found another tool - twiddla

http://www.twiddla.com/

We've been looking into hosting webinars at work and discussing the different tools. After checking this one out, I'm thinking it has all the features we need and it's free!

Virtual Worlds: A Second Life Beginner's Guide

Found this in the Orange Grove repository...free!

Virtual Worlds: A Second Life Beginner's Guide ( PDF Document )
This free textbook introduces virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular. It covers a range of topics ranging from basic movement and building techniques to some theories on virtual identities. Contents: 1) Introduction. 2) First Steps in Second Life. 3) Building your own world - 3D model creation in Second Life. 4) Who are you? Identities, …


http://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/items/52ac65c1-0c7f-daba-4d84-fc87d07408f1/1/Second_life.pdf?tempwn.b=access%2Fsearch.do%3Fpg.e%3Dtrue%26pg_pp%3D10%26pg_pg%3D2%26hier.topic%3Dd37c6ed5-3822-84a6-721c-6d9033a88541%26qs.tq%3Dweb%2B2.0%26qs.q%3Dweb%2B2.0%26sort_s%3DRANK%26she_canDisplay%3Dchecked

Top 20 Educational Locations in Second Life

Virtual Campuses
Campus:Second Life (Pathfinder Linden's hosted space for educators) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Campus/150/100
Global Kids Island - (The Main Grid location that reports on activities at the Global Kids location in the Teen Grid.) http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cincta/89/95/23/ hosting web hosting service
Harvard Law School's Austin Hall - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Berkman/69/54/24/
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Hotel & Tourism Management - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Polyusotel/114/158/26/ domain hosting
New Media Consortium Campus (private sim, Electric Sheep build, free sign up for access; overview movie) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus/142/223
Ohio University Second Life Campus - http://slurl.com/secondlife/ohio%20university/20/36/24/
Bowling Green State University Virtual Campus - http://slurl.com/secondlife/bowling%20green%20state/140/140/140/ unlimited hosting
Northern Illinois University, Glidden Campus - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Glidden/88/166/30/
The Sistine Chapel (Vassar Island) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/vassar/165/91/24
Democracy Island (NYLS) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Democracy%20Island/116/220/
Info Island (Incorporating SL & ICT Libraries, TechSoup) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/52/193/ cheap web hosting
Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vue/205/53/30
Saint Leo University Virtual Campus- http://slurl.com/secondlife/Saint%20Leo%20University/128/128/41/
Science and Health
Second life Health education (pbwiki) (Navid Tomlinson) - http://healtheducationsl.pbwiki.com/
UC Davis' Virtual Hallucinations (James Linden) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/sedig/27/45/22/
Heart Murmur Sim (medical assessment experiment, built 3/06) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/waterhead/130/37
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Second Life - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Juwangsan/218/223
Second Health - Imperial College, London - Local Hospital Polyclinic
Second Life Medical Library 2.0/Consumer Health Library/HealthInfo Island - SLurl 1, SLurl 2, SLurl 3
Spaceport Alpha (incorporating International Spaceflight Museum and Second Life Planetarium by Chaac Amarula) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/23/51/22/ SEO Seo marketing
Solar Eclipse Planetarium (Aimee Webber) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Midnight%20City/94/76/27/
Svarga (Laukosargas Svarog's virtual eco-system) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Svarga/128.0/128.0
NOAA's Virtual Island - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteroa/177/161/27/
A Sexual Health SIM in Second Life (University of Plymouth) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20UK/33/63/22 (info)
Genome (Biology, Genetics) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Genome/130/130/48
Places to Learn about Education in SL
Second Life introduction (Navid Tomlinson) - http://healtheducationsl.pbwiki.com/Introduction+to+Second+Life
Information & Communications Technology (ICT) Library on Info Island http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/50/199/33/?title=Info%20Island
Places to Learn Second Life Skills
Academy of Second Learning - http://slurl.com/secondlife/eson/32/162//
Ivory Tower of Prims (teaches in-world skills) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/204/70/25/
Orientation Island (Public version of everyone's first time) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Orientation%20Island%20Public/97/155 Search engine marketing
Interactive Linden Script Tutorial - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Daydream%20SE%20Islands/206/40

Week 6 - Journal Entry

Honestly, I fizzled out in week 6. I thought a lot about my produsage assignment (a wiki) and I worked on it here and there. It's light on content but I was weighing the costs-benefits of loading it with stuff. Vanessa's comments on the wiki are well taken - she said I might need to nudge users a little more, provide more direction. I agree and I'll work that in. I wanted to incorporate a few more cool tools but, in the end, I decided my audience wouldn't be ready...need to ease them in to it. I will use my produsage at work and I'll let you know how it pans out.

I spent time checking out more tools --- gosh, there are so many. I like Anthologize and I'm trying to see if I like StumbleUpon. I'm following and will continue to follow the Chronicle of Higher Education, USDOE and others on Twitter. It helps that I have a Twitter app on my iPhone.

I really loved this class. I think Vanessa rocks! It was fun to discover and learn with all of you.

Week 6 - Post Prompt

Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional (or whatever field you’re in).

