Building in Second Life

Building in SL is probably one of its greatest features. While building is a frustrating skill to learn, once you master the basics, almost anything is possible. This was really emphasized when we were playing primtionary in class.

Since this is my second time learning about building in SL, I'm feeling more confident about my building abilities. Enough so that I thought I should embrace building and use it to model something I'm thinking about building in real life. Something that I've been trying to design recently is cake for my sister's baby shower. On the invitations, there's a pictures of a bear and an umbrella, and I wanted to try recreate that on the cake. While there are many ways to achieve this, I had difficulty imagining it in my mind, and drawing it on paper. When I switched to building it in SL, it amazing how much clearer it is, and I can see why this would be such a powerful learning tool.

Ultimately I probably will not use this design, but check it out in the picture below:

Searching in Second Life

For our annotated list assignment, I began with reviewing some of the landmarks I created previously with hopes of finding some that would work. As I was going through them, I realized that while some of them had stayed completely the same and others had moved to another island. When you create a landmark, it's truly just a physical landmark that doesn't follow an organization when they move to a new island. I think that'd be a great feature or script that would allow this. Since everything is virtual, I wonder if this increases the likelihood for sims to move and change.

Aside from checking out new sims, and definitely some really cool ones, something I greatly appreciated was the learning how to search within Second Life. I first started with using keyword searches within SL and keyword searches in Google, and had some very poor results. The majority of the things that I found were completely unrelated or sometimes returned with no results. It was frustrating, but eventually I started using the SL Destination Guide and searching by category. I find it ironic that some of the keyword searches were the same as the categories in the SL Destination Guide and that I didn't get the same results. If perhaps SL could improve their search results, perhaps it would lead to a greater transparency and sharing of resources.

Building and Readings

In my last post, I discussed how different the layout of the SL View 2.0. I'm quite glad that the building menu remains unchanged. While I have built in SL before, I think it would have been quite painful to have to learn something else. This way, I can concentrate on improving my building skills, and perhaps actually become good at it. It is quite amazing how quickly I forgot how to do simple things like remove the color of a prim so that the texture doesn't have any color tint.

In the readings for Session 3, one of the articles focused the presence of Universities present in SL and discussed their methods of how they actually found them. Me, being the nosey person that I am, decided to put their methods to the test. I know for a fact that both UH and CSULA use SL in their courses so I checked to see whether or not they would be listed. My results were interesting. In the simteach.com I found that CSULA was listed but UH was not. I also found that on the SL educator list, UH was listed and CSULA wasn't. Since neither of these sources contained both schools, it makes wonder how do you accurately find all educators? Are these lists managed by anyone? Or does it require the school to contact the owners to be added to the list? I think that these are important issues to consider for future academic work in the topic of universities in SL.

Now for some randomness, it's always great to see how much taking classes and course discussions affect your point of view. Just reading the articles, I find that I pick up things that I would have simply glossed over before. One of the articles included a piece about inter-rater reliability. This is a topic that was discussed in 606, as the article utilized qualitative methods. Either in the same article or the other, they discussed the presence of games in SL. Gaming in virtual worlds is exactly what my group was working earlier this year with our game revolved around Kimo. After reading this, it encourages me to revist Kimo and perhaps continue development.

Second Life Revisited

I first became involved with using Second Life (SL) while completing a course for my Masters in early 2009. At my peak, I was able to do some basic building, and attempted basic scripting, though I was never really good at it. When I started this class this Fall, I was quite surprised to the see that the user interface had changed quite a bit.

While all the essentially functions and abilities were maintained in the new viewer, key things like the pie menu had been taken out. While it wasn't necessarily the best tool, it was familiar to me and was something that I was accustomed to see. Something else that had changed, was the inventory. The inventory was now embedded in some menu buttons on the side of the screen. I like this change since it makes the screen less cluttered. Something I really miss, is the ability to quickly jump between the public chat and private messages. When the viewer was changed, these functions were no longer bundled together, and now exist in completely separate windows. If anyone knows shortcuts, or ways to mimic the old style, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm glad that we had an overview of all the SL controls, since it helped me to catch up!

Flour Power

After a tedious video shooting, and countless hours spent editing, Flour Power has officially been born. Check it out!



Let me know what you think, and if I should keep it up! Enjoy!

