VWBP Conference 2012

Wade Halvorson and Leslie Bonjour

I attended my first Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference in Second Life on Friday & Saturday. I cannot even begin to explain all that I learned in just three short hours of being there. It shows me what I know and how much I still have to learn.  I attended three sessions.  The first reviewed their case study on cross-cultural online student collaboration.  The second was a review on Education and OpenSim Hypergrids.  The final was on the MachinEVO trial course on teaching machinima.

Maria Korolov

I will focus this blog on the session that I got the most out of, which is on OpenSim led be Maria Korolov.  Obviously OpenSim and Sim On A Stick is something I have discussed and where I am currently working.  This session convinced me that in my current teaching position and what I would be about to use MUVEs for, OpenSim is the way to go.  Similar to our holodecks in SL, OAR files in OpenSim allow the user to create different worlds.  I could have the medieval village I am creating on one and then create another OAR file for ancient Egypt, Greece, Etc  The possibilities are endless.  Whit help from the IT Department, I could set these grids up on the network and allow for collaborative work.  All this within the safety of our firewall.

The Session gave lots of tips as well as locations to find prefab OAR files and clothing.  There was also links to people willing to help.  One of the most famous OpenSim educators is Fleet Tuque of FleepGrid was actually in attendance to the session.  It was pretty cool to be sitting and learning from some of the biggest names in SL.

Slides from the Presentation:  https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddtq7sff_11jzdxr4pp 

Me at the MachinEVO Session