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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Source of Creativity?

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I know some people are way creative and others way less so. A new study from Northwest University may give us clues to what makes one person more creative than another.

See: Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

Lobby Cam oil painting
Lobby Cam oil painting by Bryn Oh, on Flickr

The hypothesis suggested by the research is creative people have trouble filtering out distractions. I suppose a noisy and chaotic environment would be the most common distraction. But any irrelevant sensory information could provide the distraction.

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WordPress  Lost Connection Problems 2015

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You may have noticed odd behavior and changes in the blog over the past days and probably in coming, days. I’ve been running into performance problems with this site. If you notice it on your side, it probably appears as a delay before a page loads. On my side the Admin pages are horribly slow and I see a lot of: Connection lost. Saving has been disabled until you’re reconnected. We’re backing up this post in your browser, just in case.”

Timeless Memories 2
Timeless Memories 2 by .:: Designer Circle ::. since 2010, on Flickr

It may take a few seconds or over 10 minutes for that connection issue to clear. During that time I can’t save a draft or publish an article. Very frustrating.

Pings and route traces to the server are fine. Researching the problem I find other WordPress users are having similar problems. So, it is unlikely a network problem.

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Second Life Translator Broke?

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This translation thing is present for me now. I decided to try and get the Bing Free Translation API working in my viewer. That would save me using Discord’s Metanomics, that he really doesn’t seem to want out there.

The result of my effort is: BUG-8794 – The Bing API used by the viewer is depreciated.

Tameless Green With Envy Outfit - St. Patrick's Day
Tameless Green With Envy Outfit – St. Patrick’s Day by Nita Bracken, on Flickr

The Lab was making the change over to a viewer based translator in late 2011. That was in response to Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other players in the translate game deciding they would charge for their translation service.

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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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