Inferno Redux

Inferno

When trapped by a region unavailable, make lemonade (or comics). This particular scene was an av pile-up at Korea Sim's Welcome Area this morning as SL went through rolling server updates. I love the shot of the shoes, and the very random toy soldier which was the only thing that wasn't at least partially ruthed. None of us could move. Stuck together, we formed a different kind of virtual hydra. I wonder what level of the Inferno this would count as.

I'm also testing the revised version of Flickr's 'blog this photo' feature, which lets you blog directly from the photo page. No more arm wrestling with blogger's photo uploader, I hope? We'll see. Crossing my fingers.


Well the upload didn't go as smooth as I'd hoped. Still a small chip with a ton of links to Flickr embedded - similar to previous Flickr-blog upload tools. I ended up editing the code manually in the post so that you can see it without pulling you off this blog. But the 'format your blog post' link I saw in Flickr looks promising... if I can find it again. I'll keep trying. The idea of not having duplicates of uploaded photos spread all about the Internet is appealing.

Simulation, Immersion, and Troubles for Linden Lab™

Location: Weekly Roundtable at Montclair State University

When I had the good fortune to interview Jon Himoff, CEO of Rezzable, our topics touched on SL™ for perhaps a third of our talk. So it's not really fair to say "Second Life^® Education Roundtable" this week.

I'll soon edit and place our transcript in an HTML document. It shows where we educators may be headed and why Rezzable made its decision to largely move away from the Linden Lab™ product. I will provide some noteworthy quotations that I'll sum up in my next post. For now, however, a few highlights. These are transcribed remarks from voice, so I'll ask Jon to send me corrections if I've misrepresented his remarks or taken them out of context too far:

• Why Rezzable largely pulled out of SL: "we migrated off of SL b/c SL is too expensive and LL is not as responsive as ne need" (at one time Rezzable had 40 sims in SL).
  
• What has been modified for Builderbot: "we modified the code to allow only builders to move content." Rezzable continues to modify the software, but Himoff noted that largely the work they needed from it was done, since they built it "to take content out of our sims to move to OpenSim."
• What happened to Rezzable's other SL content: It lives on at the Rezzable Grid.
• What Rezzable intends with Heritage Key: It is Rezzable's main focus now, since "we see multiple-device access to this coming soon. . .as convergence occurs, there will be a gap for new experiences. HK wants to pull all this together; this is where HK sees ourselves as a new media organization."
• The Academic Credibility of HK: Rezzable hired professional journalists to prepare content, and the company worked with several Egyptologists, including the flamboyant archaeologist Zahi Hawass.
  

Himoff envisions parts of Heritage Key, both their King Tut Virtual Experience and the forthcoming Stonehenge project, working on portable devices. The company envisions a rich set of connections between the 2D Web and 3D "virtual online environments" (a term he prefers to "virtual worlds").

My take on all this: educators are already following Rezzable's example--and were ahead of the firm in many cases--into other virtual worlds and away from the Linden Lab product. For now, it's only a bit of exploring, though Heritage Key is already rich enough in content to be the focus for a class project.

OpenSim Update: Reacting to Linden Lab

Location: Reaction Grid Virtual World

When will educators begin to explore other grids? When it gets easy enough and inexpensive enough.

Today, I found a grid that met both tests: Reaction Grid. Thanks to Tateru Nino, I'd read that a group of educators have begun meeting spontaneously there to discuss a crisis: Linden Lab's poorly handled decision to issue a cease-and-desist order to jokay Wollongon, creator of the soon-to-be renamed sleducation wiki.

jokay sought no profit from her site, and Linden Lab itself had promoted it. I know she feels burned, as do so many other educators who have promoted Second...I mean, Linden Lab's copyrighted content.

Time to go exploring. Unlike Open Life (where I've met with disaster after disaster, lately, if I can even log on) Reaction Grid seems stable and well rendered. And other grids await bold explorers not worried about leaving their inventories behind. I used the Hippo client and, with some tomfoolery, changed the settings to log on to any number of OpenSim grids.

That was the only difficult moment for me--putting in the settings so the virtual-world client logged in Iggy Strangeland (who looks like he played with Oasis in the 90s).

Technical glitches aside, once I did find the settings panel it went very well. An experienced Reaction Grid builder helped me at the orientation area and I visited his build--a wonderfully conceived extraterrestrial jungle.


The crowning irony of this moment is that in protecting their trademark, Linden Lab pushes more educators to mistrust them. Here's a reply I posted at the New World Notes coverage of the topic:

In time, as new alternatives come online, many of us will do more than talk about reducing our investments in SL. The brave are setting up OpenSim servers right now.

Most of us don't really need the shopping, the drama, and the impressive hair-styles that SL dishes out. We academics revel in our bad hair.

We do need solid, inexpensive, and immersive educational content that will run on the sorts of machines our students lug around, and many but not all of us need the ability to make content of our own.

I stand by those words--they've been a long time coming as I see Linden lab, under Mark Kingdon's leadership, moving away from the visionary era of Philip Rosedale.

Now is precisely the time that we should all be looking at other virtual worlds, as hard as it may be to leave some of our SL content and our personal goodies behind. Yet I say that with some regret. Just at the moment when SL seems more stable and adult content has been segregated to make a new user's experience more selective, LL has alienated many in its core customer-base.

Tateru Nino's first and second posts about this situation provide some depth to the issue, as does jokay's decision not to fight Linden Lab but to pull down her wiki and move it to a new site. I'll be sure to update my links to her, since her site is part of an assignment for my students and a "must see" for colleagues new to the Lindens' virtual world.

Now, live from Reaction Grid, Iggy Strangeland invites other educators to ponder what other worlds may be out there, ready for us to use. For now, at least, uploads on Reaction Grid are free.

e.e. cummings springs to mind..."Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."

RightAsRain Rimbaud to Talk With Educators About Virtual Worlds

Location: Montclair State University Virtual Campus

RightAsRain Rimbaud, aka Jon Himoff, CEO of Rezzable, will give a talk in voice, with Q&A by educators, for the weekly Second Life Education Roundtable. Topics will include the role of virtual worlds for education, Rezzable's decision to move more content to OpenSim, the Builderbot controversy, and Rezzable's vision for content creation.

I'll moderate this talk. The event run 2:30-3:30 SL Time next Tuesday, October 6, at the Montclair State University campus in SL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSSSouth/130/180/2

Have a question to put to Jon in-world? You can submit advance Qs here and as time permits, I will ask them at the event.