On my Google home page, I have a gaget that shows photos at random from my favorite FLICKR contacts.  Alan Levine, at NMC, is one I follow and it is through one of his FLICKR entries that I found out about these two FLICKR API’s that I wanted to document.  I am a big FLICKR fan; there are so many amazing photographers on this site that are more than willing to share their photos just my giving them credit. 

However, FLICKR is difficult to search.  These two applications make the process easier.  One is compflight.com and the other flickrcc.bluemountains.net.  I love these interfaces for they make searching for photos so much easier.  Thanks Alan for sharing!!!! 

Up-and-coming platforms include Google’s Lively and the Webflock by the Electric Sheep company are good places to start  . More to come later as I broaden my focus …

Life’s turbulent waters have a tendancy to drown any such notions from our mind.  Being tumbled around, these thoughts have been the last on my mind in recent years… yet today, I am reminded that every once in a while, someone or something comes along just for the sole purpose of encouraging us NOT to forget. 

I never, ever, thought I would be awarded one of the NMC Virtual Learning Prizes for 2008.  I knew that the competition was tough and there were many talented and knowledgable Second Life educators applying with excellent proposals.  I had been working on a Second Life project, the ”Virtual Endangered Ecosystem - Salt Water Marsh” for a year with two science faculty from Seton Hall.  The project had not been approved for funding at the university for some reason this past year.  I had seen the call for NMC proposals and I was so excited. By having our proposal  accepted, I could thank these faculty, in some small way, for putting in so many hours of their own personal time to help me develop out the design.     

Eight grants were issued from 75 applicants  … I feel truly humbled that our idea was chosen.  When I actually found out, I started to cry.  We were really being given the opportunity to recreate our learning environment.  And for me personally?  Well, it represents a candle of encouragement, beckoning me to enter the light. 

Remembering Wordle, I was quickly able to create a visual I liked that reflected the experience.  This Web 2.0 application will take words off of a blog, del.icio.us or input you provide and given a layout style, font and color, will create a graphic.   The size of the word is determined by the number of times it appears in the input.  Save your word input though in a Word document in case you decide to try other settings and fonts. 

I finally decided on the one below as my favorite.  Check it out …. sooooooo cool and very easy. 

Danielle has been working on our Second Life avatar, ePirate Beardmore.  She is beautiful, don’t you think?  I was so pleased that Danielle bought the dress for her that I found …. perfect!  Now all she needs is a pet … something unusual. 

Danielle did a wonderful job on the makeup and skin.  I love her hair!  Well, we are getting there, slowly but surely however I really like how our promo materials are turning out.  Next is the completion of the website/blog/wiki! 

What I appreciate is that the author of the blog identifies where she has bought everything in the outfit.  In Second Life I have “saved” most of my Second Life earnings, something that is difficult for me to do in real life because of a number of issues, however, I don’t think I will be able to resist some of these “must-haves”.  The only problem with the blog is that the surl’s don’t work for me.  Check it out at:  http://www.slfashionaddict.blogspot.com/

This past week I added the two-day, online conference 3-D Internet for Learning, co-sponsored by IBM, Arizona State University, the Federation for American Scientists and the Kauffman Foundation.  An estimated eighty participants attended the event held in >Active Worlds. Along with providing many resources I am still checking out, the speakers spoke to a number of topics that had relevance to my Ed.M. project on virtual ecosystems. 

As we start to plan out our virtual marsh environment I thought about the comments made regarding the “recreation” of “real places” so prevalent in many of the virtual world builds instead of immersive spaces unconfined by gravity, weight, climate, atmosphere, and other limitations.  A salt-water marsh just looks like a muddy tangled field of weeds, which most residents in Second Life would find very boring.  However, it is really a very complex ecosystem that is most often transparent to real-life observers. It would be very cool to recreate this microscopic web of life nursery in ways students would normally not see from the microscopic level.

James Gee talked about assessment in virtual worlds, a topic near, and dear to my heart lately.  He felt educators were bringing old world assessments into new world environments and called for assessment to be part of the experience in the virtual world.  In games such as World of Warcraft, tasks move from the simple to the complex through knowledge domains.  Game identity is anchored in the skills and talents one acquires as the world is experienced through shared activities and reflection with other inhabitants. A natural help system is built into these systems though mentors and embedded experiences.  Educators using virtual worlds to create learning spaces for students need to take these concepts from online multi-user games and incorporate them into the space if they hope to ensure the best learning outcomes possible.  I’ll be thinking of ways we can provide continuous assessment and collaborative reflection in our marsh environment as we go forward with our project.

Conference Wiki
Conference Blog

In December, myself and two other colleagues, one of which was a faculty member, presented at the Symposium on the Evolution of Communication at the NMC Conference Center in Second Life.  Our presentation, titled “Critical Analysis of Literary Works Using Virtual Worlds“, centered on the exploration of material culture through the use of objects in texts, a pilot project at Seton Hall University.  In this project, graduate students explored themes and character development in the gothic novel, The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, by recreating the rooms in the virtual world of Second Life, as they invisioned through their readings and class discussions.

The conference took place on one of the new NMC Conference SIMS and was the first experience two of my colleagues had presenting in this unique environment.  We wanted the presentation to be interactive and created an exercise where the participants read a passage and then chose objects based on their own interpretation of the text.  Theory on material culture in literary works was presented with a discussion following the exercise.

The presentation for the most part hung together however, we used a thinc book to display our slides.  Participants continually touched the book, advancing the pages so our commentary was not in sinc with the slides which proved distracting to all.  Next time we will use a simple video screen which the presenters will control.  It also would have been helpful for us to set up and practice in-world since it took us more time to set up the image boxes than we anticipated.  We also should have included a slide on an outline of the total presentation and provided more of a seamless transition between the sections of the presentation.  Finally, a printout of the total presentation would have been helpful since our online notes mininized everytime we used Second Life voice.

I always have to remind myself that we learn more from experiences that do not live up to our expectations than those that run seamlessly.  As the senior member of our group, I never expected these problems .  This virtual world environment has become so familiar to me yet still poses challenges in exploring the potentials of these virtual spaces for teaching and learning.   Ahhhhh, next time will be better …

Slideshare Presentation

Related links and Resources:
NMC Campus Observer
Resources From All Sessions at the Symposium (including our presentation)

Please excuse links that don’t work and out-of-date texts for the moment ….