voyeurism

Memorize - an iPhone application by Lindman Design

my good friend Ludvaig Lindman has just had his first iPhone app accepted at the iTunes Store :-)

Memorize is a contemporary interpretation of the age-old pastime of finding matching pairs of cards.

what i like about it is that you can customise the picture sets. learn more about Memorize from its website :-)

Technorati Tags: games

celebrate Winterfaire with the Lindens :-)

from December 19 to January 5, Linden Lab will be having its annual winter celebrations, centred around Wengen, Voss, Zermatt and Moritz.

there will be a Snowman Building Contest, and the Snowball Fight between the Lindens and Residents.

Raymaker Land Management is proud and happy to make available a choice of two rental properties at Anton, which is the nearest sim from which to visit and tour the Winterfaire celebrations in the afore-mentioned four regions.

Anton Land Parcel One
Anton Land Parcel Two

Technorati Tags: Raymaker Land Management, rent, Second Life

you know you want to...

go ahead.

you know you want to...

now, just in time for Trek XI, and thanks to the supreme talent of Cathy Foil, Raymaker Land Management proudly presents you with the opportunity to live onboard NCC-1701 the Starship Enterprise.

Technorati Tags: Raymaker Land Management, rent, Second Life, Star Trek

the kinetic art of Argos Hawks

in the one hundred and sixty-third episode of ventriloquy, i draw your attention to the talent of Argos Hawks, who has crafted a finely-scripted and -sculpted kinetic artwork based on Rolling Ball Machines.

is it Art, or is it Science?

i invite you to decide for yourself in this 2.7 MB download :-)

(this episode was recorded on my iPhone, using iProRecorder, from Bias Inc)

Technorati Tags: landmarks, podcast, Second Life, Singapore

something i never tire of

something i never tire of is spending time onboard the SS Galaxy.

today was no exception. under the expert pilotage of Cruise Manager Alf Nagy, and in the very pleasant company of fellow guest Ethran Gynoid, we spent half an hour flying around the Sagittaria Estate.

enjoy the pictures :-)

Technorati Tags: Second Life, SS Galaxy

don't miss a great presentation

it's terribly short notice, i know, but if you have even the most passing interest in geography, environmental education, climatology, hydrology, oceanography and / or sustainable living, you could do far, far worse than to go in-world at 11 pm Singapore time (3 pm Greenwich Mean Time, 7 am Second Life Time) to Florida State University's campus and attend Joe Clark's presentation on Environmental Education and the Production of 'Nature' in SL.

i've seen his slides.

if you trust me at all, you wouldn't want to miss this :-) thoroughly compelling stuff.

:-)

[update: Joe's slides on Depictions of 'Nature' in Second Life' are available on slideshare :-) ]

Technorati Tags: education, geography, learning, Second Life

down Johannesburg way (Miriam Makeba 1932-2008)

God be with you, Mama Africa.

requiescat in pace

Photo credit: wikipedia

Yes We Can

God has blessed me with very many moments in my life which have been memorable, and even so very few of them rank up there with what i experienced today, listening transfixed to the live broadcast of the president-elect's victory speech on the BBC World Service, with a frappuccino in hand but barely taking a sip from it.

:-)

The Grand Hotel at Grouse

just in time for the Christmas holidays, i've made available some accommodation in the classic Linden snowland region of Grouse.

i'd like to invite you to consider staying at The Grand Hotel; designed by Maddison Mokeev, its accessibility is certainly hard to beat, being conveniently located along a main road, an Alpine river system, and Grouse Airstrip. what's more, there's even a gas station and service garage nearby.

all told, there are nine Standard Rooms and six Deluxe Rooms awaiting your occupancy :-)

welcome to The Grand!

Technorati Tags: rent, Second Life

on the trail of the redoubtable Magellan Linden

Nautilus City (not to be confused with the continent of Nautilus) is the most recent landmass on the Linden mainland.

word first leaked out of its existence after the intrepid explorer Magellan Linden surfaced from beneath its bowels in his bespoke Mole Tank.

earlier today, i managed to secure ownership of the plot of land nearest to where the abandoned Mole Tank lies. the plot is directly across the Great Canal.

a pyramid of indeterminate origin has been rezzed there, and it's as great as any a place to start exploring this new and exciting landmass from :-)

Additional reading:
- HeadBurro Antfarm's 24 October 2008 entry (The Hunt for Magellan: Exploring Nautilus) Backpacking Burro

in Magellan's pilot seat in the skewed wreck of the Mole Tank

Technorati Tags: geography, landmarks, maps, Second Life

Study Trip on IDM and Informal Learning Environments - the group pic :-)

my new favourite pic :-)

the smiles say it all.

