Learn 4 Life

Desktop Broadcasting of Second Life with TwitCam - “Inside Broadcasting”

Here’s another first from Learn 4 Life. Using Twitcam to Broadcast out Second Life from your desktop. Simple blocky but effective if you use a tripod and don’t move your avatar around too fast.

In this broadcast I even managed to stream in a video into Second Life on a media player. The sound is superb but the video being shown comes across as stills but then my broadband connection can only take so much through my Mac.

Oh an I forgot to add I was also talking to Chris Smith @shamblesguru on Skype as well on voice - go and play. A whole new Inside / Outside broadcast model. Voila!

Scratch in Open Sim

Thanks to ReactionGrid and @dstrawberrygirl, Learn4Life now has a place on the Open Sim grid and I am officially a “Gridizen”.

Chris set me up an account in minutes and I was able to have a quick play with Scratch for Open Sim.

Here’s a very quick video of the basic process. I simply downloaded the Scratch for Open Sim application - written in Squeak here (courtesy of a link from Rich White’s excellent Greenbush Labs Blog - Rich tweaked Scratch for Second Life for Open Sim as a universal app for Windows, Mac and Linux) and then I was able to write code that could control a prim on the Open Grid in seconds.

I simply dragged and dropped the building blocks onto the interface and then copy and pasted the code into TextMate and from there into my prim on Reactiongrid and presto - it worked first time. (NB you don’t need to even copy to a Word Processor on a Windows machine - but do on a Mac)

So much more engaging than Scratch in 2D don’t you think ?

If you are a teacher in a  UK school thinking of a quick start in Virtual Worlds and want to explore Open Sim I’d thoroughly recommend ReactionGrid for their pricing and prompt service. They even have a virtual turn key solution Banbury and the educational apps they can offer and other services are well worth looking at http://outpost.reactiongrid.com/. They can make worlds secure and in my experience are still small enough to offer a very personalised service and what’s more their main developer is UK based - so what’s stopping you - get in touch with @dstrawberrygirl now.

Pixel to Person - real to virtual and back again

Pixel to Person at the Greyhound Pub in Kensington Square

At BETT last week I also attended the Pixel to Person meetup at the Greyhound pub in Kensington Square. I have written about this wonderful place in a previous blog but the most amazing thing about it are the people in Real Life who attended this session.

Real to Virtual and back again…

To get a flavour of the surreal nature of the evening here is a brief video of the sort of setup that was involved bringing together a real and virtual space…

Sloodle - Interview with Giannina Rossini by Mal Burns

I first met Giannina in Second Life a couple of years ago at the ISTE Island at about 3 a.m in the morning. We’ve been good friends ever since. Here she is talking about Sloodle to Mal Burns live on Mogulus streaming web TV as well. Mal runs 15 web sites to do with Second Life when I last counted.

Giannina is one of the hardest working people I know in Second Life, doing a lot of the background work to get Sloodle publicised - she has also built the Sloodle Island in Second Life, which as anyone who knows about building in there, is no mean feat.

Sloodle enables people to communicate between Second Life and Moodle and so much more. She is a key person in this highly innovative area. She constantly underplays her role but I know how much work she puts in and it is an immense effort to build new learning communities with these technologies. As with everyone else at Pixel to Person that evening she is unique and a very valued member of the community.

Second Life and Building Schools for the Future - Interview with Mark Mullis

Mark Mullis showed me his new BSF build on Teen Grid - exciting stuff. Mark shows his new BSF build built 2 years before the real one. He also talks about the 3D projection systems he is using to make SL come alive mixing virtual and real worlds. Again he is an early adopter/ innovator making things happen years before they become mainstream.

Interview with Slim Warrior AKA SlimGirlFat

This is a brief interview with the lovely Slim Warrior AKA SlimGirlFat. She was the first uk musician to play live in Second Life. Like Giannina, I think she confounds all the usual stereotypes of people in Second Life. A very personable, accomplished musician who has a deep and very detailed technical knowledge of how to broadcast live streaming over the internet. I had a listen to her music later and I’m definitely now a fan

Interview with Mambo by Mal Burns

Virtual Live Band is a real life band of 4 members from 3 different countries and 4 different locations playing at the venues of Secondlife. They use Ninjam Software to synchronize and stream their music into the Virtual World of Second Life.

The interview is in two parts because of the size of the upload.

Virtual Live Band is the first band of this kind and the only band in Secondlife to work in this way.

Mambo Welles (RL Trevor Tweedy): Based in West London,UK,Mambo has been playing bass for 25+ years. During the 80’s he worked with several unsigned bands in and around London. After a break from the music scene for a few years, in 2006 he returned to playing live with the rock covers band, Limeburner.

