August 15, 2007
FYI -
Second Life: Reaching into the Virtual World for Real-World Learning | EDUCAUSE CONNECT
This EDUCAUSE publication should be available to all of us at UM, since it is a member organization. I haven't looked at it yet, but in general I've been pleased with the quality and usefulness of their publications.
Posted by janeblum at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2007
Science and Machinima in Second Life
You've probably heard that the Medical School purchased an island in Second Life earlier this year. Second Life is an immersive virtural world, also known as a MultiUser Virtual Environment or MUVE. It is of interest on campus in part because it has become increasingly prominent in education and commerce.
Lots of folks around campus have been having very interesting conversations about what is happening in Second Life (SL) and what could happen. Along these lines and to aid in these discussions both locally and more widely, the School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries partnered on creating a video of science education and research in SL.
What I would like to point out to readers of this blog is how easy it was for us to do this, compared with making a video normally. For this project, we had three people. The video editor was the only person with any experience having made videos before, and he did not have an account in Second Life. The other two had accounts in SL, but no experience making videos and no knowledge of how to record video from the Second Life application. We decided to make the video at 1pm on Tuesday of this week, and gave a copy to the dean at 3pm on Thursday. In that span of time, our team of 3 learned how to make video in SL (machinima, also known as machine cinema), took lots of video clips, organized them coherently, made an outline of talking points, recorded the voiceover, smoothed transitions, edited pieces into a whole, made several versions to reduce time and help make it more engaging.
Now, if we could do this, as rank newbies, and having only been in Second Life for a couple months each, just imagine what you could do! There is a statistic I've heard (but can't verify) that on the Web about 10% of the people using it also create new content, while in Second Life that ratio is more like 60%. I don't know where that nubmer came from, but the ease of creating new content in this video says something to me about how powerful engagement with Second Life can be.
Without further ado, take a look at what we did, and see what you think. Not bad for newbies, eh?
YouTube: Science Learning Opportunities in Second Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc
Posted by pfa at 11:44 AM | Comments (1)
June 01, 2007
Web 2.0 and Television
Someone at work was raving today about Zatoo, one of the new Web 2.0 approaches to television. Yes, really -- you can watch television on your computer, tag your favorite choices, see what other people watch who like the same shows you do, and all the regular web 2.0 interactions. Zatoo isn't the only one, either. I've been hearing buzz about Joost and Bablegum as well, and there are probably others.
What John liked best about Zatoo wasn't the social aspects, though -- it was watching international news shows, and seeing how the same news events are reported differently in different places. You see, because these TV aggregators online are often collecting different channels than what you might see on local cable options. For example, a lot of Zatoo's content comes from European sources.
If you want to check out this idea further, here are a few links.
SOURCES:
Babelgum: http://www.babelgum.com/
blip.tv: >a href="http://blip.tv/">http://blip.tv/
Joost (Beta): http://joost.com/
Zatoo: http://zattoo.com/
MORE INFO:
AdministerIT: Internet TV: Zatoo and Joost (beta): http://winmaclin.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/internet-tv-zatoo-and-joost-beta/
Ghacks.net: Say Goodbye to Joost and Babelgum, here comes Zattoo: http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/08/say-goodbye-to-joost-and-bablegum-here-comes-zattoo/
Watching TV Online: http://www.textually.org/tv/
Posted by pfa at 08:45 PM | Comments (1)
May 11, 2007
Want to Find More Web 2.0?
Posted by pfa at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)
More Web 2.0 Tools & How They Can Be Used
Linked In - job hunting, address book, mailing lists, client contacts, consulting referrals ...
Twitter - quick answers to quick questions; highly interactive (but goegraphically separate) professional community; remote personal trainer; health counseling & tracking ...
Slideshare - presentation archiving and sharing; quick preparation for a presentation; models of good presentations ...
Zoho Show - collaborative presentation development; simple webcasting; remote job interview or consultancy presentations ...
Google Docs / Zoho Writer - collaborative development of documents / training manuals / policies & procedures / vision statements / best practices ...
Wikis (CTools [UM], PBWiki, WetPaint) - archiving consensus knowledge on a specific domain or topic; everything listed in the Google Docs section; teamwork; project planning; project management; development of consensus statements / documents; class projects ...
Posted by pfa at 06:33 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2007
More Web 2.0 Tools: Flickr, Slideshare, Zoho Show
There are a lot of other useful Web 2.0 tools. I've been using a number of them in creating this site. Up to this point, I've a few hours across a couple of days in assembling this information as the web site.
Using the blog as a web development tool has been a great help. The University of Michigan Libraries are providing MBlog as a platform for all faculty, staff, and students.
Within the blog framework, I have used Flickr to manage the screenshots and pictures, and I've used Slideshare to manage the presentation files I wanted to show you.
Both Flickr and Slideshare allow you to load your files (images or presentations) into an online account. There are usually free versions of the service to start with, and then you have the option of paying for an upgrade to the account to provide more services and options. Both Flickr and Slideshare also make it really easy for you to use whatever you have in their service in your blogs and web pages, and they even provide you with the code! For this class blog, I loaded the screenshots or presentation files, clicked through to the screen that gave me the code, copied it and pasted it into the blog editing window. Pretty simple.
Here is another presentation file that talks a bit about how to use Flickr and Slideshare, and gives some other productivity tips for using these.
Posted by pfa at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)