Tech -- Culture -- Humour
After last year’s successful ‘Discover Your Second Life’ session, a number of educators have banded together to organise the first Australian Virtual Worlds Workshop (AVWW).
It’s scheduled for the 28th and 29th November 2008 at Swinburne University in Melbourne. The organising committee are currently calling for participants, so if you’d like to get involved, check the AVWW website.
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I have to admit, I hadn’t understood the weapons in Second Life thing. For me, there were so many gaming worlds around where you can engage in combat that I just didn’t see the point of Second Life weapons.
I spent some time tonight being guided around the showroom floor for the Second Life Combat Expo by its creator, Australian Apollo Case. It then started to dawn on me why weapons are such a big deal in Second Life. There’s the obvious testosterone-laden image side of it, but it’s also another creative outlet. The level of design and scripting with some of the weapons is as complex as anything you’ll find in Second Life. As Apollo Case said during the guided tour, “weapons are a very competitive business, so the people in it need to be very good at what they do”. From my time browsing I don’t doubt there’s some real talent here.
The Expo has two workshops and five product demonstration sessions with at least three products per demo. I was interested in whether any real life weapons manufacturers had explored opportunities in Second Life. Case’s repsonse: “not directly, but I have suspicions a lot are playing around the edges and need their hand held coming into SL”. Then he couldn’t resist saying “and we can do that”.
The expo kicks off Sunday morning east coast Australian time (5pm SL time May 17th).
(Disclosure: Apollo Case is an intermittent advertiser on The Metaverse Journal)
The island touted for SBS may have been shelved, but they are still steaming ahead with their work within Second Life.
A blog has launched on the SBS site with the focus being on helping people to make their own machinima. Documentary-maker Shelley Matulick (SL: Mixin Pixel) is behind the blog and will provide weekly tips.
It’s certainly a hands-on approach for SBS and if the blog delivers on what it’s promising, it’ll be a useful Australian resource on machinima.
The title of this post is the title of a fascinating article, which was recently published in the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AAEC) Journal.
You can get the full-text (PDF) version online by clicking here.
The abstract for the article:
Educational games and simulations can engage students in higher-level cognitive thinking, such as interpreting, analyzing, discovering, evaluating, acting, and problem solving. Recent technical
advances in multiplayer, usercreated virtual worlds have significantly expanded the capabilities of user interaction and development within these simulated worlds. This ability to develop and interact with your own simulated world offers many new and exciting educational possibilities. This article explores the technical capabilities and educational potential of these new worlds. Additionally, it presents and illustrates a model, which uses interaction combinations, to identify course content and topics having educational applications in virtual worlds.
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