General News

Second Life: Community?

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I’ve been going through the VWBPE 2015 Keynote speeches and listening to them as I work. Pamela Broviak made one of the speeches. She has a civil engineering and planning background. The video is a 45 minute talk about community in Second Life™ (SL). Mal Burns recorded it and uploaded the video to YouTube.

StoryBrooke Gardens
StoryBrooke Gardens by Loverdag, on Flickr

I’m not at all sure the speech part of the video has any actionable ideas regarding or new insights into SL. If you have studied history, humans, and social development you’ll probably be scratching your head as you listen.

If you want the good information, jump to the question and answer section (TM: 30:00±). The value of this video is there.

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Second Life: Educational Community Update 2015 March

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Ebbe Linden (Altberg) has given his opening speech for the VWBPE  (Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education) meet up. Daniel Voyager has a summary of the speech with a number of quotes. See: Ebbe Linden talks about education. See it for a quick summary by bullet points.

I’m going to do a bit of analysis and express my thinking rather than try cove his speech point by point. I am going to arrange my writing by subject into different posts. I normally follow the delivery sequence in a speech. But, that doesn’t work for me in this case.

If you want the word-for-word, watch the video. 1 hour 9 minutes. Ebbe reviews what has been happening in Second Life and then changes to talking about the future at about the 23 minute mark. 

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Second Life’s VWBPE Starts

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Seems we are hosting an in-world meeting for educators. The Lab published the information today about 10AM. See: Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Starts March 18th with Keynote from Ebbe Linden. So, that starts off tomorrow. News leaked of this event in several places and it has been covered in the SL blogosphere.

@ work
=”@ work by Caitlin ‘Caity’ Tobias, on Flickr

It will be interesting to see what Ebbe has to say. 

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Firestorm Activism

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As I and several others have reported, the Lab is thinking about removing the Restore to Last Position (RTLP) feature at the server level. No one really knows how many people use the feature. The Lindens only heard about use of the feature when people showed up at support wanting things back which they lost by using the feature. So, the Lab has a bad taste for RTLP. No surprise there. And they don’t build IN Second Life the way users do. So, they see no use for the feature.

Jungle Ruins
Jungle Ruins by Carthalis Rossini, on Flickr

But, there are possibilities for keeping the feature and eliminating the problems. Firestorm has disabled the feature for No-Copy items in there viewer. If you screw up, at least you have a copy left. Other viewers have done similar things. This is a rather simple fix.

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Second Life Bits of News 2015 Week 11 TPD

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Avatar Layer Limits

The Lindens are back on this project. The idea is that the current limits we have will change. As it is now we can wear up to 5 items on each of 12 attachment points – 60 items. The Lindens are changing that so, that you can wear 60 items (layers) any where you want.

This is going to really help with tattoos and alpha layers.

"1920s
1920s Berlin: Talking Shop by Marion Beresford, on Flickr

This change will affect viewers and servers. Viewers don’t have to update to be compatible with the changed servers, but that would restrict that viewer’s users.

The avatar bake engine is going to be updated to enforce the 60 item limit.

No projected ETA.

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Ebbe Linden & Second Life in Education

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Ebbe Linden (Altberg) gave the opening speech at Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) earlier this year. (Reference) They have videos available.

Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable 12 March 2015
Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable 12 March 2015 by Sheila Yoshikawa, on Flickr

On March 21, 2015 Time: 9:00 – 10:50 a.m. in the Second Life Main Auditorium (SLURL) a panel of people from Second Life will be discussing and answering questions in Second Life about “…how NonProfit Commons has contributed to significant dialogue around the uses of virtual worlds like Second Life. The panelists will discuss how they have changed and grown, as well as the different opportunities and moments that have distinguished the group and the manner in which they promote and spotlight best practices.” (quoted from the VWBPE site) 

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