Joint Eduserv/JISC CETIS Second Life in Education Meeting - 20 Sept 07

This event was intended primarily to showcase the four Second Life (SL) project’s that Eduserv have awarded their annual research grant to. The interest shown in this meeting, and the speed at which it was completely fully booked, just goes to show the level of interest in this area at the moment - and this seems to be growing.

I would have liked to post a screenshot of Heather Makira (me) inside SL whilst at this RL conference to accompany this blog post, but as I was unable to log in to SL this just was not possible. The irony of the inability for most delegates to log into SL whilst at the conference due to firewall issues was not lost on the conference organisers – but fortunately the speakers (through some creative use of cables) were able to connect to SL and so able provide in-world demonstrations of what they were up to.

In addition to the presentations from the projects there were also presentations from Andy Powell (Eduserve) and our very own Lawrie Phipps. Andy used his extensive collection of SL T-shirts as the basis for his presentation (you’ll have to view the presentation to see what I mean) - if only I could script in SL, I'd like to do my slides on an SL t-shirt! Lawrie gave an overview of JISC’s activities within SL (which is not a lot!). JISC is doing very little indeed in SL. There is the emerge island for Lawries user innovation projects and some of the JISC Regional Centres have set up spaces in SL too, but that is about it so far.

The day ended with a lively debate on where we are with SL and education led by Paul Hollins. Overall this was a really interesting day - I made some new SL friends, met one of my SL friends in person for the first time (which was great) and it has inspired me to revisit priorities I had previously identified around virtual/immersive worlds.

Conference url: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/EduservCETIS_20Sep2007
Venue: London Knowledge Lab
Wireless: Excellent
Power access: Poor but possible