Blogs

I've created this blog (hosted by NC State's WolfBlog service) to document my experiences, thoughts and activities related to my work at NC State University.

For a month or so a number of select users were testing the voice chat in the beta grid. As of 5:38pm PDT on 3/28/07, that option is not open to everyone. You can find details by going here:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/03/28/voice-beta-live/

So - is voice in Second Life a good thing?

Many of us have gotten used to new habits developed due to needed to type conversations. There has been a whole etiquette developed surrounding this process. In fact, some of my non-education friends are very against voice chat.

I believe there is good use for voice chat - teaching, groups, etc.... But walls and ceilings don't stop sound in Second Life. So, right now, if someone is having a conversation with 20m of you, you "see" it, even though you are not part of it. Once voice chat comes in, you will be able to "hear" it as well.

One friend reported a trip to the beta grid where she was outcast and ignored by a group who were chatting because she would not use the voice chat. She said they were downright hostile.

Granted, that might have been an isolated incident, but it is likely that voice chat could segregate the SL community. I would not be surprised if the ability to use voice chat becomes an item in private SIM covenants.

Based on a conversation on the CIO list, a group of us got involved in Second Life (SL) just after the new year. The discussion started out asking how it was being supported, if at all, but it quickly turned to SL as a teaching and learning tool. The AcademicCIO group was formed and has met three times. I've also heavily invested my time in creating The Center for Learning in a Virtual Environment, which we refer to simpy as The Center.

I'm also doing research for a number of things I'm working on that are related to SL, a couple of them can be cross posted to items here. One of the things I've noticed is that there are a lot of people blogging about this - and I read many of their blog entries. So at a meeting last night in SL, somone asked me why I wasn't blogging about my experience in SL. I didn't have an answer.

So here it is.

I hope to use this blog as a sounding board, as a scratch pad, as a journal, and as a way of listening to and reaching out to, others. Feel free to comment - not only do I encourage it, I'm counting on it.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on project communication tools!  As
we have been researching tools and recommendations, the institutional needs
for these systems has started growing.  In addition to project management we
are wondering about how collaboration tools can also meet communication
needs within our department:

• as a repository for documentation (how to install...)
• to provide an overview of what is going on in the department (this
• week...this month)
• as a place where all the bits of information can be brought together into
• a big snapshot

I have no expectations that technology will provide us with the sole
solution to improving communication and workflow, but I¹d really like to
hear more ideas and stories about how other institutions are effectively
using collaboration applications.  We narrowed down our list of possible
solutions to four:  mediaWiki, drupal, typepad and Teams.

And since drupal consolidates many kinds of content (wiki, blog, RSS, etc.)
we felt that it was the product most worth looking at.  Yeah...simple,
right? 

During my recent stay in Singapore, I was reminded yet again of the ways in which the use of new technologies tends to highlight differences in national and social values. Like Australia, Singapore is currently beset by a moral panic surrounding young people’s use of online gaming. But the Singaporean response has differed significantly from that of its Pacific neighbour.

In December 2006, the local Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, reported that a teenager had been arrested and sentenced to early military service for illegally accessing a neighbour’s unsecured wireless network. The boy’s parents, concerned by their son’s moodiness and declining academic performance, had decided that he was spending far too much time on gaming. Enough was enough: they unplugged the household modem. The boy’s response was to take his laptop outside one evening, wandering round the neighbourhood until he found an unsecured wireless network to tap into. There he was discovered by a neighbour, who confronted him and then called the police after the boy allegedly became aggressive. Then on January 17 2007, the newspaper ran a follow-up story: ‘Is there a gaming addict in your home’? The way in which one family’s issue was used to feed existing concerns about online gaming in Singapore, and to create an impression of gaming as a runaway social issue, was telling.