Questions for Rod Humble from the Educators

Location: Virtual Worlds Roundtable

Recently I posed four questions that I will send to Rod Humble, Linden Lab's CEO. I then put the issue to members of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable at our weekly meeting in Second Life. Here are some of the questions, edited for parallel structure and brevity. You can read the entire transcript of our meeting, including additional questions, here.

• Is he having fun yet? (Birdie Newcomb)
• Will he be able to make it to a future meeting? (Grizzla Pixelmaid)
• What is Linden Lab doing to make support more useful and reliable? (Hour Destiny)
• Are the recent rate changes and loss of Concierge support, etc. a path/process leading LL into mobile/social networking community areas? (Gwenette Writer)
• Is it true that there is only one database for all inventory? (Hour Destiny)
• Will Linden Lab resume work on interoperability with OpenSim grids? (Gwenette Writer and Ignatius Onomatopoeia)
• How effective does he find the search in finding events? (Profdan Netizen)
• When can we expect the advertising focus and promotion to STOP being all about escaping real life and finding love and focus more attention on some of the more serious endeavors like education, research, and activism? (Olivia Hotshot)
• If 40 or 60$ a month for a full sim (= server partition) is a sustainable price on open sim grids, wouldn't there be a little room sooner or later for LL to lower theirs? (Xon Emoto)

Got a polite question for Mr. Humble, about education in SL, that you'd like me to add? Post it in comments!  Keep in mind that several questions I did not include were excellent, but since they focus on Linden Lab's past decisions, some VWER members concluded that he'd likely not answer them.

And we want a short list!  So have at it.

Under a Virtual Moon: Spring Break

Pink!

Location: Second Life
I missed the Saturday morning circle with the United Healers, the Sunday morning discussion with Anam Turas and the Tuesday evening healing. I had a few first life commitments that got in the way. A really good excuse, yes?

It was, anyway, a quiet pagan week in SL. No Rising Moon meetings nor any Esbats, major or minor. I had hoped to focus on the pagan music concerts held Wednesday mornings at the Blue Moon Tavern on Gaia Rising but no one was there. The Wednesday evening United Healers "All Things Spiritual" discussion also did not happen. So, I went for a motorcycle ride with my buddy Nick.

Below is a shot of us on NIck's sim-wide sky track with motorcycle rezzer. My first choice was the pink cycle (above). After a few laps, Nick insisted that I ride a "real" bike. I have no idea of the model name but it has a serious chrome attitude.

Which doesn't matter, because I suck at driving no matter what the vehicle. I can't even make a flying carpet fly right. Nick made two laps around the track in the time it took me to make one. When I finally got up to speed on the chrome attitude, I plowed through the only loophole in the barrier and drove off into space.

The chrome attitude.

Mixing Fact and Fancy in The House of Usher

Location: Usher Graveyard

In building the simulation for Fall 2011 and my group of students in the English course "Invented Worlds," I decided that I'd use both Poe's story and the history of North Yorkshire as templates to expand the House of Usher tale.

After all, Poe's own works are full of intertextuality.

Playing off my knowledge of North Yorkshire, from a prolonged stay in 2009, I have begun adding local color.

I only wish that the village of Ravenscar, near Dracula-haunted Whitby, had that name in 1847, when we decided to set our simulation. That date lets us bring onto the scene a few new anesthetics that might explain Madeline Usher's malady.

Or might not. One goal of the simulation, as in a good Poe tale, is to keep characters guessing at motives and forces at work behind the scenes--human and, perhaps, supernatural. When, in setting out free content, I discovered several standing stones, I had a new subplot not available to us in the Second Life simulation, where the House was everything and any grounds beyond it were merely suppositions. Thus students may run across this letter to Roderick in the course of their visit:

My Dear Lord Usher,

I really do think that you have been overwrought by the decline in Madeline's health. It would be terrible to fall prey to ancient superstitions about the righteous souls who pulled down the heathen stone ring to build the Usher graveyard.

The stones are, of course, of great antiquity and any cultists who may have celebrated dark rites in their precinct have long vanished before the light of true wisdom and the power of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

I have, however, endeavoured to look through our parish records, as you requested. The stones, it seems, were somewhat dispersed as early as the 15th century, and during the time of the Godly Protectorate your ancestor Mandrake Usher, who had fought alongside Cromwell, was noted by my predecessor as "scattering to the four winds the bits of Satanic filth and other such from the grounds of the ancestral castle."

Thus we have an answer. At some time in the early 17th century, any remaining ring of stones was taken down, and rightly so, by your family.

I remain, Sir, your humble and obedient servant,

Giles Rammage, Minister, St. Stephen's Chapel, Robin Hood's Bay

VWER Grid: A New Start For Educators

Location: VWER Grid

AJ Kelton worked very hard to get 15 of us onto the new grid, hosted by Reaction Grid, to hear guest speakers John "Pathfinder" Lester and Jokay Wollongong.  The transcript will be a lively one.

We broke our old record of attendees, and the grid proved stable for "native" accounts and Hypergrid visitors.

This is looking more and more like the future for educators. For those who call OpenSim a desert, I'd add "I think we have an oasis."

And for those who claim the avatars and gear don't match SL, I'd say "give it time. A lot of clever folks are building and sharing their content, just as we do at our K-12 schools, colleges, and universities."

With Jokaydia Grid ramping up past 80 sims now, with over 1000 educators involved, more oases are on the horizon, not mirages.