Just joined a new online community dedicated to education in virtual worlds.  I have overwhelmed by the number of groups that have popped up since we first brought students in Second Life two years ago.  I would have to clone myself and my AV in order to attend them all   Anyway, the interface being used on this site is very cool – wondering what they are using to power the site.  You know I am impressed if it inspired me to dust off my poor negelected blog.

Check it out at http://www.rezed.org

 The end of the summer is always a tough time – lots to do at work, prep for teaching and dusting off that pesky literature review.  I have been making a big effort to try to keep up with the SLED list especially since the weekly meetings seem to be on a break (although NMC is going to start a weekly Monday meeting).  Recently there was a post about a new group being started with weekly meetings on Tuesday night at 10pm EST – the Synthetic World Initiative at Indiana University.  It seems that this group started out of the work/research done by Ted Castronova in World of Warcraft.  The group is named the Kuurian Expediton after the original World of Warcraft guild.  The group is open to more then just educators – journalists, industry people, etc are involved.  It is not clear if this group is open to everyone but more information can be found on their wiki.

  On a another note – SL partner in crime, Heidi TeeCee, has a bought her self some new hair and skin.  Its about time – thank you Baccarra for convincing her!!!

Now all we need to do is get her some new clothes

If you are on my friends list in SL then you have one of these waiting in your inventory.  Anya is officially launching slatenight.com, a collaborative project that I am proud to be a part of.  I hope to see you all there!

HA! What fun. Definitely something that I would not do in real life. There is a bit of a story behind my latest adventure of skydiving with new found friend Audio Zenith. I recently posted to the SLED listserve a bit of a formal blurb about the grad student group. Audio and another responded that they would prefer more informal conversations in SL which is fine by me but I think that some structure and formality would help poor struggling grad students, like myself. So I responded about the purpose of the group, blah blah blah. After reflecting on my response I started to feel badly hoping that no one would take that personally. When I saw Audio online I wanted to make sure it was all OK. Funny thing is that he had no idea what I was talking about, LOL, so we went skydiving!

Informal meetings are great – look how much fun this spontaneous get together was and what I learned about Audio and his 6 years of exprience in distance education. The social affordances of SL allows us to experience that “water cooler” talk that is known to bind communities. But without the formality of the Grad Student group and our meeting I might have never had the chance to meet Audio – what place does each have in building community?