vortiCISM- New bookshop, new books 14 December 2009The new Bookshop is now open in solipCISM Village, with new titles on teaching and learning in Second Life: Aldrich, C. (2009). Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction. London: Jossey Bass. ISBN-13: 978-0470438343. [Amazon] [Product description from Amazon] Higher education institutions are increasi […]Chris Hutchison
- JISC, ‘Getting Started With Second Life’ 30 November 2009I’ve just found the very useful JISC publication , ‘Getting Started With Second Life’, at 32 pages a succinct and very readable guide for educators that addresses just about all the core issues for newbies, from first signing up for an account through to answering questions relating to common mistakes and assumptions. The only shortcomings […]Chris Hutchison
- Building the bookshop 30 November 2009The new solipCISM bookshop, located in the new Village at 4000 metres over the island, is now near completion. At the present time it displays and (via a link to Amazon) sells only books related to Second Life, plus a couple of my own books. My hope is that other staff in the faculty will [...]Chris Hutchison
- Phone line installed on solipCISM 26 November 2009You can now reach Khoisan by telephone in solipCISM. Students and others have always been able to see whether or not I’m online, but unless they’ve been on my Contacts list they’ve had no direct way of contacting me when online. To address this inconvenience, I googled a telephone box image, built a telephone box, and [...]Chris Hutchison
- Rezzable and Heritage Key 15 November 2009It had been, as much as anything else, my longstanding interests in virtual history and virtual archaeology that had, after some years of teaching my desktop VR module, motivated me to devise and launch my final-year undergraduate Culture & Heritage Informatics module two years ago. I’d been surprised and impressed by a number of historical [...]Chris Hutchison
- The Middle Passage Experience comes to solipCISM 9 October 2009I’m delighted to announce the arrival of Tamsin Barzane’s Middle Passage Experience installation as a new permanent exhibition on solipCISM. I first blogged the exhibition back in early July when it was curated on Saminaka. Prim limitations at that time meant, however, that the exhibition there could only be temporary, so I’m very pleased […]Chris Hutchison
- Ananse’s Web 9 October 2009I’ve written before about the cultural and educational African presences in Second Life, and documented elsewhere Tamsin Barzane’s impressive Middle Passage exhibition on Saminaka. Back in early August Tamsin invited me to a meeting of Africanists convening on Friday 10th August in the magnificent Saminaka Library. [2009/08/06 4:27] Tamsin Barz […]Chris Hutchison
- solipCISM gets makeover 3 September 2009In preparation for the next academic year, beginning in four weeks from now, solipCISM has had an extensive makeover this summer, with much of the existing content redesigned, rebuilt, or re-textured, as well as much new content added. The Welcome Zone has been largely redesigned and rebuilt, now with well-stocked freebie shops as well as [...]Chris Hutchison
- Demonstration of 3Di OpenSim for education 3 September 2009Other than maybe better integration with the web, I’m not yet sure I quite yet see the point of this–Second Life running in a frame within a standard web browser (available for both Firefox and IE)–maybe because the documenttion is scant in English (3Di is a Japanese company), but it seemed to me worth posting [...]Chris Hutchison
- Second Life running on an iPhone 3 September 2009I first found these YouTube videos almost a year ago, but hadn’t thought to flag it in this blog. At that time, the company that was leading the development of Second Life on mobile phones was streaming mobile game service provider Vollee: Vollee is a technology company which streams PC applications to mobile handsets. By hosting [...]Chris Hutchison
- New bookshop, new books 14 December 2009
