Snacks4theBrain!

At the request of my wonderful Center for Science Outreach Director Dr. Virginia Shepherd and with the blessing of School for Science and Math Director Dr. Glenn McCombs, a dozen or so staff and faculty from both institutions gathered for an hour in the School’s classroom on the Vanderbilt University campus to witness my best shot at explaining why I think Second Life (and by extension Virtual Worlds) have a great deal to offer for teaching and learning.

I started off by welcoming the assembled and introducing a guest, Digital Collections Archivist at the Vanderbilt University Library, and archivist for its DiscoverArchive.

Then I proceeded a bit unconventionally (no, not moi!) by viewing most of the ten minute ISTE in Second Life video that describes how that 85,000 member International Society for Technology in Education built a virtual community (of over 4,000 members, at current count) inside the 3D platform of Second Life, after which I launched into my Powerpoint presentation. True to Murphy’s Law, I failed to hit record on my little Olympus voice recorder until we were discussing the Peggy Sheehy slide, so I will append this dialog to the beginning of my very first “Slidecast” at Slideshare.net. This’ll be a long ‘un, so take from it what you will, and my hope is that it remains as a resource for innovative educators for a good while to come.

NEW! Here’s the Slidecast RIGHT HERE!

I’ll also be glad to travel with this show or one like it, upon delivery of a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills (just kidding).

Okay, if you want the full experience, visit the link to the ISTE video in the Episode 80 blog post at blogs.vanderbilt.edu/s4theb and watch it, then pop on into the slidecast. Settle back with a bowl of popcorn and let the ‘cast cast it’s spell.

THE LOST NARRATION

I believe that there are two kinds of people: 1) the kind who say there are two kinds of people, and 2) the others. I hope I am in set number 2. That said, I have in recent years noticed a clear dichotomy in the world between people who readily latch onto the value and potentials of online Virtual Worlds and those who pretty much refuse to entertain the possiblilty. There is also, thankfully, a broad spectrum in between those two camps. Hopefully, sharing this with you will help you sort things out for yourself and your school or business.

There is more text in this presentation than I would like there to be, but I include it because it’s important. Feel free to multitask as you will by reading as I’m blabbering.

TechTipTidbit comes to you via the COMPUTER TIP OF THE WEEK from Dr T — RTemlak4dds@aol.com, in turn by permission from the CompletelyFreeSoftware online newsletter.

Finally, the lovely music that plays you out of the episode is from master guitarist David Modica, courtesy of Magnatune.com (”We are not evil!”) and just one of the absorbing tracks on his beautiful CD, available at Magnatune, “Acoustic Earth, Electric Sky.” Thanks, David!

Download S4theB! episode 80 here!

Welcome to Episode 76, reporting out the November meeting of the Vanderbilt Web Spiders. There’s so much going on at Vanderbilt that I wonder if we’ll ever run out of topics for S4theB? Could that ever happen? I doubt it, Monty!

Case in point: Every month or so a group of 25-50 people who are interested in the Internet get together somewhere on Vanderbilt’s campus to share thoughts with one another. In the words of fearless leader Melanie Moran, Associate Director of the Vanderbilt News Agency, “Vanderbilt Web Spiders is a group of people interested in Web development from across Vanderbilt University that meets once a month to share ideas, identify needs, and ask and answer questions of each other about the latest and greatest in Web use and development.” Ms. Moran maintains a website at vanderbilt.edu/spiders which elaborates, “The Web has revolutionized the way Vanderbilt communicates with the world, and the number of people developing Web sites at Vanderbilt has exponentially increased. The Web Developer Group was started to provide a forum for networking, sharing, and learning. Anyone who is a member of the Vanderbilt community — student, faculty, or staff — can join the group. There are no dues.

Web Spiders meet for one hour each month, with topics ranging from browser compatibility to content management systems. We also have an email listserv where members can get meeting notices and post questions or tips for other web developers on campus.

Web Spiders archives an audio podcast for those who can’t make the meeting and I got permission from Ms. Moran to excerpt from that for this episode of s4theb. If you want to listen to the entire meeting you can get on over to http://blogs.vanderbilt.edu/spiders and do so, but I thought it’d be of service to post a bit from each of the three mini-presentations I got to participate in, including one from me about Education in Second Life. That day I shared a little video of the new Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach presence in Second Life, located on Lighthouse Learning Island, and the video can be accessed at blogs.vanderbilt.edu/s4theb, in today’s shownotes.

Let’s get into some music first, then I’ll share from PodSpiders! Since at least a portion of my shareout this episode certainly heralds a “new age,” let’s just stay with the “New Age” theme. I use a portion of Adam Fielding’s wonderful song “Traveling Light” from from his cd, Distant Activity, available for purchase and download at Magnatune.com, and then play you all out with another of his songs, this one a vocal entitled “Nostalgia.” I love his innovative rhythms and cadences, and I will reference him again, I’m sure.

