In this weeks Start the Week with Virtual World Watch podcast, Dr. Anne Cunningham talks about how she ‘got’ Second Life, and some of the work she is doing with this particular virtual world.
Annabeth is a multi-media artist and lecturer, based in Leeds and working at Leeds College of Art and Design. In this week’s Start the Week with Virtual World Watch podcast, Annabeth describes how she got into Second Life, her art developments within, and her experimentation and educational work with other virtual worlds.
For historical context, Virtual World Watch was a work colleague of Andy’s from the mid-1990’s at UKOLN (VWW: back row 3rd; Andy: back row 6th).
Andy is now the Head of Development of the Eduserv Research Programme, formerly the Eduserv Foundation. The Foundation funded a number of Second Life and Virtual World research and development projects, as well as Virtual World Watch, an island and several events.
Research Programme / Foundation activities with virtual worlds are described and archived on their website.
Two of Andy’s presentations of note are a recent one, presented at the JISC RSC Eastern event in April hosted by Shri:
… and his well-known “Second Life in 3600 seconds” presentation, the slideshare version of which has received over 17,000 views in the last three years:
In Second Life, and also blogging, Andy is Art Fossett where he has an occasional sideline in making footwear. On twitter, Andy is andypowe11.
This week we go to the East Midlands, as Andy Beggan, manager of the IS Learning Team at the University of Nottingham, describes what they are doing in virtual worlds there.
Andy’s team have put together a nifty little presentation which brings together much of what they are doing, and plan to do, in Second Life. The University of Nottingham campus in Second Life is publicly accessible.
Jane works in the JISC-funded Regional Support Centre (RSC) for the West Midlands. As she describes in the podcast, some of her time is taken up with activities to support, and progress, the use and development of Second Life within post-16 education in this region.
Jane is also in the process of purchasing an island, then developing it, within Second Life to support these activities. Jane is also the co-maintainer of the JISCmail Virtual Worlds mailing list.
You can find Jane on LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr. She is also, of course, in Second Life as Ladyjane Plympton.
It’s the 20th of April, so in today’s Start the Week podcast Anna Peachey describes some of her Second Life activities.
Anna is a teaching fellow at the Open University and has been involved (through her company Eygus) in Second Life developments at that institution. She is in her third year of using Second Life for tutorials with students studying T175 Networked Living: Exploring Information and Communication Technologies, and has worked with Liz Thackray to provide sample tutorials for other T175 students, as well as a 2 day course event inworld.
Anna chaired the ReLIVE08 conference in Milton Keynes, wearing a pair of wings to the event:
Anna flits between Devon, where she is usually based, and Nepal. She can be followed on Twitter.
Kate Boardman is the head of e-learning at the University of Teesside. As such, she is involved in a number of Second Life activities within the university and has created a fair amount of “stuff” herself in-world. In this weeks podcast, she describes her path to using Second Life, and some of the issues she has dealt with in using this media within an academic environment.
If you want to see her in the flesh and hear her speak, then Kate is doing the 3pm keynote presentation at the Virtual Worlds event in Sunderland on the 21st April. Her slides can be viewed online:
David Burden is the manager of Daden Ltd, a virtual worlds agency based in Birmingham. He’s the interviewee for this week.
Why are we interviewing someone from a commercial company rather than an academic? Well, as you will hear, David and co. have been active in many UK academic Second Life developments. They have also developed PIVOTE, a virtual learning authoring system for virtual worlds which came out of the JISC-funded PREVIEW project; David describes PIVOTE in some detail.
David is a good speaker and you can hear him speak, along with many other UK academic developers, at the Virtual Worlds event in Sunderland on the 21st April. He also tweets.
Mark Childs is a teaching development fellow at Coventry University, and a PhD student at the University of Warwick. Mark is involved in several Second Life-oriented initiatives, and also teaches using this particular medium. He has some interesting things to say about his work, as well as some of the student issues he faces when they encounter Second Life for the first time…
Like many other academic Second Life developers, Mark can also be found on Twitter.
Mark’s presentation on Second Life and Theatron gives an insight into why some people find using a virtual world beneficial from an education perspective, and other’s don’t:
In today’s “Start the Week” podcast, VWW says hello and requests information about virtual world activities from the UK Higher and Further Education sector.
There is a permanent page on this website with more details about the kind of information we are looking for. So basically if you are in a UK university and you are teaching, developing, researching or doing something else with virtual worlds (note: not just Second Life), then we’d love to hear from you.
