The reality is that I use Facebook quite a bit, but is usually something I tend to use more for personal communication. I’ve never in my life been capable of keeping up with the latest happenings in the lives of family members, people I was friends with decades ago, and occasional acquaintances I don’t really know at all as effortlessly (and regretfully with an much meaningfulness) as I have been able to since Facebook. That being said, I do experiment with features like groups and pages to understand how they work in the event a faculty member expresses interest in using it for their class. It doesn’t happen a lot though. I’ve heard of instructors using pages or groups in their courses successfully, but I haven’t seen it first hand.

It seems to me that some of Facebooks features like Groups and Pages are where the most promise are for really accomplishing anything as a community. FB Pages are well suited to serve people’s professional interests. I’ve seen companies blogging and conducting outreach to their customers using pages – and even groups. Saucony, Academic Earth, and AlaskaPhotoGraphics come to mind for this sort of use. I’ve also seen some interesting uses of groups, such as the Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market, who are announcing events and connecting to community members on FB. More of a grassroots effort in this case and FB seems well suited for it.

There are a few educator groups I’m a part of but I don’t participate in, simply because there isn’t enough time in the day. One of them (Blended Learning and Instruction) sends out regular announcements about synchronous workshops they conduct about various aspects of teaching online. They always sound interesting, and I assume someone is getting use from them, but I haven’t ever dropped in. I’m sure I’m missing out.

I’ve just recently started a new page called Winter Running just to test out the features of Pages. I’m curious how they might be used in conjunction with other platforms and where, if at all, they generate feeds (RSS) that can be pulled into other spaces people may already be using – such as re-feeding Notes posted on a FB Page into a blog somewhere else. I’ll post more about what I discover about that later.

Facebook is great for keeping visibility on a large number of interests, but I find that I have so many that I rarely follow up with any of them on FB. It seems to me to be a much less formal space and I find it very easy to ignore the traffic there for higher priority professional tasks in other spaces.

The most successful groups/communities I have seen on FB have all had great, active, and energetic community leaders who are constantly posting new content, coordinating events, and contributing back to the network. Facebook is just a tool that links people together – it is the value people bring into it that makes it useful to others, that grows communities, and that in the end, may even accomplish a goal. Without contributing, participating people it just becomes a time sink for entertainment and vampire mafiozi farmers harvesting their virtual crops.

It’s nothing new to hear about developers integrating communities and conversations between online social network services such as Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, and the list goes on. Many of these applications have opened their APIs to developers in the hope that they will make useful tools for users of those applications. As these services and associated tools become more useful, their users increase in number. In light of this, it is no surprise to see these same applications permeating virtual worlds.

So why when talking about the permeability of virtual worlds, focus on Second Life? The biggest reasons are that the world is highly customizable and has a diverse user community already building a variety of tools that connect to other online social networks. In many cases it is possible to either buy or find free versions of these tools for your own use. A handful of them are even made available as open source code so that you can customize or extend them even further.

As educators, why are we interested in whether or not social networks are able to cross into worlds like Second Life? The artifacts created when these tools are used can be valuable to instructors and learners for a number of reasons:

• They move conversation/communication beyond the immediate community of the class and SL
• They are mechanisms for aggregating and sharing student experiences (in SL) when a cohort isn’t meeting synchronously
• They can be used to share teaching resources for other classes (promoting openness perhaps?)

Feed Display

Description: This feed display can pull information from websites and bring them in-world. If your website, blog, forum, or podcast has an RSS, Atom, or SSS feed, you can use it with this item.

Use: Open up the _config file in this object’s inventory and edit the default feed address to point to your own. You can also edit how often the script checks for new posts.

Creator: Dedric Maurac (L$19 copy/modify)

More Info: https://xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=164667

RSS Reader

Description: Display the latest headlines from your publication using RSS, RDF, Atom, or SSS (Second Simple Syndication). As residents come to your parcel, they can touch the RSS Reader to get a link to visit your publications main website. The original scripts for the RSS Reader are available with the Second Simple Syndication script and are open source.

Use: Open up the _config file in this object’s inventory and edit the default feed address to point to your own. Change the frequency the script checks for new content if necessary. You are also able to change the color of the floating text.

Creator: Dedric Maurac (L$39 copy/modify)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=122338

BlogHUD Pro 1.06

Description: This HUD is able to cross-post from the BlogHUD Pro site to your own external blog (compatible with Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Friendster, and Tumblr). It can also send snapshots to your Flickr account.