Study Trip on IDM and Informal Learning Environments - the podcast and video

the one hundred and sixty-second episode of ventriloquy brings you my main learning points from the recent Study Trip to America :-)

in this 71.7 MB download, i bring you video footage of large mammalian fauna which i took while in California.

in addition, the YouTube video below is a Google Earth fly-through of the hotels we stayed at, and the sites we visited. to learn more about each site, please refer to this map :-)

Additional reading:
- Creative Class®

Technorati Tags: education, games, geography, learning, maps, navigation, podcast, Singapore

Study Trip on IDM and Informal Learning Environments - the map

long overdue, i know, but better late than never :-)

here's the map of the places we stayed at, and visited, during our Study Trip :-)

View Larger Map

Technorati Tags: education, games, geography, learning, maps, navigation

Study Trip on IDM and Informal Learning Environments - Day Four (Project New Media Literacies)

today was the fourth day of our study trip to America.

i was tasked to be the note-taker for the second half of the day, so here are my preliminary notes :-)

we visited Erin Reilly at Project New Media Literacies (Project NML).

Erin is the Research Director at Project NML, and we were joined by Kelly Leahy (Project Manager), Anna van Someren (Creative Manager), Katie Clinton (Content Analyst) and Jenna McWilliams (Curriculum Specialist).

the team is presently transitioning from the foundational planning phase of the interventions to the implementation phase, with an aim to making tools available to the wider educational fraternity in the first half of 2009.

using their White Paper (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century) as an organisational framework, the team that hosted us represented each of the three main tools that they are presently developing.

after a brief introduction to the characteristics of participatory culture, an outline of three core problems / research questions, and an overview of core social skills and cultural competencies (including visualisation) associated with NML (which you can read from the White Paper), Anna took us through the first of these tools - the Learning Library. more than just a repository of learning materials online, a major goal of the Library is to support children in their co-construction of their own learning through exemplars, exercises, expressions (which are jointly created and shared) and engagement in ethical debates.

Anna gave an example of how this could be done, using the theme of Creative Commons ("Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"). for that particular module, the NML skill was 'appropriation', learners would then be taken through a video-based exemplar, be presented with exercises through which the skill could be explained and practised, and finally be presented with opportunities to express their understandings of the skill ("Your Turn"), during which ethical issues could be surfaced and discussed.

Jenna then talked about the Ethics Casebook. she briefly mentioned one example - "the Meaning of Bling", which encourages learners to think about the evolution of signs, signifiers and symbols, and how these are used in social networking.

the discussion then moved to how NML skills might be learned through classroom projects. Examples were the Teacher's Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, Weaving the Thread (social mapping; social studies and mathematics), and Civic Engagement (history and civics education).

Katie talked a bit more on her work on the Strategy Guide. using the example of Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theatre adaptation of Moby Dick, she talked about how traditional literary terms (such as 'allusion') might be used as a foot-in-the-door to help teachers (during, say, a two-day workshop) navigate between the familiar and less familiar (the latter being the relevance of NML to traditional subject domains).

this latter discussion of the Strategy Guide helped us consolidate our learning points from this visit. speaking personally, it helped remind me of how fundamental literacies (such as print literacies) are being redistributed across the much more expansive curriculum defined by the NML landscape.

