetto elevator" by making a tub, with a cutout on each end, and just walk in and fly - if you put an angle at the top/bottom, it would simply force the user ina nd out - just have 'em walk in, and fly and thell go up and then bounce out on that floor- would save all the click, teleport nonsense...
- It looks really neat when you fly above a highway, as low as possible, essentially "driving" yourself thru the countryside... got to find a highway though - on in gallinas... 139 146
- later in gallinas 123 38 - mideast style
-camping gourdneck 30 252
-Obscuru Valkyrie 49, 39, 27 - nice example if a 6 item screen with center selection

Been about 5 hours, now almost 6am, and i'm off to bed!!

d.i.

A reply from me to a post about someone who said they were addicted to SL...

LOL!

I left here at 520 am when the grid went down- and we were just about to put up my first building!!

And after class today spent 3 more hours on it... Too damn much to learn, and WAYY to much time - but I agree that it's addicting. I now have in my inventory 55 buildings, 20 scripts, 40 plants, etc.. Etc...
And am still like a baby trying to move prims around on my new (as of
3am) aquired 512 acres...

My greatest wish is that by getting educators TOGETHER here we could actually NOT reinvent the wheel all over - so that we must think about collaborating and sharing work, in the same way that 1 linden dollar bought me 17 buildings. Just think if I coul dgo get 5 html tutorials, or a phlebotomy simulation - so please everybody think about this.

It's all fine and dandy for me to have my cool space, and avatar and (waittaminute, somebody made me a woman.... Damn... Wonder if I left that "remember me" box... Not a good default to have in school labs) - anyway, try and keep plugging how we can really use this!

D.i.

Ps- I'm giving my intro to internet class extra credit for this, and they've slowly been getting accounts- today one students in back started laughing out loud and couldn't stop, and it turns out she and her neighbor had launched SL and she had pushed somebody into a lake, and couldn't get over it (I think because it was accidental) - so this is powerful stuff... Now if we can just make it more useful than keeping me and my students from our work...

It all started a month or so ago when i read an article in popular science about Second Life. Then I found an article in MIT's technology review from 2005 that mentioned the economics of second life. I thought it might be interesting to play with in my emerging tech class, and set the articles aside for review.

A student tried it out and was excited about it, and i mentioned it to a dean or two, and about the same time a few more articles started popping up, and i did some basic research.

Which culminated in my boss' boss asking me to figure out how to make it happen, and to make it happen, with pretty rapid deadlines.

So first steps:
-create account, verified with my card
-muck with my avatar- too complicated, walk around with white and blue shirt coat using flag texture for first week until someone gave me some regular clothes
-spent way too long a week into trying to make my face look like my real face, but then giving my ears pointed tips, and making my hair silver-gray
-requested education island space- waiting to hear back
-learned about first land, and got some
-built my first primitives (prims) as big flat boards to put on my property
-and so on.

So this is a place for me to start putting this al together, though I'm wondering if a wiki wouldn' tmake more sense...

the impetus? The SLED list had this link, and i needed a place to put it:
http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/virtualworlds/