Education

I'm not sure how much Amanda Linden enjoys posting on the blog. Amanda is a serious grown up Linden, she's there for corporations and education, I envisage her in a business suit, maybe a little bit of power dressing. I wouldn't imagine her as a furry inworld, more of a business executive with bouncy hair. However whenever Amanda posts on the blog she's greeted not by her target audience, but us lot, who wonder what the heck they're upto now and how much is all this costing.

However one plus point for Amanda is that her blog posts generate lively debate and that is very much the case with the post about the behind the firewall solution being offered by Linden Lab, named "Nebraska" because it will be pancake flat when terraformed....I might have made that bit up! The blog post can be read here.

This is the long awaited behind the firewall standalone solution so that corps can have meetings without someone throwing penises at them right? The promised land of no rude words in search. A place where everybody knows your name because they're your work colleague, indeed you won't even need avaline with this solution because you'll be able to phone your colleague on the internal telephone system and tell them that you've seen them trying to get the jiggly boobs image working via the emerald viewer.
{ Read more }

Step UP! is a campaign centered on a special day of action that everyone can become involved with, and that can empower and inform people about the problem of content theft, and what they can do about it..

We are aiming for a day that draws together action, education and celebration. We want a focus that empowers people and allows them to express their own creativity in a variety of ways. It also draws attention to the strength of feeling that there is here on the grid.

Step UP! Day will be November 5th – Guy Fawkes Day or Bonfire Night in the UK.

Action:
a) On this day – no-one uploads textures to the grid. This should show the economic power of people acting together, without harming content creators. We want Linden Lab to see the power of the feeling about the problem of content theft – and to discuss urgently strategies for tackling it.

b) As many people as possible wear an orange ribbon as a sign of support for creators.

Celebration:
The day ends with parties. Bonfire parties. That means that all around the grid, people have parties.

We're encouraging every club to hold a Step Up! party. We encourage every musician to play Step UP! events. Everyone on the grid has a part to play. Everyone can take part.

Wear the ribbon!  Come to the store and buy the ribbon for 0 L from the Step Up Kiosk.

This is a sign to everyone that you're part of the Step UP! campaign. 

Follow the Blog!
http://stepupsl.wordpress.com/
We'll be sharing news from the campaign - and give you more fun ideas as to how you can be part of the Step UP!

Share the Campaign with friends and customers!

Please to remember the 5th of November - it's Step UP! Day!!!!
One of the ways we want to show our strength is by holding Step UP! Day on November 5th.
{ Read more }

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Educators ever done for us? Oh hold on that's The Romans isn't it!

The Educators aren't currently flavour of the month at the moment in some circles, being blamed as a driving force behind the adult continent move (with no evidence whatsoever) and some of the bad publicity regarding SLCC when they announced they were pulling out (which did have evidence and was extremely churlish of them).

However educators aren't bad people, there's much going on within the world of education. Virtual Worlds are in fashion. However where educators need to take stock is with regard to the community, all of us within the community should be seen as part of their reach. They shouldn't be so immersed within their own project that they don't look outside the front door, in RL of course community relations are key to the success of education.

What do they do however? This is the big question. I briefly popped along to look at the University of Essex International Academy and found myself dumped into the sea. I was greeted with a notecard and when I finally surfaced I discovered huge banlines preventing me from exploration. Not a great start but I decide to carry on regardless.

Next up I went to Princeton, now this was more like it, nice and welcoming but not so much going on. There's a very nice art gallery there though displaying paintings and drawings by Dr Bernd Heinrich. There are quite a few Princeton sims. { Read more }

The question Linden Lab won't answer is "Why not create a G rated continent instead". They have been skirting the answer quite well and evading the question directly but their credibility on this is a matter of diminishing returns everytime they avoid answering it.

However there are issues with a strictly G rated continent as Iggy O points out on the new world notes blog comments about the issue:

"no way I'd want a G-rated continent. Nor would most educators NOW in SL. What the future brings, I don't know. Poe's short-stories would not get a G-rating..."

Which is a fair point, however surely we can have a continent that allows mature discussion but doesn't allow adult content. Educators and discussion groups will often want to discuss mature themes but they don't need to rez examples for the purpose of discussion.