I think that for brevity we’ll only share out two brief portions of presentations at the Web Spiders meetup. The first is from the Director of the Vanderbilt News Archive, John Lynch The Vanderbilt News Archive is an online-searchable database and collection of video recordings collected since 1968, find out more about it at tvnews.vanderbilt.edu. Mr. Lynch talked for around 20 minutes and I want to share a portion of his engaging chat from somewhere around its middle. Mr. Lynch shared a particularly amusing set of news spots from NBC News about one Buster Lee Blevins, then got all techie with us with some explanations about some of the things we saw in them.

I also share a portion of my piece, Education in Second Life, and lead you out with another tasty treat from Adam Fielding, master of new age ambience. Go listen, purchase, and download Adam’s indie music at magnatune.com.

Download S4theB! 76 here!

Finally, here’s the slideshare from my Web Spider’s shareout. You can visit slideshare for a larger display, and all the links are hot as hot can be!

Are you a teacher? Visit the ISTE Educators’ Portal online to get started in Second Life! See ya next time!!!

Hey, ya’ll,

Welcome to episode number 75 of Snacks4theBrain! The featured snack this episode is audio from a talk I gave to Vanderbilt University faculty and staff by invitation from the “Digital VU” series from the Vanderbilt News and Media department. The title of the offering was “Engaging Podcast Content” and it featured a sideshow I put up at slideshare, so if you’re of a mind you can visit blogs.vanderbilt.edu/s4theb and follow along whilst you listen. Oh heck, let’s embed it below

The music this episode is a treat, at least for me; and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. It’s two songs delivered recently from a dear friend who recorded them in December of 1975 at a venue called the “Bread Factory.” Geoff Feiler, my good good friend, sat out front with a boombox and what you hear is what he heard, two guys with aggressive acoustic guitar styles and darned decent, well-practiced harmonies. You’ll also hear folks chatting over dinner in the small vegetarian restaurant that was the Bread Factory. It was a very hot spot in Anchorage, and I had been playing every Wednesday night for 75 dollars and tips. When Scott Miller came up to be with his betrothed, who was the owner of the restaurant, we hooked up and started rehearsing for fun. We liked what we made together, and we had a good run for a while performing for the folk music-loving denizens of 1975 Anchorage. Years later, when I was in Juneau (where Scott and Debbie had moved to open the “Fiddlehead Fern” restaurant there, Scott and I had a blast opening a church-venue show for Elizabeth Cotton, the 93 year-old creator of the folk classic “Freight Train,” which she played for us that night, finger-picking her classic holding her guitar upside-down and backwards, the way she’d taught herself decades earlier. Scott H. Miller, by the way, has a fabulous CD for sale at CDBaby!

The podcast’s songs are from Aztec Two Step and John Prine. I don’t know the first folks, but I do know John and I sincerely hope he’ll forgive my cover of his Rocky Mountain Time. I like the way I sing “saxophone.” Here it is.

I follow up the podcasting session with “Scott and Scott’s” cover of “Highway Song,” by Aztec Two-Step, Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman. This great duo took their name from an Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem and we definitely found much inspiration from their tight harmonies and beautiful thought-provoking lyrics. If you like the song, please visit aztectwostep.com and buy some of their music. Unlike “Scott and Scott,” they’re still going strong with their music. I’ll not say goodbye after, just get you on your way from this, episode number 75, of Snacks4theBrain!

Download episode 75 here!

Links:
Notice about the session on the Vanderbilt website

My blogpost that contains the slideshare slideshow

The slideshare slideshow

Scott H. Miller’s fantastic CD, “Letters to Myself”

Greetings, Snackers!

For the week of July 21 through July 24 (that would be the first four days of that week), I helped six incredibly wonderful public school teachers (a broad range of grade levels in Metro Nashville Public Schools) dip their learning toes into the rapid-running river of dialog and information that is Web 2.0.

In a reprise/refinement of the week-long workshop I crafted and delivered for teachers at my own school last year, we spent our time looking at blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, micro-blogging, and VOIP/videoconferencing. The last half of the last day we spent in Second Life, the online virtual 3D metaverse that is becoming the “go-to” place for 24/7 online personal/professional networking. Our heads were spinning around by the end of each day, and one great upshot of it all may be a full four weeks of this kind of intense learning and exploration for teachers next summer.

While that remains to be seen, there’s matter herein that remains to be heard! Pop on over to your favorite podcast aggregator, or click here to download episode 73. Wait! You have another option! Click “Links” in the topbar and open up our very own Podcast Pickle Player and you can listen right here whilst you surf the Web for those cool shoes you’ve been shopping for.

