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.

Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance

July 15, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance
By Kelly Truong
Spend as much time on Facebook as you want—it won’t affect your GPA, a new study says.
Researchers at Northwestern University found no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance. The study, the results of which appear in the latest issue of Information, Communication & Society, included responses from approximately 1,000 first-year students at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Sites such as Facebook and MySpace had no effect on grades, despite how often students used them or how many they used.
Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern, suggests that the benefits of social-networking sites may cancel out the distractions they pose.
“You could go on there and waste your time,” she said. “On the other hand, you can connect with your classmates, get information about homework assignments, get to know people better, and feel more comfortable engaging with them on academic matters.”
A past study at Ohio State University suggested that students on Facebook earn lower GPA's than nonusers. However, the scholar who did that research later said that she lacked enough data to determine whether that conclusion was true.

Week 5 - Journal Entry

I'm playing catch up this week. I was at a Jobs for the Future conference in Miami most of the week.

I have continued to participate with the communities I joined for the assignment and I am really enjoying it. I have become more actively engaged in the one I merely observed.

I have spent a lot of time considering the produsage assignment. I think I have landed on a concept and will spend today and tomorrow building it. I want it to be something that lives beyond this class so I decided to use Web 2.0 to help formulate a formative assessment of a new initiative to encourage adults to complete their degrees. I have the basics in mind but I really want to jazz it up --- that will be my challenge.

I'm happy to report that I am following USDOE and The Chronicle on Twitter. I love the snipets.

While I hate to admit it, I have been lurking on classmate's blogs and checked the class wiki a couple of times this week.

Week 5 - Post Prompt

How do issues such as authorship, copyright and open access impact your desire, ability and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?

Personally, these issues don't impact my desire to engage.

Professionally, however, I am concerned about open access without quality control. Florida is moving forward with Orange Grove Text Plus (http://www.theorangegrove.org/open_textbooks.asp), a repository of textbooks that are available to faculty and students free of charge. Currently, there is no quality control and the textbooks in the repository are just those that have been found on the web or shared freely. Without peer review or some type of content review there is a likelihood that not all textbooks are high quality.

Using Creative Commons for Educational Content

“Using Creative Commons for Educational Content” by Lila Bailey from Creative Commons.
August 5, 10AM EDT.
This would be a great primer for those interested in using Creative Commons for educational contents. Lila, Counsel for Creative Commons, will cover the basics of using Creative Commons for different situations.
http://collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/events/using-creative-commons-for-1?xg_source=msg_mes_network

KnowHow2Go Learning Community: Connectivity Drives Change

http://www.luminafoundation.org/newsroom/newsstories/topics/connectivity-test.html

Use of Ning to promote collaboration to increase access to college.

How Twitter Helps Researchers Visualize The Moods Of Americans

http://edudemic.com/2010/07/how-twitter-helps-researchers-visualize-the-moods-of-americans/

Maybe I need morning Twitter instead of coffee...

Top 20 Websites No Teacher Should Start the 2010-2011 Year Without

http://mrssmoke.onsugar.com/Top-20-Websites-Teacher-Should-Start-2010-2011-Year-Without-9213932

Good list of Web 2.0 tools

Week 4 - Journal Entry

This week I focused my energy to my online communities - Lumina Foundation Knowledge Collaborative (KC) and Community College/Technical Center MIS (CCTCMIS) Let's Discuss It! Both are related to higher education and relevant to my work. The KC is a multi-state, invitation only community focused on innovation and accountability in higher education. Participants include high level state and institution administrators, well established researchers and education advocacy groups. There are many ongoing discussions ranging from initiatives to increase college access and completion to strategies to improve persistence. Let's Discuss It! is a Sharepoint space, closely related to a wiki, where college MIS administrators discuss common reporting issues. I observed.

I also participated in the discussion board, albeit minimally this week. I worked on the assignment and piddled in Second Life with my daughter.

I want to like Twitter but I still haven't intergrated into my routine.

Week 4 - Post Prompt

How do you judge the value of expertise on the Web? Does it differ from your notion of expertise in face-to-face settings? Why or why not?

Expertise on the Web? Hmm... When my daughter asks me a question that I don't know the answer to I say, "I dunno, why don't you Google it?" I consider the Web a perfectly acceptable method for her to learn about how rainbows are formed or why bugs are attracted to light. I'm not as willing to "Google" questions that arise at work. I know the experts so I seek face-to-face exchange of information. The face-to-face setting facilitates interaction.

In general, I think of the expertise on the Web as being contained within the libraries. Journals and books written by experts in a given field. Materials that are known and available outside the Web. The individuals who contribute content to the Web may be experts but I don't have time to seek them out.

seamless integration

I've been contemplating Web 2.0 in an education context this week rather than exploring more tools (there's so many). The reason Facebook works for many of us is because they have made it so we can seamlessly integrate it into our lives. It doesn't require much work or thought. That's what educators need to do - firgure out ways to use the tools in a way that seems natural and obvious. In order to take root, the integration of Web 2.0 in the learning envrionment needs to be more than just introducing the flavor of the week. With the mass of collaborative, user-driven tools out there, I think there's potential for an educator to be drawn to the coolness of a new technology or tool without really considering how to fully and seamlessly integrate it into the overall instructional design.

Wikis in Higher Education, Part 2

http://en.nursingwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page
This page has been subject to recent vandalism. Please allow some time for it to be repaired.

In my perusing, I landed on the nursing wiki linked above. One aspect of wikis and other open collaboration sites is the potential for inappropriate content to be added.

Wikis in Higher Education

Here's a great resource for using and building wikis - http://www.udel.edu/sakai/training/printable/wiki/Wikis_in_Higher_Education_UD.pdf.