Technorati Tags: education, games, learning

Study Trip on IDM and Informal Learning Environments - Day One (Institute of Play)

today was the first day of our study trip to America.

i was tasked to be the note-taker for the first half of the day, so here are my preliminary notes :-)

we visited Katie Salen and Robert Torres at the Institute of Play.

we began by being given the context that large high schools in the New York districts were re-organised and re-constituted since 2003 as approximately 150 smaller schools, operating independently of each other, but within the respective original sites and infrastructure. in some cases, these sites had been so large that they were able to support five or six smaller schools within them.

on our part, we shared a brief history of educational reform in Singapore, thereby contextualising the recent Third Masterplan for ICT in Education.

from this introduction, both parties had a better appreciation of the areas of commonality between the issues faced by teachers in Singapore and America - these include high-stakes assessment and a (still) heavy curricular workload.

this enabled us to have a short discussion on the nature of assessment in informal learning contexts, such as those typified by the new media space. Katie and Robert shared how - in GameStar Mechanic - assessment was embedded within gameplay itself. such designs had been informed by the theoretical positions of people such as Barbara Rogoff and Jim Gee, with their calls to move away from standardised tests, and towards understandings of assessment through investigating the creative outputs and dispositions as afforded by the deep involvement and immersive contexts that characterise much of new media.

this led quite naturally to a discussion of the conversations between curriculum developers and game designers (i have elaborated on this in my paper on the Six Learnings framework). we agreed that one of the challenges facing these two parties was to engage each other on an equal footing, and thereby move towards designing, investigating and understanding assessment in a game-like way. this might take the form of earning certifications within the learner's trajectory through the curricular unit, as well as without (say, through ways outside of the formal bounds of curricular time and space). such certifications might then be part of a learner's individual portfolio. the rigour of such certifications would likely be in place because of the high standards of self-governance that emergent online communities typically hold themselves to.

in this way, the school would be reconceptualised from the centre of the learner's universe, to but one of the spaces in that universe.

Katie and Robert suggested some ways to structure such a curriculum for learning in a game-like way. instead of the vertical silos of traditional subject domains, one might look in terms of broad themes such as 'systems', 'the way things work', and 'codeworlds'. indeed, systems thinking might be postulated as one key with which to unlock 21st century literacies. as learners think in a systemic way, they necessarily have an appreciation of interrelatedness, energies, and flow. they would find greater relevance in the creative process and its related artifacts, as these would have clear applications beyond the traditional curriculum.

in their program, Katie and Robert conduct professional development for teachers through a summer institute. teachers are given opportunities to talk about fostering collaborative dispositions, and learn about the principles and architecture of game design. in particular, the potential of virtual worlds as platforms upon which to dialogue, practice, and learn about such principles was highlighted.

through their participation in such professional development programs, both teachers and educational researchers have been presented with opportunities to observe for themselves the importance - and different affordances - of game design, and game play. Katie expressed it as understanding the importance of observing how learners use the 'edit' and 'play' modes in the games they work on, as well as (say) what is revealed by the differential uses by the learner of 'save' and 'save as'.

this brought us nicely back to the question of assessment of learning. one suggested methodology was the use of think-alouds during the creative process. assumptions which needed to be questioned in this regard, included the binary distinctions between work and play, formal and informal learning, and the issue of whether adult-figures are best placed in the conduct and interpretation of evaluative exercises.

at this point, the interesting issue of attitudinal differences with respect to the use of games in learning was raised. Mimi Ito's work was cited, and of particular note was that in contrast to home-backgrounds in middle and upper-middle income families, parents from working class backgrounds felt more strongly that computers should be used for work, as a way of augmenting productivity (narrowly defined) and that - in general - they should not be "messed around" with.

by way of conclusion, a key take-away is that learning interventions should not be about the game itself (ie, not about learning through gameplay). rather, a far more deep and productive developmental trajectory would be thinking carefully about learning in game-like ways, and - if properly understood - this would involve much more than simply the tacking on of an optional co-curricular after-school program for interested students. such an approach would betray a fundamental lack of understanding of the good work and philosophy of the Institute of Play. instead, curriculum needs to be re-thought from the ground up to continually incorporate systems thinking, metacognition, cooperative learning, and peer critique. only then can the learner's experience be considered to approach learning in game-like ways.