Stay on through the very end of the episode: Blues-rocker Chris Juergensen’s band “Big Bad Sun” has a great song for you, “Sweet Melissa,” and no, it’s not a cover of the Allman Brothers’ classic!

As a bit of a bonus, I’d like to embed a brief chat we held during the workshop with the founder of the premier professional learning network (”social” network?) focused on Web 2.0 for education, “Classroom 2.0.” Here is our talk with Steve Hargadon (thanks, Steve!):


Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0


Links:
VUCSOWeb20forUS! wiki
Jeff Agamenoni’s “From Mr. A to Mr. Z” blog
Skype
Twitter
Magnatune.com
Classroom 2.0

Hello and welcome to S4theB episode 68! This episode steps out of the box and into the virtual world of Second Life. I’m going to take you, dear listener, into the metaverse.

Second Life is a computer-facilitated world, yes, a world, and as such its content embraces more than virtual play, virtual music, virtual art, and virtual anything-else-you-can-name. I’m not going to attempt to define it, because you just have to go see it yourself. If you’re over the age of 18 you may do so at secondlife.com, and if you’re in the 13 through 17 age group, the place for you is teen.secondlife.com, where no one over the age of 17 is allowed without a thorough FBI-style background check.

Second Life is just one of dozens of versions of parallel realities being developed by companies who are convinced that the 3Di, or the 3 Dimensional internet, represents to our global culture a development as profound and innovative as the invention and adoption of the web browser. This week, for example, I’m taking part in a “What’s Missing?” summit, two days of exploration by invited participants inside IBM’s ActiveWorlds, the men in blue’s version of parallel reality. Over 350 educators and businesspeople have registered to discuss the future of the 3Di and its “leveraging for learning.”

I’ve been exploring Second Life for going on three years now. Since its launch in 2003, the science-fiction inspired brainchild of Phillip Rosedale, former Chief Technology Officer of RealNetworks (see this interview at Inc.com), Second Life has seen millions of users from every continent on the rw (that’s “real world”) earth, at least login and try it. A useful piece of data is the actual logins at any time. Right this minute, as I type this script at SL time (US Pacific–the servers hosting SL are housed in San Francisco, CA) 4:37, there are, let’s see: 40,705 “residents” online at this very minute. That’s a number featured on the login page at the SL website at secondlife.com.

How would you like that many people in your store?

Well, it’s not actually a store, though it is literally full of places to spend (and earn) real money. The Linden Exchange offers daily metrics about demographics and economics, where I see that that at this writing the average rate of exchange for Lindens to Dollars yesterday was 268.15 Lindens to the dollar. The actual rate of exchange held stable at 265 L$ per $ and there were, get this, 73,382,620 Lindens exchanged. I’m no math genius so I break out my Windows calculator to do the math: that looks like 24,460,873 US dollars exchanged. Saturday, Feb. 16, 2008. Yesterday. In one day. Let me say that again. 24,460,873 US dollars exchanged.

Still thinking this isn’t an important phenomenon?

Let’s look at some demographics–

Last Updated: Thursday, February 14, 2008
Reflects data through midnight, February 13.

——————————————————————————–
Population
Residents Logged-In During Last 7 Days 487,746
Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days 648,681
Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days 935,326
Residents Logged-In During Last 60 Days 1,369,715
Total Residents 1 12,470,805

I begin our little tour by using SL’s search feature, clicking on the “Places” tab, and entering the term “science.” After a brief moment as the data does its data thing, I am rewarded with 76 returns on my query. The SL search engine orders its results by traffic, or how many avatars have spent at least 5 minutes in its virtual space, it’s “sim” (short for simulator). Ranking returns in this way gives and off-the-cuff indication of how popular a location is. Let’s just look at the top 5 of these today, and you can go in and explore for yourself anytime!

Sorting through the search results I see that the top returns are a mix of legitimate science sites, some of which I’ve never visited, and commercial sims that have most likely manipulated their traffic to appear high in the search results. Ignoring those, I visit in this episode two of the top 5 results, the College of Scripting, Music, and Science and Elon University, “a sandbox for science and math education, a charter member of the SciLands, and home of the Apollo 11 moon sim.” Come with me as I discover these two science resources and add them to my growing list of places to revisit in Second Life. Of particular interest is the simulation at Elon that strives to educate its visitors about our Carbon Emissions footprints!

By the way, NPR’s popular Science Friday is also hosted live in Second Life. I’ve been to one of these inworld and wow, take a look at the number of avatars present for this one!

