Here’s a preview:
After a winter hiatus, State of Play Academy is back in session with an exciting new series of forums touching on a number of legal and legally-related topics ranging from Public Disclosure and the Fourth Amendment to Election 2008 and the Remix Culture. Sessions will run through June 8. Times for each class are different, […]
I’m tardy in reporting two MUVE-related developments. First is that Prof. Nesson’s (Eon Berkman) has continued to experiment in Second Life by hosting mock trials, or cyber trials. Nesson observed that one of the major features/limitations of Second Life — use of text chat rather than speech — presents certain advantages when exploited creatively. Nesson […]
About a week ago, Prof. Pete Fitzgerald of Stetson Law School dropped me a line inquiring about using Second Life to offer his first-year Contracts students to engage in what I might dub “legal anthropology.” The fact that Linden Labs was now processing millions of dollars of transactions caught Pete’s eye, and he realized that […]
The ideas presented at the State of Play session on education this past Saturday triggered a realization that online/computer simulations add the most value as compared with traditional teaching methods when: The subject is best learned through role-playing The subject must be modeled using complex data and formulae The subject is amenable to learning through […]
State of Play Session MP3 (large!) Below are raw-text notes I took at the education session at State of Play. I’ll write something more coherent when I catch some time. At right you can see Becca and me participating in our own ad-hoc backchannel via Berkman Island. Doug: transferability. Games as terrible environments, not for […]
I’m here at the State of Play / Terra Nova Symposium at New York Law School. Sadly I missed yesterday’s proceedings, but today’s lineup is also exciting, particularly the 11:15 session on virtual worlds and education. I have to say in comparison with other similar conferences I’ve attended in the past, it’s a bit disappointing […]
I’ve been working on a tutorial for State of Play Academy showing instructors what to expect and giving some tips. (I lack mastery of my video editing tools, so don’t ask me why there’s so much empty space around it.) It’s a snippet of a text chat that’s taking place among three course participants during […]
Last Thursday I had the opportunity to lead a lecture/discussion in Second Life for CyberOne-Extension about relationships, networks, and how to build relationships through one-to-ones. The night before I had attended a training by Milosun Czervik on behalf of the SL Library Group on presentation tools available in SL. I picked up some really useful tools at the Milosun’s presentation, most notably a chatfeeder (works like a teleprompter — you pre-write the talk and press a button to “speak” each line from the text) and AngryBeth’s whiteboard…
WBUR ran a story yesterday morning on the use of virtual reality software/hardware to train surgeons. See Simulating Surgery (RealMedia format). The story describes various efforts to institute practical, hands-on, but simulated training for operations that would otherwise be possible only in actual, life-threatening situations. Because surgery is a kinetic skill, the simulations necessarily involve a combination of software and hardware, although more and more of it is moving into the software side with virtual reality technology.
