An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

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What happens when you take 6 online philosophy students with and average age of about 50* and attempt to run a discussion session on ‘identity’ in Second Life after only two short orientation sessions that not everyone could attend?

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Well about 202m if you are given 15 minutes to build a tower and you have the physics switched on. That was the challenge I presented to all the avatars who came along to the SL social event organized during the Emerge online conference (23rd to 25th June). On paper (or notecard) a simple task and one that was reused from a teaching activity designed for the OpenHabitat project by Cubist Scarborough.

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Yesterday's Emerge conference social event was more than just jolly tower building fun for me. A number of vague ideas that have been bouncing around my head since we finished the first art & design pilot were suddenly brought into focus. Earlier yesterday, whilst giving StevenW a hand preparing for the event, I got the chance to chat very briefly to Margarita about the initial evaluation of the pilot. One issue that has emerged is the restrictive nature of dealing with noobs. Another is the limitations of restricting learning to a three week block.

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Well… i’m finally getting my teeth back into opensim and finding that there are a couple of things i’d like to get built over the next couple of months. We’ve already gotten a good start on the automated installer for opensim, but what i’d really like to do now is attempt an integration with drupal.

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Well… time to put rhizomes aside for a bit and move onto working on some of the other interesting projects that I’m privileged enough to be involved in. It’s been quite a spring really… my partner has been on bedrest for the past 13 weeks, and with conferences and projects and writing I really haven’t had much space to think…

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I have an idea. I wonder if it's possible?

We have a stack of dusty old PCs cluttering up the place at Uni. Their old network sockets have been stolen by the shiny new computers, and without a network connection, they're pretty useless. So useless, in fact, that their hard-drives could be wiped without anyone getting upset.

So, this is the idea:

Somebody clever creates an magic installer CD that I can boot up an old PC with.

The installer CD wipes the hard-drive and installs the Debian OS+OpenSim standalone+Second Life client.

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Project launch - Monday May 26th - 10am Studio Theatre, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, PE, Canada.

Preamble

Living archives started as a conversation with Elizabeth Deblois about what we could do that might be interesting for the 2008 anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. She wanted to do something with technology and kids, and I’d been looking for a good project to bring some of the interesting things I’d seen on the intertubes here to the Island.

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Eduserv has just published John Kirriemuir's latest snapshot of Second Life use in UK HE/FE:

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/sl/uksnapshot052008

Apart from the fact that my contributions seem to have had words inexplicably added or removed (almost certainly by me), making me sound a bit daft, it's a great report.

As the first Open Habitat pilot with Art & Design students draws to a close it???s worth reflecting on how the process has gone before we dive into the formal analysis of interview transcripts, surveys and building work in Second Life.

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