Use: Type /9 Your interesting message about your Second Life! For long posts (Title + More text/description) create a notecard in your inventory, type what you want to say then save it. Then drag and drop the notecard from your inventory to the blogHUD. It will then read the contents of the notecard and prompt you for a title to this post (type: /9 your long post title). To cross-post to your own blog add it to your BlogHUD profile and activate cross-posting on the HUD itself.

Creator: Koz Farina (L$1500)

More Info: http://bloghud.com

Slurlblogger v0.4

Description: The Slurlblogger is a device to enable one to easily keep notes of different locations that one has visited within Second Life, and easily send them to oneself for reference, or automatically to a blog. Each note will appear as a separate paragraph, with an HTML link to a SLurl for the location you were at when taking the note (or, as an option, you can turn SLurl display off).

Currently, the Slurlblogger supports posting to blogs that allow posting via the Blogger API, which includes those using Blogger, Wordpress, and Movable Type. It has been tested with both Blogger and Wordpress. Further versions of the Slurlblogger will support other systems such as Livejournal.

Creator: Ordinal Malprop (Free)

More Info: http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine

RSS330 ZEND

Description: This RSS reader is fast and it is open source. It can be adapted to various non English languages if they are available in utf8 font. It can used to read anything providing some rss feed. Current version is distributed with pre-defined languages Portuguese and Esperanto, however, they should work well for Italian, French, German. Use the instructions found in this page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/XyText-UTF8 if you have other languages you have to produce textures for. This script is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike license and can be found at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/RSS330-Zend

Use:
Select a feed:

1. Just grab the RSS link from the page you want to be blogged in world (right click the RSS icon and then copy link location)
2. Open the content of this Feeder the _RSS330 ZEND script
3. Paste the address in the line where you read feed=”http://web.site/rss.xml”; be sure to not delete the ” ” and the ending; Remember to change the title=” “; with the title of this blog
4. That’s all the board will refresh instantly with new feed

Use the board:

1. Use the black arrows on the top line to scroll on older news and back on various pages
2. When you are interested in a news just click on that row and the news will be expanded over the board
3. Click on the board to open up the browser with the full news
4. Click on the title to go back on the title listing
5. Board will autorefresh every 10 minutes (change refreshminutes=10)

Creator: Salahzar Stenvaa (Free)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1665331

[Zone] Media TV

Description: Plays YouTube video and playlists, radio, Flickr photo streams

Use: This product does not ship with an in world instruction manual as they change often. When you rez your product you will be given a URL in local chat. This is your TV setup web page. You can find instructions, help, revision history and configuration settings on this page.

Creator: Zone Brand (L$849 modify/transfer)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=775842

Blog Reader V2.0

Description: The Blog Reader will parse and display most RSS feeds.

Use:
Rez the reader (Blog Reader V2.0) – it will show the default blog
Use the forward and back arrows at the top of the screen to move between blog posts
Use the read button at the bottom of the screen to open a web browser and read the entire post.

Note that this Reader is free and runs a PHP script on the creator’s server to parse the blog feed. If their server gets hit too much or otherwise inconvenienced then this service may be discontinued. However, the scripts for this Blog are open source, so if you want to use them, please feel free to contact him and set them up on your own server. You will need a PHP-enabled server and suitable feed parsing scripts – this Player uses MagicParser (www.magicparser.com – US$38)

Creator: Dudeney Ge (Free)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=503315

Ping.fm HUD v0.91

Description: With this little HUD you can post from Second Life to most social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Myspace, etc. All you need to do is sign up for an account on Ping.fm – http://ping.fm/ and you can Ping away from Second Life. SLURLS can be optionally automatically added to posts.

Use:

1. Sign up for an account on http://ping.fm/ and connect one or more of your social networks into your Ping.fm account. Make a test ping from the Ping.fm website to make sure it is working and that your ping appears on the social sites you have configured.
2. Get your application key for your account. Go to this page, http://ping.fm/key/ Copy the key with the long set of numbers into your clipboard.
3. Attach the HUD. Default location is top left, but it should attach anywhere. The top of the HUD will be black indicating your key is not valid yet. It will turn white once you have put in a valid key.
4. It will say your account it not validated. Enter this command on the chat line: /47 key [paste in your key here without the brackets]
5. If the key is correct it will say User ID Validated. If not, check your cut and paste and your Ping.fm account. You should only need to do this once unless you reset your HUD.
6. Make a ping: /47 ping [text I want to send but you don't have to put in the brackets] or activate the Ping.fm gesture, then if the channel is still set to 47, you can do a /ping [text I want to send… but you don't have to put in the brackets].

