Cultures of Virtual Worlds Conference

I was only able to stay for one day of the conference, held at UC Irvine. It was similar to the MetaverseU conference in that some extraordinary thinkers and doers were there. Maria Bezaitis and I chatted a bit about how important metaphors are as bridges to understanding.  Melissa Cefkin is doing some great thinking on interactional space. Jasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields are doing cutting edge research in education and virtual spaces with kids; and Tom Boellstorf ethnography on Second Life is due out soon. I’m also going to check out Paul Dourish’s book Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction and was glad to hear from Mimi Ito, who’s work on digital youth culture is fantastic.

The audience was primarily academic but the conversations were anything but. Students and experienced researchers presented their work, with the conference being all about emerging questions that crisscross business, education, research, schooling and entertainment.

If It Qwaqs Like a Duck…

… It must be another virtual world!

Thanks to a SLED announcement by Lori Bell of Alliance Library System, I had the opportunity to attend a Qwaq demo yesterday hosted by John at Learning Times. Very interesting, despite some unforeseen technical issues (gotta love technology!)

Built on the Croquet platform, the Qwaq environment offers some interesting collaborative features not currently supported in Second Life. For example, users can simultaneously collaborate on Word or other applications, view multiple live web pages (no dividing land into multiple parcels to support multiple media streams), and even stream a live video camera from their little Qwaq lego-like head. Yep - a talking head!

Due to the tech issues du jour, I wasn’t able to fully experience all the nifty Qwaq features. It plays nicely with Google SketchUp and seems to support multiple avatars quite well.

I’m excited! Does Qwaq replace Second Life? Of course not. But opportunities to experience and compare the differing strengths and capabilities of different platforms helps me think more carefully about instructional design decisions - including on which platform to develop specific projects. A good thing. I’ll be looking for more opportunities to experiment in Qwaq.

Here’s a YouTube featuring a Qwaq demo.

100 virtual worlds for children under 18

There being called youth worlds and there’s lots of them either in existence or being developed.  The current ones are not 3D is the same way Second Life, but they have that sense of being in…well…a world. For example, there are avatars, and maps and buildings, things to do and people to meet.

See the list here