I have learned so much during these few weeks and I'm so excited about the potential. My challenge is to slow down long enough to figure out how to integrate some of these tools into my life, work and home. Of all the Web 2.0 tools I've now piddled with, I must say that I am most drawn to anything Google. Does that make me a sell out? I love and use GoogleDocs frequently at work and now I'm starting to use the groups and sites. Google just seems to get it --- I want it to be so intuitive that I don't have to READ anything.

I still want to keep exploring, keep working at integration. I think there is great potential for me to use Web 2.0 to improve work productivity.

I'll probably continue to use Facebook and other social media for connecting with friends and family. I haven't bought in to using FB for education but I'll keep an open mind.

Second Life - Avatars as Editors

Chronicle of Higher Education

August 4, 2010, 05:00 PM ET
Avatars as Editors
As if living one life isn’t work enough, people are doubling up in virtual worlds. But don’t call Second Life and other online worlds make-believe. Users take them more seriously than that. Some develop novel approaches to teaching there; some make art, or dance. (Others, it is rumored, philander in ways that defy gravity.)
Those are all activities that interest Elif Ayiter and Yacov Sharir, the co-editors of Metaverse Creativity, a new journal that Intellect Books plans to launch online and in print in early October.
The great pleasure of virtual worlds, of which Second Life is the only extensive example, so far, is their open-endedness, says Ayiter from her real-world home in Turkey. Online-game worlds, like the hugely popular World of WarCraft, come with programmed, hard-wired rules, tools, and formats. By contrast, in Second Life users make everything up. They program environments, activities—realistic and fanciful—and create their own virtual selves, or “avatars.”
As a result, interactions there are “a lot like children playing with toys,” says Ayiter, an artist, designer, and educator at Sabanci University in Istanbul—users often assign unpredictable meanings and significations to the places, objects, and activities they design and enact.
Both editors of Metaverse Creativity exemplify that kind of innovation. And, they often spend time together in Second Life seeing whether their avatars can come up with better ideas for the journal than their “real” selves.
In Second Life, Ayiter, who specializes in the educational possibilities of virtual worlds, is Alpha Aura, whom she describes as “a totally irreverent, mischievous, politically incorrect, frivolous, fashion-victim avatar.” Sharir, an Israeli who teaches theater and dance at the University of Texas at Austin, dances with projected, virtual dancers on real-life stages, using ideas he refines in the virtual world.
The editors hope to attract a wide range of writing to Metaverse Creativity, including ideas about artificial-intelligence systems, landscaping, zoological and biological creations, and even virtual-world fashion design. Second Life’s relations to psychology, law, and technology are another focus. Plans for MC's first issue include a piece on how technological prostheses—beginning with the telescope—have altered human perceptions. Another article explains what neuroscience reveals about the benefits of the kinds of brain plasticity that simulation in virtual worlds can enhance, while a third edges up demurely on love in Second Life with a take on virtual-world adaptations of Korean romantic puppetry.
Second Life has existed only since 2003. As a result, many activities in it remain rudimentary. “I’m a little dubious about how much real fine art there is in a builders’ world like Second Life,” says Ayiter, a graphic designer in worlds real and virtual. “In any case, we’re not yet seeing publications in that area.”
Still, she believes plenty of good writing is out there. Among her suggestions to contributors is to avoid virtual-world insiderism. She urges them to explain such terms as “alts,” “twindividuals,” and “pairsons” (all multiple-personality counterparts of avatars). “The whole idea is to disseminate what is going on among people who are not using virtual worlds—among academics, especially.”
Another priority, she says, is to find more colleagues to swell the ranks of the journal’s board members. Those currently include Trish Adams and Stefan Glasauer, Australian and German neuroscientists who work in Second Life, and Beth Harris, a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The fledgling journal particularly seeks more referees. Due to the novelty of Second Life, Ayiter says, “it has been difficult to find reviewers, but I have done it. We have had a couple of submissions that were very good, but we had a hard time finding reviewers for them, and had to let them go.”—Peter Monaghan

Anthogize - I LOVE THIS!

http://anthologize.org/

August 3, 2010, 04:43 PM ET
Digital Humanists Unveil New Blog-to-Book Tool
By Sophia Li
A team of 12 digital humanists came together at George Mason University last week. In seven days, they built a new Web tool that lets users turn blog entries into an electronic book.
The creators intend their new tool, Anthologize, to make preparing a polished product—potentially for publication—a simple, quick process.
Anthologize is the product of the One Week, One Tool program, run by George Mason's Center for History and New Media and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The program brought together people from a variety of disciplines, including professors in the humanities, instructional-technology staff, and Web developers, for a hands-on learning experience.
The new tool, Anthologize, is a free, open-source WordPress plug-in that lets users organize and edit work from one blog or from many. Users can then export the content as a printer-friendly PDF or in other digital formats. The tool's creators have proposed several potential uses for Anthologize. For example, instructors might compile work from student blogs, or scholars could collect pieces on related topics and edit them into a digital publication similar to a journal.
Still, the new plug-in is not perfect: Its creators acknowledged that when they revealed Anthologize online on Tuesday afternoon. They plan to continue refining it over the course of the next year, and they encourage its users to join in, said the center's managing director, Thomas Scheinfeldt, in the online announcement.