Supported Services:
Bebo http://www.bebo.com, Blogger http://www.blogger.com, Brightkite http://www.brightkite.com, Delicious http://delicious.com, Diigo , http://www.diigo.com, Facebook http://www.facebook.com, Flickr http://flickr.com, Friendster http://www.friendster.com, hi5 http://www.hi5.com, Identi.ca http://identi.ca, Jaiku http://jaiku.com, Koornk http://www.koornk.com, Kwippy http://www.kwippy.com, LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com, LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com, Mashable http://my.mashable.com, Multiply http://www.multiply.com, MySpace http://www.myspace.com, Plaxo Pulse http://www.plaxo.com, Plurk http://www.plurk.com, Pownce http://pownce.com, Rejaw http://rejaw.com, Tumblr http://tumblr.com, Twitter http://twitter.com, Utterli http://utterli.com, Wordpress http://www.wordpress.com, Xanga http://www.xanga.com, Yahoo 360 http://360.yahoo.com, Yammer http://yammer.com, YouAre http://youare.com

Creator: Overthruster Heavy Industries Online – Veyron Supercharge (L$150 copy/modify)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1067816

SLare Board

Description: SLare stands for ‘SL share’, so the goal is to share something from SL to RL. People can share your place in this case, with this ‘SLare Board’ to RL Social Network. Right now there are 20 popular social network in SLare Board : blinklist, blogmarks, delicious, digg, diigo, linkedin, furl, mr wong, myspace, newsvine, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, technorati, twitter, g bookmarks, netvibes, y! bookmarks, live, facebook

Use: Rez on your land. Residents can click on your SLare Board and post the location of your place to their favorite online social network.

Creator: Arjuna Nirvana (L$250 copy/modify)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1562837

diigo SLare HUD v0.1

Description: Post SLURLs to your diigo account while in SL

Use: Wear as a HUD and click the icon when you want to bookmark the location of your avatar.

Creator: Arjuna Nirvana (L$25)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1574272

Yummy

Description: This HUD posts SLURLs to your delicious account while in SL.You may optionally add a description and tags, and may mark the post either ‘not shared’ (default) or ’shared.’

Use: To post a slurl to del.icio.us chat: /111 description, tag1, tag2, …
description (optional) can be any text EXCEPT a comma and tag1, tag2, etc. (optional) are single words to use as tags.
For example: ‘/111 Great store for clothing and hair!, clothing, hair, shopping’
The tag ’slurl’ is automatically added to all posts.

Creator: Bill Hax (Free copy/modify/transfer)

More Info: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=244301&random=94326

Picture a morning that starts off like any other morning at the office. I come in… get the computer running… get some coffee… and settle in to get some work done. This is how my workday starts, usually. Wednesda I was going through this routine and was about an hour into actual work when a helpful Windows alert balloon appeared in the corner of my screen to notify me that the USB device I had been using (my mouse in this case) was now no longer recognized. In fact, none of my USB ports worked anymore What had happened? Static discharge? Mischievous fairies? Paranormal activity? A moment earlier everything was sunny skies and unicorns. Long story short, I don’t know.

I went through the normal troubleshooting exercises – check the device manager, reboot, Window’s update – all in various combination. Nothing. I resorted to searching MSDN forums next. What a time sink. Finally, weary from reading the details of what worked and didn’t work for myriad configurations of PCs, I decided to try the least involved, most general, AND seemingly improbable solution. What do you know? It worked.

So what fixed it? Unplug all USB devices, power down the computer, unplug it (or remove the battery if it is a laptop, as in my case), do something else for 30 minutes, return to the PC, plug in the USB device, and power the machine on again. Voila! I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t witness it for myself.

Introduction to the Dashboard
[direct access]

Configuring Discussion on your WordPress blog
[direct link]

Writing and Publishing a Post
[direct link]

Moderating Recent Comments from the Dashboard
[direct link]

Previewing and Activating Themes
[direct link]

During his presentation Keene highlighted a number of features of Google Earth that make it a powerful tool for visualization and learning. This particular session was well attended with standing room only. Below are highlights of the topics he touched on and links to projects he shared with the group.

The Gallery Layer in Google Earth features data pulled in from other online services like:

• 360cities.net – Dedicated to promoting geo-mapped, VR panorama photography and VR photographers around the world.
• gigapan.org – An interesting service to explore in itself, GigaPan was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google. It is the newest development of the Global Connection Project, which aims to help meet neighbors across the globe, and learn about the planet. GigaPan consists of three technological developments: a robotic camera mount, custom software, and a new type of website for exploring, sharing and commenting on gigapixel panoramas.

