CSI: New York and Second Life

I finally got around to watching the episode of CSI: New York from last week that was supposed to portray Second Life. One question kept going through my head: Had anyone involved in producing the episode actually ever been in Second Life? It certainly didn't seem so.

The avatars and sims did look like ones that could exist in Second Life. However, the CSI characters' avatars did things that I've certainly never seen avatars do: find out from a white rabbit (or anyone else) where a particular avatar is currently located, walk off in synch while holding hands, teleport together to a different location, assemble a crowd on the spur of the moment for any kind of activity, pick something up with a hand.

I'm afraid this show is only going to make it harder for educators to convince administrators and students that Second Life is different from violent computer games.

Twine

I read about Twine in a post on Read/Write Web. It looks very interesting. According to the About page, "Twine is a new service that intelligently helps you share, organize and find information with people you trust." In addition, "Twine uses the Semantic Web, natural language processing, and machine learning to make your information and relationships smarter."

I've requested an invitation to try it in beta, but I haven't heard back yet.

Review of Renaissance Island

Sherpa Voyager at Second Seeker reviewed Renaissance Island in a post yesterday. Her review was generally positive. She wrote that she was "was delighted to find myself in a community that has some claim to historical accuracy." The most exciting thing was seeing my place, the Poet's Corner, in the first picture.

Book of Poetry

For a while, I've been putting a different one of my poems on an easel outside my house on Renaissance Island. I finally put them all together in a book and put it outside. The price is L$100. I've been thinking about creating books of some poetry from Tudor England as well.

Co-Author at Tek Trek Blog

I'm going to be co-authoring the Tek Trek blog with Bethany Bovard. I hope to post my first entry next week.

The Crystal Cave

About a month ago I finally bought some land in Second Life (from a private party not Linden Labs). My property is on an Athurian-themed sim named Logres, which is one of the historical names for Arthur's kingdom in England. I bought a cave with crystals, so, naturally, I had to name my lot The Crystal Cave, after Mary Stewart's novel about Merlin.

Successful Renaissance Festival

At one point there were close to 50 people on Renaissance Island for the festival last Saturday. I got to be the queen's lady in waiting. (Floria is in the red dress in the picture.)

The jousting went quite well, and a lot of people want to do it next time.

List of Podcasting Tools

Thanks to the Savvy Technologist for pointing out this great list of podcasting tools at Mashable.

50 Ways To Tell a Story

Alan Levine is using a wiki to prepare workshops for his cross-country tour of Australia this month. The first workshop is titled "50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story." Participants in the workshop will use one of 49 Web 2.0 tools to create a story.

In another workshop titled "Precious Web 2.0 Gems," participants will select a tool from the "Web Gems Starter List" or "Web Gems Other Lists" to try. He's used the tag "webgems" to identify these tools on del.icio.us.

His other two workshops are still "on the drawing board," but I intend to check back later to find out more.

Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning

According to an e-mail message sent to the SLED (Second Life EDucators) listserv this morning, the Sloan Consortium "has embarked on an initiative to help online educators gain a better understanding of how the technologies available today can help make their classrooms better." To accomplish this, Sloan-C has launched a new website. The site was designed to support Sloan-C's upcoming conference on emerging technologies for online education, but the site and its forums are open to anyone interested in this subject, not just people who attend the conference.