Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for March, 2009

During the (Australian) Summer I was invited by incredible and passionate-about-education-in-virtual-worlds colleague Nick Noakes to participate in the Virtual Worlds and Language workshops held in Second Life (link to the associated ning here). I conducted a few tours through Macbeth and talked with participants about some principles for education in a virtual world. Today Nick shared [...]

Read Full Post »

I wanted to share this great slideshow courtesy of my SL friend and fellow Australian virtual worlds researcher, Joanna Robinson. Joanna works and studies at the GNWC Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver and is a leading presence for digital media studies in Second Life. Her work is very cool and theoretically rigorous – enjoy!

Read Full Post »

Have you ever floated in and around and through words? In a dreamlike and yes, poetic, experience, I enjoyed drifting through ‘love’s fair brow’, ‘time’s fickle glass’ and ‘knowledge as in hue’. Try it for yourself, here.

Read Full Post »

    (Hecate, from Inanimate Alice)       Ironically, days *after* doing my Digital Fiction workshop which had a strong focus on Inanimate Alice, I am only now discovering things I could have included in my workshop to enhance it!  For example, did you know that if you signed up to Alice’s newsletter, “she” [...]

Read Full Post »

Listen to this incredible, evocative song and watch the wonderful music video that accompanies it. Then interact with the narrative of the song, by going to Labuat.  Make sure you move your cursor like a paint brush across the screen as the song crosses the space and takes its emotional journey with you, allowing you [...]

Read Full Post »

I created a Virtual Macbeth group on flickr so that I’d be able to view and enjoy the fun other people were having on Macbeth – and it is indeed a thrill every time somebody adds a new photo to the pool, or adds the tag virtualmacbeth to their flickr image. So far there are [...]

Read Full Post »

At the end of last year, the Australian Council for the Arts published The writer’s guide to making a digital living. The authors are Therese Fingleton, Christy Dena, and Jennifer Wilson. Christy has been a long time friend of mine since my early days in Second Life, and I met Therese whilst working on the [...]

Read Full Post »

This afternoon we made our own Digital Fiction using various tools. The above was made in around 15 minutes, using the amazing (and free!) text-to-movie software, xtranormal.

Read Full Post »

Today in my Certificate of Digital Literacies workshop we’re studying Inanimate Alice!

Read Full Post »

In the past two weeks or so there has been enormous controversy over an alleged “leaked wikilinks” site to the Australian Government sanctioned “blacklist” of sites banned from Australia. Last night, the ABC aired a program called “QandA” in which the Minister for Communication, Stephen Conroy, attempted to address the issue of censorship and the [...]

Read Full Post »

Twitter has really entered mainstream consciousness! Everybody is “a-twitter”! And so too are new curriculum designers in the UK. A report from the Guardian yessterday announced that the new curriculum proposes the following: Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must [...]

Read Full Post »

Oh! This video provides a great overview and definition of New Media Literacies. Members of the research team at Project New Media Literacies discuss the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully engage with today’s participatory culture. Featuring Henry Jenkins, and produced by Anna Van Someren at Project New Media Literacies. See more NML [...]

Read Full Post »

These past few days I have had various meetings with colleagues interested in blogging, social media, and Second Life. Somehow the word must have trickled through the system to others that I am using social media for various purposes, and people are interested. It’s really affirming for me to talk with them and to have [...]

Read Full Post »

Today is Ada Lovelace day! Ada Lovelace was a 19th century British writer and mathematician who is considered the first ever programmer and the founder of modern computing. Her friend and colleague Charles Babbage called her “The Enchantress of Numbers”. This year is the first year of what is hoped to be an annual celebration [...]

Read Full Post »

Here are some of my fabulous Children’s Literature students presenting some ideas for working with Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Students were asked to develop and share learning experiences which could be used in classrooms to encourage children to explore characterisation, symbolism, and themes of a text in a creative way. I was very inspired by their [...]

Read Full Post »

This satirical look at twitter made me laugh. I am now 2 years into twitter and (like other social media use) I have my phases of being very active and not so active. But twitter has grown by over 2000% in the past year, thanks to all the celebrities who have taken it up and [...]

Read Full Post »

Last month I learned that an application for funding for a research project I proposed was successful!  It is a grant of $52,000 from the University of Sydney and the project title is: Innovative Pedagogy in Virtual Worlds. I am working with colleagues from a number of other faculties on the project – medicine, pharmacy, [...]

Read Full Post »

Virtual Macbeth is going to be participating in the Virtual Worlds Story Project, a project running in Second Life as part of the celebrations of World Storytelling Day! In details sent to me by the organisers, “The Story Quest brings writers from around the globe to participate in a fun-filled and challenging story writing exercise [...]

Read Full Post »

Yesterday I was so happy to find this box in my mailbox!!!  This is a Priority Box, a box made by Franck de Las Mercedes, an artist from the US.  The priority boxes are a global interactive art / peace movement – they are meant to provoke thought and discussion, the message is the box [...]

Read Full Post »