Timeline imagery: in Google Earth 5 they’ve included all the historical satellite imagery they have. A number of projects are taking advantage of the historical data visualisation capabilities, as well as mashing additional information with it. Some projects mentioned were:

• http://henryhudson400.com
• http://www.heywhatsthat.com
• http://mashedworld.com
• http://demo.mapfish.org/mapfishsample/1.1/demos/
• http://earthatlas.info
• http://earthswoop.com

Tours in Google Earth
Dreaming New Mexico – Go to different sites in New Mexico
Google has posted many GE tours http://google.com/plugin/tours

How can you create your own tours

1. Record the tour in GE
2. Use the Google Earth plugin embed gadget to prepare the tour if you’d like to share it on your web site – http://www.gmodules.com/ig/creator
3. Copy/Paste code generated from the gadget into your web site

Google Earth Mashups

• Media integration – http://photoskml.googlepages.com/youtube.htm
• http://mapthefallen.org – a project using Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• http://planetinaction.com – The Earth as your playground
• http://barnabu.co.uk -contains a number of GE map mashups
• Google lit trips – Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place

If you’re interested in creating your own visualization using Google Earth keep in mind that you can make use of geotagging tools, GPS data, and GIS integration (in the case of GE Pro) to create your maps.

Great job, Keene, I really enjoyed your presentation.

Over the past week I’ve been putting an Eee Top PC through its paces. When I first heard about the Eee Tops my first inclination was to roll my eyes at yet another in the continuous onslaught of netbook clones, but this Eee doesn’t look much like any I’ve seen before – it’s big(ger).

In reality, the Eee Top fills a niche not currently getting a lot of attention – desktops. With a relatively low price point, true to the Eee series, these machines deliver a sleek look, tiny footprint, big sound, and touchscreen interface all in a package the size of a medium-sized flat panel display. They come running Windows XP and include Asus’ own Easy Mode software with its touch-friendly interface. A short keyboard with stylus and a mouse also come in the box. The keyboard is minimalist with low-profile keys, and the mouse is a glossy hand-sized pod. Overall, the system appears very Mac-like and is very quiet too, operating at about 26dB.

Here are the official specs:

• LCD: 15.6″ 16:9 Wide Panel
• OS: Genuine Windows® XP Home
• Touch Screen: Single Touch
• CPU + Chipset: Intel Atom N270 + 945 GSE
• Memory: DDR II 1GB
• HDD: 160G SATAII 5400rpm
• Graphics: On board graphics
• Build-in Camera: 1.3M pixel Web camera
• Mic: Array Mic
• LAN: 10/100/1000 Mbps
• Wireless: 802.11 n
• Audio: 4W Hifi speaker x 2 + SRS Premium Sound System
• Microphone port in ß> Center/Bass
• Gigabit LAN x 1
• USB 2.0 x 4
• Power Supply: 19Vdc, 3.42A, 65W power adaptor
• Battery: N/A
• Net Weight: 4.3KG

The Eee Top is a good choice for homework, surfing, or display kiosk, and with its clean lines and cool blue ground effects it is something you won’t mind leaving out for the world to see. It comes loaded with OpenOffice for productivity, but could run MS Office if you prefer. The display is sharp and a good size for reading from. If you like running a high resolution and tiny text with which to create vast tracts of screen real estate, this system simply isn’t going to be for you. It’s a touch screen and Asus designed for sausagey human fingers tapping on the screen. Don’t be fooled though. The touch screen is quite accurate and when used with the stylus tasks like writing on an Elive whiteboard are quite legible.

It’s also possible to play movies IF you have an external player to connect via USB. There is no CDROM, DVD, or BluRay player on board. The picture is good, but if you think you’re going to try and get in some game time or log into Second Life, think again. The graphics card just can’t keep up with the more graphically demanding applications.

Here at CDE we are using this system to help students register for classes at the front desk and to direct them to other online resources. The entire set up is so compact that it fits on the counter without cluttering up space or blocking anyone’s line of sight. We’ve also thought about logging Barb into Skype so she can see who’s in the office and ambush people walking by (just kidding).

Generation Loss from hadto on Vimeo.

As I’ve been working on the class with her I’ve been noticing just how many resources are available online for the areas this course covers, and one site in particular really stands out – smarthistory.org. This site is an effort by two art history professors, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker , to eliminate the need for the giant art history text book traditionally used as required reading in their own classes. This site they are working on is a collection of images, audio, video, and insightful narrative all licensed under a Creative Common Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

The purpose of the site in their own words:

smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.

We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web’s interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing… [more]

It is a very well designed site with quite a (growing) collection of resources. In addition to their video collections on Vimeo and YouTube they have set up a Flickr group for anyone interested in sharing pictures they have taken of the works of art discussed on the smarthistory.org site.

I have to mention the very nifty timeline they’ve built for the site. So slidy!