Snapshots from ISTE Island

Hey, all,

Looking forward to the upcoming ISTE VEN Reunion in Second Life, I dug into my bloated SL inventory and struck paydirt in the form of snapshots auto-named for the location and coordinates where they were taken. It was a quick search for "iste island" and it yielded enough snapshots for what you'll see here, if you have the patience to view a 5+ minute video comprised of them. The video and music is courtesy of my Screencast-o-matic Pro account, filmed from my desktop whilst standing in front of the images displaying in an image viewer object (Multi-photo Display, Sold by Iain Maltz Visit The Store) at the new Virtual Environments Network homeplace, now viewable there. Many of the pics were taken for my long-running blog, "Oh, Virtual Learning," which ended years ago but is still available at Blogspot.  I suggest you go all full screen with it! I hope you enjoy:

Anybody Coming to Music City for SITE?

I've been drafted by my good friend Jan Zanetis onto a remarkable panel session at March's Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education conference, to be held here in Nashville March 8-11. The panel, on the future of distance learning, includes Jan, Kathy Hayden, Mike Lay, and Kecia Ray. It'll be great, I do believe!

Anyone coming? If so, comment away and let's get something going during the conference, even if it's just a meetup for a few light beers and some dynamite honkytonkin' at Tootsies Orchid Lounge!

As usual, I'll be the Virtual Environments guy, and I'm looking forward to sharing our Virtual Learning experimentations with OpenSim and the great work my global colleagues and I are carrying out in Second Life via ISTE's SIGVE 3rd Tuesday Speaker Sessions. ISTE, like many other educational institutions, are greatly reducing their investments in Second Life, partly due to our national economy and partly in response to Linden Labs' relatively recent abolishment of what had been a very generous educational discount program. ISTE will be abandoning three of the four islands they've been leasing from Linden Lab for several years now, but they'll be retaining their original ISTE Island and hopefully allowing my own Bloggers Hut to remain standing. They are also discontinuing the weekly Speaker Sessions that esteemed colleague Kevin Jarret had run for several years, but the good news is that the SIGVE Sessions will continue as the sole remaining offering of its kind. Once a month, my good friends, we'll continue to see, hear, learn, and backchat about the best that Virtual Worlds have to offer for education.

If you're coming to SITE, gimme a holler!

Immersive Australia: Education--A new modality for learning, collaboration, and knowledge production

I came across this report via the SLED listserv the other day and emailed its author, Mandy Salomon, to request a copy. She promptly emailed me one, and when I read it...well, read it yourself!

Thank you, Mandy, for sharing so openly your hard work and excellent research. IIA_Edu_18Dec