Vlog & youtube

These days, I seem to be inspired by articles written in the LA Times. This time they had written about the prevalence of cooking videos there are online. According to the article, there's a huge range in the quality of videos from amateurs like me, to those who claim to be at the professional level. The timing of this article could not be any more perfect. I think I mentioned it in a previous post, but I've been working on a cooking video entitled Flour Power. Ideally, I think it'd be great if Flour Power was a series of cooking tips or recipes, but the way it's shaping up, it's too time consuming. A 5 hour shoot turned into 30 minutes of footage, which will be no more than 5 minutes when it's published. Although cutting down the footage to 5 minutes is the most frustrating part of the process, ideally the video shouldn't be much longer. How many people would actually sit around and keep watching? Perhaps I'm just selling myself short, but I think a lot of it would just depend on the response that I get from people. Once I have finished editing it, I'll post the link up for those who are interested in watching. In case I don't post it here, it will definately be posted on my other blog.

Anyway, getting back to the original topic of the article and videos, I know cooking shows have been around forever, but I can't help but think that this recent boom in the number of videos being posted is related to youtube, and other similar sites. Youtube has every other way for people to express themselves, why not food? Food is so expressive. You can see the amount of time and effort people put into creating it, not to mention the way it's presented. The more I think/write about food, the more I feel like I should pursue cooking more seriously.

If it weren't for my video class this quarter, I wouldn't have noticed so many things. It's been the launching point for so many things - youtube, cooking, Flour Power, and my niece's birthday slide show. I am so grateful for having taken this class, and I hope to continue to refine my editing skills and purchase a video camera.

SGVCUE Technology Fair

San Gabriel Valley Computer Using Educators (SGVCUE) put together a technology conference this past weekend. Being that this was my first conference since I stopped teaching full time, I hoped that I would learn new tools and give more insight about what it is I'm studying to become, a technology coordinator.

Overall, the conference was like any other, a mix of the good and the bad. There were phenomenal presenters, those who were unprepared, presentations that were enhanced with a hands on piece, and those that were hindered because of technological problems. My morning began with a double session on Pixie 2. I think that this software is truly aimed for students K-3. Beyond those grade levels, I fear that some of the students would find the program to babyish. For the appropriate grade levels, it has great potential to enable students to illustrate their work through technology, as well as having some publishing capabilities. The presenter showed numerous books that she created using Pixie which look great. I wish that the computers were working properly, (they executed actions at the pace of a snail!) so that I could have gotten a better feel for the program.

Our keynote speaker was Ted Lai, who is noted for being an Apple Distinguished Educator. I really loved his speech as he related integrating technology to Disney. He encouraged that we need to makes students live, love, and thrive in education. One way that he suggested to engage students is to cross promote. I feel like this is exactly what I'm going to be doing for my final video project this fall. In my video, I'm going to be linking it back to a food blog that I'm starting with my roommate. By me making that simple hyperlink to the food blog here in my technology blog, it is a great example of cross promoting. I'm so excited about this project and I hope that it comes out well.

The second session that I attended focused on Google Earth. I heard about Google earth a while back, as a means to plot the whole world. I even downloaded it recently so that I could have a picture of the earth for a flash animation that I'm working on. Anyway, the application of Google Earth, is for Google Lit Trip. Through literature, you plot the paces the character go so that students can get a sense of where the story's taking place as well as the distance that they're covering. In addition to simply plotting the places, comprehension questions can also be linked to the plots. I think that's probably one of the greater benefits to using Google Lit Trips. Supposedly there are supposed to be ways to use Google Lit Trips for other subjects but the presenter didn't give further examples.

Lastly, the final presentation that I attended was regarding using video to for Digital Storytelling. Although I am in a video class this semester, I found that the information that was presented wasn't redundant. Rather than focusing on taking raw video footage, it was focused on using still images, creating thought provoking titles and slogans. By doing this, it makes creating a video project more manageable to for students as more emphasis is placed on conveying the information, rather than the shoot.

Overall, the conference was very informational. I think that if the quality of some the presentations could be equaled to that of others, it would improve immensely and possibly attract more educators to join CUE or attend the workshops. Lastly, in nearly every presentation they kept pushing Macs and Apple products. They always say that imovie and the like are easier to use. It makes me wonder if it was a mistake to buy a PC again, and if should have bought a Mac too...