After this podcast was boxed and ready to publish, I revisited Elon and took in the Apollo 11 build. There’s a video of that experience, sort of a little bonus for blog readers (heck, you deserve something for getting this far!), located at the Second Life video social network at http://sleducation.ning.com.

Music this episode is from our friends at Magnatune, where internationally renowned independent musicians offer you their music for a price you may set yourself! We have a Dutch percussionist and a Slovakian bassist for you today, just to keep the global them a’runnin’.

Listen to S4theB! episode number 68 here, or click “Links” above and use the Podcast Pickle Player to listen whilst you continue your other 2D internet work or play!

Hey, ya’ll,

This episode features a chat I was lucky enough to facilitate this past month, July 2007, between participants of a workshop I offered for teachers at my school (University School of Nashville) and educational change advocate David Warlick. David blogs an immensely popular site called 2cents worth and hosts an educational podcast called connect-learning. The workshop participants used a blog and a wiki to archive their learning about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the service of our children’s learning. These are packed with information so I highly encourage you to check them out and use anything you find for your own classroom. Also feel free to comment below if you should have any questions or require further info!

David has some impressively interesting things to share. I particularly like his first quality of Web 2.0 education: “Information should be participatory and inclusive.” Think about that for a minute, and if you’re anything near my own age, think about how your own schooling may or may not stand up to that principle. And what about his second quality, the one that offers a place for teachers in this brave new world, that “Education is leader-directed,” or his third, that it’s “people-connecting.” Listen to what David Warlick has to say about all of those qualities and then draw your own opionions. Again, feel free to comment at the end of this post.

I’ve brought a little music to this show in the form of a melody I worked out on a McNally Strumstick, a little three stringed instrument that was given to my son recently. It’s called “Allaboutme” and it underscores the podcast’s introduction. I also share a little mandolin ditty of mine called “Emma and Miranda are in China,” and I end the show with a song from a new compilation CD from Magnatune.com. The album’s called The Art of Persuasion, and it’s overbrimming with romantically seductive ear candy that is only available at magnatune.com. WE ARE NOT EVIL…

The sound quality of the interaction is not the best, but it’s what I call GE (Good Enough–thanks Steve Bergen at the Harlem Storefront School in New York), recorded as it was from the speakers on my Dell Inspiron laptop running Skype video and captured on my little FlipVideo device–see that at theflip.com.

Download S4theB! episode 59 right heahhhhh, or click “Links” above and listen to it on the Podcast Pickle Player!

Until next time, Seee yaaaaaaaaa…

Howdy and happy summertime, ya’ll.

As you may have learned by now, S4theB! can get a little erratic in the summertime, the victim of its producer’s schedule gone Attention Deficit as the structure offered by the academic school year’s busy calendar evaporates with the last bell of the last day of the school year.

NEVER FEAR! I have been traveling a bit, down to the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), hosted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), in Atlanta, Georgia. Thank the powers-that-be for acronyms, since I don’t have to type those long names anymore!

My time in Atlanta was so productive it’s taken me this long to sort out what I wanted to share from the recordings and pictures I brought back, and I’ve come up with three short snippets of three of my most favorite talks:

1) Peggy Sheehy describes part of her work with her teenagers at Suffern Middle School in New York. If you don’t know about Second Life, check out its website (after listening to the podcast!). Then google it this way, [”Second Life” education], and that will help you begin to understand the potentials this Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)–and others like it–offer to engage the otherwise possibly unengageable student. There are some videos I took of Peggy’s presentation with more stunning curriculum description available at my own Second Life blog.

2) Kathy Schrock (previously interviewed on an early S4theB!) spoke with upwards of a thousand, maybe 2 or 3 thousands (I don’t have the capacity of the full-to capacity ballroom in which she shared her presentation) of educators about just what Web 2.0 is and what it will be. Her presentation slides (many featuring her Second Life Kathy Dryburgh avatar standing in front of an inworld podium with a presentation slide behind her–verrrry interesting) and all the resources she shared are at her website.

and 3) Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Chris Dede asks a question (you’ll have to listen to hear it!) that might keep you thinking well into next week (whatever week it is that you’re listening to this!).

The single song in the podcast this week (notwithstanding my closing “Snacks4theBrain!” “unjingle”) is from the amazingly talented Bill deRoth, a stellar denizen of the Podsafe Music Network. Go listen to more: Support him buy buying a few songs, or his wonderful album, “Liquid Light.”

If you want to learn more about my time at NECC2007 (”the conference that never ends…”), visit my personal blog and my personal Second Life blog. Also, I’ll be spending quality time with a dozen of my favorite people, my colleagues at University School of Nashville, the week of July 23-27, exploring Web 2.0 tools for education in ways they’ve seldom been explored before. Keep up with that at the workshop’s bliki (a blog with an embedded wiki!).

Listen up, right here!