Technorati Tags: education, games, learning

coming to America #2

the one-hundred-and-sixty-first episode of ventriloquy presents me with an opportunity to share news of a Study Trip to the United States that my colleagues and i will be undertaking.

the trip is jointly organised by the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore, and members of the Educational Technology Division at Singapore's Ministry of Education.

please do join me in this 3.3 MB download :-)

Additional reading:
- the Institute of Play
- Global Kids Digital Media Initiative
- Games for Change
- Always with You
- Fab Lab
- Ohmwork: networking homebrew science
- the Goodplay Project
- New Media Literacies at the MIT
- TERC
- WGBH
- 5D: future of immersive design
- Network Culture Project
- the Digital Youth Research Project
- Carlmont High School
- Linden Lab
- the Center for New Media
- Black Cloud Project

Technorati Tags: education, games, learning, podcast, Singapore

the Six Learnings at the Second Life Education Community Conference (SLEDCC) 2008 (recording)

the one-hundred-and-sixtieth episode of ventriloquy is a recording of my talk on the Six Learnings framework during the recent Second Life Education Community Conference (SLEDCC) 2008.

this is a follow-up to episode 158, from which you can access my presentation slides and the complete paper.

please do join me as i share my ideas with the very supportive audience in-world, in this 8.9 MB download.

Technorati Tags: education, learning, podcast, Second Life, Singapore, Six Learnings, sledcc08, TLLM

the Six Learnings at the Second Life Education Community Conference (SLEDCC) 2008 #3

just a quick note to give you the details about my presentation on the Six Learnings framework at this year's Second Life Education Community Conference (SLEDCC).

you can actually get more details about the framework from last month's post.

if you'd like to attend in-world, the presentation is today - 7 September Sunday - at 8:30 am SLT (11:30 pm Singapore), at the Corrimal Lecture Hall.

i've just visited the venue to test my presentation equipment - initially i had a problem getting things working, till i realised that the presentation slide-textures needed to be set as full-permissions before they could be projected from the 'laptop' to the big screen.

i'll also be using Dagmar Kojishi's Question Box as a way of helping me get a better handle on the question-and-answer session that i hope to set sufficient time aside for, after the talk itself. if you do find yourself at my presentation later and wish to ask a question, type your question in chat channel 11 (that is, type (without the quotation marks) "/11 your question here...")

[update: 8 September - the recording of my talk is available here]

Technorati Tags: education, learning, Second Life, Six Learnings, sledcc08, TLLM

Temasek - Orange Fashion Photo Contest (all entries)

further to my earlier posts here and here,

i would just like to acknowledge the breadth of talent and the time and effort that ALL photographers and models who visited Temasek last week spent.

in all, 51 photographs from Temasek were submitted.

quite apart from the photographs which were shortlisted for the finalists, i would strongly encourage all of us, when we can spend some time, to browse the creative output of six people in particular, whose work i have not featured on these pages till now.

- dixmix Source (in-world Galerie)
- Madeliefste Oh
- Monroe Snook (in-world Art Maniac Research)
- Rhi Rossini
- Timetraveler Georgia (in-world Chupacabra Gallery at Lauk's Nest)
- Wren Carling (in-world Photo Wrenovations)

Technorati Tags: Second Life, Singapore, Temasek

Temasek - Orange Fashion Photo Contest Grand Prix!!

wow!

the results of the Orange Fashion Photo Contest have just been announced :-)

on behalf of the architectural team behind Temasek, i would like to congratulate Trinidad Anatine, Halllie Larsson, and Gweneth Lange for being awarded First, Second and Third Places respectively, for their entries taken at Temasek :-)

you can have a look at their entries here, and also in-world at the Oceanview Deck, where they will be on permanent display.

i am absolutely thrilled, because Trinidad's entry - Singapore by Boat - was chosen as the overall Grand Prix winner for the entire contest!

Singapore by Boat was chosen from 46 other finalist photographs taken from five estates across the Second Life grid, including from the London sims and the SS Galaxy.

this is testament to Trinidad's talent, Halllie's beauty (she was the model), and the creative effort that went into the planning, landscaping, and building of Temasek by the architectural team.

thanks be to God, and heartfelt thanks to all photographers and models who took the time to visit Temasek this past week.

:-)

Morning Fog by Hallllie Larsson - an especial favourite of mine

Singapore by Boat - Photographer Trinidad Anatine, Model Halllie Larsson

this photograph won the Grand Prix at the inaugural Orange Fashion Photo Contest

Technorati Tags: Second Life, Singapore, Temasek