This interview is 20 minutes long and is absolutely fascinating - Mambo goes into quite some detail about how the Virtual Live band play together. They are the only musicians to do this in Second Life. Yet another amazing innovator.

Interview with Francesco D’Orazio, founder and CEO of Myrl and Victor Keegan technology columnist The Guardian.

Francesco D’Orazio

Myrl is a Social Gateway for Virtual Worlds,  it was released in September 2008.

Francesco has been working over the past 7 years as a strategic communication consultant and qualitative researcher specializing in social media strategy and immersive marketing.

He holds a Ph.D. in New Media Studies and Sociology from the University of Rome. His research has been focussing on immersive communication, mapping the pervasive and ubiquitous spread of immersive strategies and tracking down the history of immersion from religious rituals, planetariums and panoramic painting, up to ambient music, experiential marketing, alternate reality games and virtual worlds.

He is currently Lecturer in new media at the IULM University in Milan and is Senior Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.

Francesco explains here how Myrl’s Social Gateway offers people a way to keep track of their online activity in the different virtual worlds, sometimes even with multiple accounts in the same virtual universe.

Vic Keegan

Vic writes a weekly technology column in the Guardian, and also contributes to Guardian Unlimited’s Comment Is Free blog. He joined the Guardian in 1963 and since then his positions have included Business Editor, Economics Editor, Chief Leader Writer and Assistant Editor. For 11 years he was a member of the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian, and edited the Online section of the Guardian for six years.

But here he describes his numerous projects in and out of world. Here he talks about his art gallery in Second Life and his NFP company World Film Collective which has offices in Second Life. World Film Collective runs a series of filmmaking workshops with groups of young people from marginalised and deprived areas of the world.

They aim to give students a voice through which they can present their lives, their passions, their interests and their messages to the global community. They can make films using mobile phones and show them through Second Life - as he said it is a very cheap way of having a centralised global office to enable people to communicate. Yet another fantastic idea - I’d encourage you to go along to the website and sign up.

We also had a brief conversation about poetry, economics and his proclivity for creating surreal Flickr groups. I put him in touch with John Davitt - I think they’d get on…

And that’s what I love about these events - the fascinating people you meet and the endless possibilities for networking and collaboration. Often it is difficult to fully socially engage when you are filming people - you can be so intent on getting footage and technical stuff right, that it only strikes you later, in post production, what incredibly interesting people and what ground-breaking projects they have been involved in.

Pictures of the Evening

You can see further pictures of the evening on the Flickr set here and read the Twitter feed here.

It was a pity I had to leave early as I was streaming/ filming the MirandaMod Moots at BETT the next day and gearing up for the same at TeachMeet (click the link for a teaser) - both those events I’m still post producing and will be covered in much more detail in subsequent blogs.

I really enjoyed videoing all these incredibly creative people. I’d like to say a big thank you to Kwame Oh again for allowing his pub to host the venue and all the other people I talked with that evening but didn’t get on video. I can’t wait until the next one where I might be able to simply sit and have a drink and non-digital chat for a change.

High Definition Video

As you can see I took a lot of High Definition footage with my new Flip Mino HD camera and one week on I’m still uploading a lot of it to my HD site. Unfortunately a couple of films did not come out including mine.

I have not enabled embedding of videos on other sites unless it belongs to the interviewee because High Definition footage over the web is still an expensive business and my allocation of 1000 views is rapidly decreasing!

It definitely proves that people want to see HD and Learn 4 Life content but it is getting rather expensive to broadcast at the moment. If you are a regular subscriber and would like to sponsor video views please do get in touch we have a number of advertising options in place. Otherwise please subscribe to view the content. We have a LOT of footage in the pipeline.

Live streaming from the Moodle Moot UK 2007

To see the Live Stream from the UK Moodle Moot just click here.

If you have an Avatar in Second Life go to here to chat with others about the presentations especially the one on Sloodle!

Pop along to the Moodle Moot Second Life Space at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Learn4Life/134/109/26.

We’ve also set up a Moodle Moot Twitter Group at http://www.twitter.com/moodlemoot07 should you wish to play.

Now playing in the Second Life City Learning Centre

We thought this might be fun. To show you what is possible - we are now playing the Vidcast we did of Alex Savage and Joe Dale in the Second Life CLC - nothing like a bit of virtual CPD now is there.

We have now comprehensively cracked how to do this in the Second Life environment and we are embarking on the next stage of our building works. The Learn 4 life Island will soon be open for public scrutiny (some parts will be locked down as courses are being trialled). So keep your eyes peeled for the announcement of the facilites and if you want to join us and several other innovative early adopters please get in touch with Leon Cych - his details are on the contact tab.