Whatever happened to Second Life? In the mid-2000s, Second Life was one of the most talked-about things in tech. Singer/songwriter Regina Spektor used the virtual world to conduct listening parties, while rapper Chamillionaire conducted virtual meet and greets. MTV sponsored in-world fashion shows, tech firms set up training centres and hip brands rushed to set up virtual storefronts; in the real world, Second Life was a business magazine cover star and the subject of breathless dozen-page spreads in tech titles. Things have changed. SL hasn't been a cover star for a while, and reports tend to concentrate not on exciting new possibilities but on real-world concerns, such as SL creator Linden Lab laying off 30% of its workforce in 2010. Many brands' stores have been deserted for years, and concurrency - that is, the number of people using the service at the same time - has been slipping. Don't believe the hype Part of the problem is that the gentlemen and women of the press got a bit excited. Learning curve
Limits Summary The Second Life Viewer and simulators have a division of labor, keeping track of the data that makes Second Life run. The Viewer's job is to: Handle locations of objects. The simulator's job is to: Run the physics engine. Limits are necessary for all of these components to work together. Avatar Max. # of attachments - 38 combined HUD or body attachments. Animation Building Communication Gestures Groups Maximum number of groups you can belong to: 42 for Basic accounts, 60 for Premium accounts. Inventory Maximum number of inventory items that can be sent in a folder: 42 Folders count as items too. Land Maximum parcel size: 65,536 meters² Covering a whole region, or square on the World Map. Mesh User Found Temporary Mesh limits: Because of an apparent bug in the importer stay within these limits. 174,752 triangles, beyond which additional triangles will appear as holes. Misc. Billing and Trading Limits - Includes LindeX currency exchange limits. Profile Performance Scripting Sound Textures
Virtual world language learning Virtual worlds are playing an increasingly important role in education, especially in language learning. By March 2007 it was estimated that over 200 universities or academic institutions were involved in Second Life (Cooke-Plagwitz, p. 548).[1] Joe Miller, Linden Lab Vice President of Platform and Technology Development, claimed in 2009 that "Language learning is the most common education-based activity in Second Life".[2] Many mainstream language institutes and private language schools are now using 3D virtual environments to support language learning. History[edit] Virtual worlds date back to the adventure games and simulations of the 1970s, for example Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only simulation in which the user communicated with the computer by typing commands at the keyboard. Three-dimensional virtual worlds such as Traveler and Active Worlds, both of which appeared in the 1990s, were the next important development. The 3D world of Second Life was launched in 2003.
A Second Life success story: Nyla Cheeky « Second Arts I’m not sure why Nyla and I met each other – I think it was from our mutual love of SL sculpture (and, in particular, the works of SL sculpture legend Starax Statosky). She told me that she was a designer of high fashion womens wear from Vancouver, Canada, and she showed me a few of her outfits. It was pretty clear that she wasn’t selling the standard SL women’s clothing styles of grunge or princesswear. Nyla takes the notion of Real Life-Second Life transfer to the next level. With a few bucks and a lot of faith in herself, Nyla set about turning the SL fashion world on fire. Read on after the fold for the more serious moral to the story… I went a little harsh in my assessment of the fundamentals of Second Life in yesterday’s post, “Not Ready for Prime Time.” Now, look at this video that Canadian television did on Nyla. Done? Nyla’s work stands as the reason WHY Second Life should succeed. One last thing: Nyla is a total sweetheart. Congratulations, Nyla! Like this: Like Loading...
[VIEWER 2 TIP] Shared Media: Show YouTube on a FUL I'm a big fan of narrative arcs, and Shared Media has wrapped up some loose ends very neatly (with other ongoing threads, like privacy, continuing to be covered). I've been asked for YEARS: "How do I play YouTube in Second Life?" Before Shared Media, some very clever Residents devised ways to continually re-fetch the MP4 links that YouTube has made increasingly available for videos on its site. Now we have Flash support with Shared Media, we can show YouTube as-is without any conversion or hosting hassles. BUT! It's cool I can show YouTube, but I ONLY want to show the video. There are several methods to this, but one of the simplest is provided by YouTube itself. See where it says "watch"? You can try clicking on the two URLs in your normal web browser to compare. Or, on a YouTube page, look towards the upper right for an icon with the hover tip "Watch this video in a new window". Other sites may have their own means.
