News from the three Second Life contacts I've been talking with:
1) the ALS organization I mentioned earlier [http://infoisland.org] has given us a 1440 sqm plot of land on "Cybrary City 2" in Second Life. We are free to use the land for 6 months.
2) Lori Bell, the contact from ALS I've been communicating with mentioned that ALA is also interested in working with us. They are in the process of establishing a presence on their new island. Lori mentioned that the ALA contact I should talk to will be back and working in Second Life around November 15th.
3) Steve Tomblin, the UI Academic Technologies contact I mentioned is also interested in working with us. He mentioned to me that he wanted to share my proposal with others as an example of what academic groups are doing in Second Life - pretty neat.
We will hopefully be able to do some things with all three of these organizations at some point. It's promising.
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After I write this blog entry I'm going into SL to get a building started on our land. The challenge I face is how to utilize the space efficiently. It won't have to be perfect because Lori Bell told me that her organization has an auditorium and meeting hall that we can utilize for our programming. [As a refresher, we are in the process of holding readings in SL.]
Here's some specifics that Lori and I talked about as she showed me the plot of land we are being afforded in SL:
- 329 prims on plot of land (1440sqm)
- can use auditorium in Cybrary City II or on Infoisland 1
- ALA contact – Oberon (not back till November 15) Wants to work with us later on.
- can use this land for 6 months
- Lori said they have theatre in Cybrary City II if we want to use it
- Official SL newsletter – Metaverse Messenger (can have public info push here)
Lori was very encouraging with me about our project. She assured me that there are a lot of authors in SL that will be interested in our programming. Jon mentioned that we may be able to get a member of the Maia Quartet at Iowa to do a performance also.
I have also started working with Jon on his Electoral College website. This site has information pertaining to the upcoming Iowa Caucus. The aspect I am working on involves finding factoids about the state of Iowa (famous people, landmarks, etc.) as well as political issues pertaining to Iowa. This information will go on a widget that people can download to their computer. I will be learning the ins and outs about their database design and such with this work.
I have also been working hard on my website for the Virtual Object class. I am working locally right now with the site...so my link to it on the Intermedia server is not really worth checking out right now. I am enjoying web development. I get the same satisfaction out of it as I do making videos. I think I'm using the same sort of cognitive muscles with these two sorts of tasks. Mainly, I am organizing visual data in some manner in order to convey a message. I enjoy the combination of creativity and pragmatics that this process involves. Right now I am in the process of finishing the look of the site. I also am working on the different languages of which I will be demonstrating my compentency in. [ I have finished the flash stuff I'll be doing. I am working on CSS stuff right now...I will be doing some Javascript and php things as well.]
My goals for the rest of the semester:
- Finish the building in Second Life
- Host a sort of house warming in our Second Life building for individuals that may be involved with the project in the future.
- Host a reading in SL. This will serve as a "proof of concept" for the project. This means that the reading will be focused on making sure all the technical aspects of the initiative goes smoothly. We most likely won't be looking to get a famous author for this reading, but we of course need a decent amount of people to show up [10 or so] to make sure everyone involved can attends the reading successfully.
- Finish my website for the Virtual Object course
- Keep finding relevant Iowa Caucus related information for the Electoral College website.
