If It Qwaqs Like a Duck…
Posted on April 24, 2008
Filed under Conversations, Harbingers and tagged , collaboration, virtual worlds
… 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.
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Thanks Cathy!
I’m hoping to get in and play with QWAK too, on May 5, when they demo it again.I do want to get my hands on it though, not just be shown it. But what you’ve described gets at some of the many details that need to be articulated about these “tools,” namely what can we actually DO with/in them that’s better in some way than another tool?