Hot Potatoes The Hot Potatoes software suite includes five applications that can create exercises for the World Wide Web. The applications are JCloze, JCross, JMatch, JMix and JQuiz. There is also a sixth application called The Masher, that will compile all the Hot Potatoes exercises into one unit. Hot Potatoes was created by the Research and Development team at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. Commercial aspects of the software are handled by Half-Baked Software Inc. Hot Potatoes has been freeware since October 2009. Hot Potatoes was first released in version 2.0 in September 1998, at the EuroCALL conference in Leuven, Belgium. References[edit] Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (1998). Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (1999). Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (2001). Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (2003). Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (2004). Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes (2008). External links[edit]
From Euro 2012 to Gangnam Style: what Britons Googled most this year | Technology Like the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year (2012: omnishambles), Google's annual Zeitgeist list of the year's top UK internet search terms is becoming a handy barometer of what is on the nation's mind. In 2012 the top UK search terms included Whitney Houston, Kate Middleton, Gangnam Style and April Jones, the Welsh five-year-old who went missing in October. Zeitgeist measures the year's fastest-growing search terms, rather than the largest volume of searches. The top 10 overall list of trending terms features familiar online preoccupations – sport, celebrity, the royal family, viral videos, Apple product launches – along with others relating to big stories of 2012, including NatWest Online, which went down in July leaving customers with no access to their internet accounts and unable to use debit cards, and the disappearance of April Jones, who remains missing despite a massive search effort.
Self access language learning centers Self access language learning centers are educational facilities designed for student learning that is at least partially, if not fully self-directed. Students have access to resources ranging from photocopied exercises with answer keys to computer software for language learning. These centers are an outgrowth of a style of learning that can go by several names: learner-centered approach, learner autonomy or self-directed learning. These centers exist primarily in Asia, Europe and North America. Use of such facilities and the pedagogical theory they are based upon has its advantages and disadvantages. Proper use can result in a feeling of empowerment and better learning outcomes, but getting to the point where students and teachers can exploit them effectively can be problematic. Definition[edit] Self access language learning promotes the approach where students study independently choosing from among different resources that are available. Examples of self-access centers[edit]
Will digital addiction clinics be big in 2013? 6 January 2013Last updated at 20:06 ET Mobile and social media are the driving forces of the next wave of digital change. But these advances are reducing our attention spans and creating new dilemmas for the way we live and work, says Nic Newman. It used to be the case that British people had a reputation for buttoned-up restraint. Today we are some of the most active social networkers in the world - sharing our party pictures, our music playlists and our deepest secrets with hardly a moment's thought. Sir Tim Berners-Lee's tweet to the world at the Olympics opening ceremony was a reminder that social networking is now a key part of our national culture. And in terms of mobile, the UK now leads the world in its use of data. There is, of course, a link between the two. So what will the potent combination of social and mobile bring in 2013? Increasing amounts of our life will be controlled with our mobiles in 2013. On the one hand this is driving convenience and greater transparency.
Input hypothesis The input hypothesis, also known as the monitor model, is a group of five hypotheses of second-language acquisition developed by the linguist Stephen Krashen in the 1970s and 1980s. Krashen originally formulated the input hypothesis as just one of the five hypotheses, but over time the term has come to refer to the five hypotheses as a group. The hypotheses are the input hypothesis, the acquisition–learning hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis. The hypotheses put primary importance on the comprehensible input (CI) that language learners are exposed to. Krashen's hypotheses have been influential in language education, particularly in the United States, but have received criticism from some academics. Outline[edit] The five hypotheses that Krashen proposed are as follows: The input hypothesis. The comprehensible input hypothesis can be restated in terms of the natural order hypothesis. Corollaries of the input hypothesis[edit]
MOO A MOO (MUD, object-oriented[1][2]) is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time. The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to those programs descended from the original MOO server, and the other is to refer to any MUD that uses object-oriented techniques to organize its database of objects, particularly if it does so in a similar fashion to the original MOO or its derivatives. Most of this article refers to the original MOO and its direct descendants, but see Non-Descendant MOOs for a list of MOO-like systems. Background[edit] New MOOs have to choose a starting database from which to set their MOO up, or they can use a minimal one which contains only the necessary objects to start a MOO. Every object in the MOO is assigned a number, and may be referred to by this number, prefixed with a #, as well as its name when the user is in the object's presence. History[edit] Non-descendant MOOs[edit]
Computer-assisted language learning Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is succinctly defined in a seminal work by Levy (1997: p. 1) as "the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning".[1] CALL embraces a wide range of information and communications technology applications and approaches to teaching and learning foreign languages, from the "traditional" drill-and-practice programs that characterised CALL in the 1960s and 1970s to more recent manifestations of CALL, e.g. as used in a virtual learning environment and Web-based distance learning. It also extends to the use of corpora and concordancers, interactive whiteboards,[2] Computer-mediated communication (CMC),[3] language learning in virtual worlds, and mobile-assisted language learning (MALL).[4] The term CALI (computer-assisted language instruction) was in use before CALL, reflecting its origins as a subset of the general term CAI (computer-assisted instruction). History[edit] Typology and phases[edit] Internet[edit]
Terms