Cecil's Latest Machinima: The Sunfisher

Location: YouTube

Take a look at this preview for Cecil Hirvi's new machinima, shot in the Wastelands regions of Second Life.




Cecil's fifteen-minute film will be released in May. Watch here and at Cecil's blog for more information!

Metaplace Update: Hillbillies Arrive in Metaplace!

Location: Tenchi's World

My Second Life friend Tenchi Morigi, also my "Mysterious Mentor" for class and frequent mischief-maker on this blog, made the leap to bobble-head land to create a Metaplace account.

Her first act? To make a trailer worthy of Pappy Enoch himself (who is off on work-release from the alien zoo where he's been held hostage, but that is a tall tale for another time).

Buying Stuff:
I had to one-up Tenchi, so I visited her world (I'm now a sixth-level Mad Scientist) and with 200 of my Metaplace Coins I purchased a bulldozer from the marketplace. Unlike SL, with its in-world shops and Web-based Xstreetsl site, Metaplace combines both functions in a marketplace that a player can invoke while wandering about. I guess that there are in-world shops too, but my travels have been limited so far.


Modifying an Item:
Pulling up the "my stuff" box, I placed the dozer on Tenchi's land. I've no idea if she gave me permission to build there or how long the object will remain. Then I used a "behavior tool" to add a few features to the vehicle.


It now wanders Tenchi's land randomly. It did not run me over, however, as I was secretly hoping, so I could yell mad-scientist dialogue into chat such as "Curses! The infernal thing will not bend to my iron will and superior intellect!"

Well, I could have picked the machine back up, but no hillbilly paradise would be complete without a demonically possessed "Killdozer," straight from the 1970s Movie of the Week by that name.

Intuitive Play:
The "scripting" of the object was instant and involved no Byzantine lines of code, something I despise in SL but am learning to do, reluctantly. In many other respects Metaplace is intuitive, but I still have to unlearn many SL habits. I can only zoom in on IggyO when I'm in build mode, but once I did that, when I returned to Play Mode I was still in a close up. This proved ideal for the shots I took for this post.

Coda:
Now that I've begun my career of chaos, I need a few items that may not be in the marketplace:

• Tesla Coil (for ambience)
  
• Giant Robot (for mayhem)
  
• Death Ray (ditto)
  
• Sniveling Assistant Willing to Rob Graves (for spare parts)
  
• Grant Money (for...well, every scientist needs that)
  

Videoconference

Location: Online Meeting Room, NITLE

Today I did my first-ever video conference. It was a practice/get-acquainted session for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, where I am to be on a faculty panel next week. Our topic? "Using Technology for Collaborative Student Projects," and I'm to hold forth on both SL and wikis in the writing classroom.

Our organizer and NITLE's technologist did a great job in getting us ready, but to be honest, Second Life skills came in really handy. Like the table-etiquette simulation I reported here a while back, SL proves handy for preparing students to other virtual meeting places where their headshots, not an avatar's, fill the screen.

Of course, I could not be completely serious, once we were all at ease. So I froze my camera-feed for a moment, and then put a bust Socrates in Mardi-Gras beads in my place.

Scared them for a second.

I'll behave better when we have the real event. Maybe.

I was able to multitask well between the Marratech's client's features: text-chat, voice, video, and a nifty smartboard feature that lets us all collaborate on making notes, drawing pictures, embedding images, and more. It points the way past the sorts of atrophied forms we have been teaching in universities, to collaboratively authored projects rich in multimedia and, now, interaction from all over the globe.

How will we grade such work?

My class brainstormed some ideas about assessing online work, and three aspects of projects, as compared to "papers" stuck out:

• Increased Interactivity
• Non-linear Navigation
• Different Accessibility (for those with an impairment or different sorts of technologies)

The summer ahead gives me time to come up with rubrics for next year, as my students and I begin looking at these sorts of projects.

Armada Dispatch: YouTube Teaser

Location: Armada Breakaway

I enjoyed this tourist's guide to Armada. I just hope the naval battles don't damage my shop! I understand we have an eccentric resident with an ironclad who likes to sail about and randomly shell us...Professor Onomatopoeia may have to invent Armada's first torpedo.