My daughter says...

After seeing that I am blogging, my daughter said with disgust in her voice, "Are you blogging?" I told her that I'm required to blog for class. She thought about it and retorted with "blogging is a waste of time."
Hannah is 9 years old.

We do have something to say...

In reading over the discussion board entries for Tweet, Tweet, it appears that many of us don't Tweet or blog because we don't have that much to say...publicly. What I'm finding from reviewing your blogs and our class wiki is that we do have something to say. I think we just needed this class to get us jump started. Not every post has to be deep, well informed or particularly interesting. :-)

The cloud

I have been hearing about "cloud computing" lately so I decided to check out Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Cloud Computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

The concept seems analogous to Web 2.0.

Week 3 - Post Prompt

What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in your chosen (current or desired) work environment? How would they support learning and/or performance? What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort?

A collaborative wiki would be useful in my work context to plan and track legislative session. There are many people involved - some within my unit and Division and others outside the Division but within the Department. During the months leading up to session, there's a lot of action and deal making. A wiki could help us keep track and colloborate on proposed legislation since we aren't generally in physcial proximity or on the same computer network. Many times emails are lost in overloaded inboxes. The wiki would support the Division and Department's legislative priorities and provide a forum for negotiating language, sharing concerns, and discussing legislator reactions. It could also be used to get information to the folks in the field quickly which is a necessity during session.

Management challenges: There might be management challenges since there are designated liaisons responsible for coordinating activities during session. They might perceive this as a threat to their authority or an indication that they are not meeting expectations.

User challenges: With the numerous "players" in the mix, it might be difficult to coordinate the effort. There might also be individuals resistant to change and/or afraid of new technology. Organization and information management could be a challenge if the original design isn't well conceived.

By George, I think I've got it!

I must admit that I've been slow to conceive of educational applications with Web 2.0 but I just found a really cool blog - http://askatechteacher.wordpress.com/. The Google Earth projects drew me in and I have spent a good 15 minutes down the rabbit hole of this blog. There are links to wikis by grade level. This would be awesome for homeschoolers.

xobni

Does anyone use xobni for organizing Outlook? I'm surfing Web 2.0 - found a cool conference website (http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2010) - and stumbled across xobni. My work email is a catastrophe. It looks like you can also use a gadget to connect Outlook with Facebook and Twitter profiles. AHHH, my head is going to explode!

Week 1 Journal Entry

Week 1 Participation:
1) Reading assignments
2) Web 2.0 exploration on web
3) Created blog
4) Discussion board participation
5) Checked out 5 classmates' blogs
July 5, 2010 5:00 AM

Week 2 Journal Entry

Week 2 participation:
1) Downloaded Shirkey book --- skimmed chapters 1-4, read 5-8
2) Wandered around the class wiki and posted a couple of times, still a little uncomfortable taking control of content
3) Checked out 3 classmates blogs
4) Checked out the class blog but spent more time on the wiki
5) Explored some of the Web 2.0 tools listed on the wiki, including Diigo and knol
6) Checked out the first wiki ever made, according to Shirkey
7) Got overloaded and needed a break
8) Participated in EME6635 Tool Wiki
9) Participated in the Knowledge Collaborative (a Lumina Foundation cross-state collaboration site for higher education issues)
10) Participated in the college registrars discussion board
July 11, 2010 6:06 AM

Do you Ning?

Ning (Facebook alternative): http://blog.ning.com/2010/06/pearson-to-provide-ning-mini-for-free-to-educators.html

Ning Networks have become a valuable complement to many schools and other educational institutions by helping teachers, parents and students supplement class curriculums; allowing educators and administrators to share best practices; and by helping all these groups bring the vitality and vibrancy of their institutions online.
July 6, 2010 5:15 PM

What is produsage?

The terminology is difficult to keep up with - seems like there's a new catchy term every day.

Produser? http://produsage.org/produsage

"...the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement."
July 6, 2010 4:42 PM

Week 2 - Post Prompt

How might the concept of produsage be applied in your life (personal and/or professional) as it stands today? Are you already a produser? If yes, what do you do? If no, why not?

Last week, I responded to the prompt at the beginning of my exploration but I thought I'd wait until the end of the week this time. In the wide scale world of the Internet, I am not a produser. I find it daunting and overly indulgent. I do, however, employ sharing and collaboration strategies within my work context. GoogleDocs and Sharepoint are frequently used for multi-person collaborations.
July 11, 2010 5:44 AM

Week 2

So, I just re-read the syllabus and I need to be sure to get 3 entries in my blog this week. One thing that has always struck me as curious about maintaining a blog is that folks feel like they have enough interesting stuff to say to put it out there in public...routinely. It would drive me nuts - too much pressure. I have to work hard at posting on our discussion boards where the topic has been identified and prompts for discussion provided. Maybe if I follow a few of your blogs, I'll start to get an idea of how it works - make it less scary.

Week 1 - Post Prompt

What have been your prior experiences with Web 2.0 technologies? Do you consider yourself a leader or follower in this realm, or something else altogether? Why? Also, discuss what you hope to get out of this class.
Honestly, I don't know exactly what Web 2.0 technologies are. I guess I need to do this week's reading to find out. I guess blogs and wikis are part of Web 2.0 so I'll go with that assumption. I'm certainly not a leader but I have used both. I don't use Twitter but I am an occassional Facebooker. I am intrigued and I love to learn new stuff. My iPhone has loads of apps but many of them don't get much attention.

I hope to add Web 2.0 to my vocabulary and learn about technologies that I have heard about but not used. I want to find useful tools for school and work. I also want to consider the implications for teaching and learning.