Here’s a few pictures from the excellent presentation on "Virtual Environments as ways to Reorganize Thinking about Research and Education" that Dr John Bransford, education psychology specialist affiliated with the National Science Foundation, gave today in Second Life. The complete transcript of the event can be found here. You can view the video shown during…
Avatars and humans stand up against poverty
In my previous job, I was responsible for promoting civil society activity on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a set of development targets agreed to by the governments of the world in 2000 at the UN General Assembly. It’s an important list of commitments to combat some of worst social ills — including poverty,…
Salon on the Net Neutrality and the “telecom slayers”
There’s a couple of nice quotes from my colleague Ben Scott, policy director at the media reform group Free Press, in a Salon.com story on Net Neutrality entitled "The Telecom Slayers": In his Capitol Hill office, Scott keeps a small framed photo from the movie "Cool Hand Luke." It is the famous scene where…
Get your SL events posted on New World Notes!
I’m excited to report that I’ll be contributing to the pre-eminent blog on all things Second Life "New World Notes" run by the intrepid embedded journalist, Hamlet Au. Specifically, I’ll be covering the "events of the week" section, helping point residents to interesting and fun happenings that they might want to participate in. More info…
Monday cuteness: Tina and Ike
My girlfriend has sweetly brought over two six-week-old kittens for me to foster for a couple of weeks until they can be properly adopted. We’ve christened them Tina and Ike, with Ike obviously being the more aggressive one and Tina more touchy-feely. They are about the perfect size for cat juggling, but aren’t good for…
Oh Lord Philip forgive me…
What the hell am I doing (T)here?
Virtual memorial to domestic violence victims
In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, real life women’s legal advocate Ziolla Magpie will be launching a “Silent Witness” display on October 1 to create awareness of the victims of domestic violence around the United States. The installation features a ring of sillouettes with word bubbles containing various statistics about domestic violence in different…
Cisco:virtual environments help education, video-conferencing doesn’t
Cisco has conducted a meta-study of education technology entitled “Technology in Schools: What the Research Says." Produced by Cisco Systems and the Metiri Group, the report summarizes general trends and representative studies in areas such as television and video use, calculators, engagement devices such as interactive whiteboards, portable or handheld devices, virtual learning, in-school computing,…
Virtual Non-profits: Profile of Boomer Esiason Foundation
A couple of months ago I did a popular "Second Life Do-gooders" tour of how various non-profits were setting up shop in the virtual world. I focused on non-profits featured in the Tech Soup non-profit HUD, which the Tech Soup folks had recently launched. I neglected to visit one of the featured groups though, the…
Dr. John Bransford talks on using virtual environments for education on Oct 2
Folks in the Second Life education list tell me this event is a super-big deal. Dr John Bransford, education psychology specialist affiliated with the National Science Foundation will be speaking on "Virtual Environments as ways to Reorganize Thinking about Research and Education" on October 2 in Second Life. Here’s the complete description from the Learning…