Whenever the issue of zoning has been discussed at Jack Linden's office hour there has been general consensus that this is a good idea, where opinion has been split has been in zoning existing land. The proposed new adult continent fits the zoning of new land idea, but also zones existing land and therein lies the problem. This is a zoning issue and I'm against zoning without consensus.

There are only so many comparisons that can be made between RL and SL, however in RL you will often find adult entertainment near general stores. In busy malls you will find lingerie shops that also sell sex toys, Lapdancing bars will be in city centres, they aren't always pushed into a Red Light District because they're not selling sex, indeed official Red Light Districts are few and far between. { Read more }

Valleywag have an article regarding the end of Second Life in their deathwatch series which is so devoid of news that it seems to me it's more likely Valleywag is on deathwatch than Second Life.

Owen Thomas has some absurd notion that Second Life is only now chasing the education market, which will come as something as a surprise to the numerous education institutions already here.

Valleywag would seem to have run its course if this is the best they can come up with, are they sick of trying to poke fun at Steve Jobs over his health? Do they not have a new angle on Meg Whitman's politics?

Dredging up news about Reuters abandoning ship is hardly breaking news here, it happened last year. Eric Krangel hasn't done badly out of his Second Life presence, but this is all old news.

Valleywag hasn't been the same since it had its facelift and with Owen Thomas as the main poster there it seems even he's running out of angles to try and explore, the joke just isn't funny anymore most of the time. Owen should be more concerned about his own position than that of Second Life, especially when he's pointing out a side of Second Life with regard to the education aspect that has been here for quite some time.

There are reasons to be fearful for the future of Second Life, some of their absurd management decisions (*cough* Openspaces *cough), XStreet making it questionable whether a land presence is required, the global economy, the falling number of islands. However one area that isn't a sign of Second Life being in peril is the use of Second Life for education.

In my day job I work as a waitress in a cocktail bar....hold on that's not right. In my day job I work for an Information Technology department at a college. We have over thirty thousand students.

Now let me tell you why my budget, and I control a budget worth over half a million pounds, will not be spent with Linden Lab despite the many wonderful ways that education can use Second Life as exemplified in the official blog.

First of all the Openspace debacle. I will not spend taxpayers money with a company who act in this fashion. No if's, but's, why's or wherefores. I will risk my personal expenditure, but I will not risk public money with a company who don't know their arse from their elbow in this fashion. A company who don't know how to price their product are not trustworthy partners, a company who refuse to see how their customers use their product are not a trustworthy business partner.

The age issue. I work in a college where we have students as young as fourteen, we also have students aged over eighty. Where would we fit on the grid? Immersive workspaces may offer a solution, but Second Life itself does not. We can't be on a grid that is only eighteen plus, by the same token every single student we have cannot be expected to age verify without an angle of trust, Linden Lab need to trust us to age verify our students.

Technical issues, look we have a three year cycle on computers, we can't and won't upgrade our pc's on a quicker cycle than this. We will not pay extra for fancy graphics cards, if we do that we can't replace our pc's every three years because the cycle gets too expensive. if we were to take a big role within Second Life we'd need our students within the college to be able to access Second Life and with how demanding the client is, this would make life difficult. { Read more }

European marketing chief Clare Linden goes all global on the official blog talking about how the Second Life love has been spread all around the world.

I note, with no surprise, that Clare ignores the globally understood concept of money in her blog. If Linden Lab really want to reach out to the worldwide community they'd do well to realise that a price increase at a time of global financial crisis is a price rise in any language.

Unfortunately due to the new nature of communication, there's no place to respond to Clare's blog post. They haven't even setup a forum post for people to ask Clare for a bear.

I like blogs like this because they are informative. I'd never heard of this sister cities project and now I can go and visit Dublin, San Diego, London, Krakow, Luxembourg! There are also other areas of interest such as the museum of robots. These are the sort of blogs that should be appearing on a regular basis.

I'm still not sure what they're playing at with the blog, Torley should be back on the front page of the blog too, not tucked away inside.

Another useful use of the blog would be to tell us that they've built a new road through a sim I have land in. I mean imagine my surprise when I went to visit a tenant to find a bloody great road through the middle of the sim. Admittedly it's a nice road, indeed it makes the sim look much nicer. { Read more }