I'd appreciate any comments from experts  on this sort of development.

see  http://sl-sexualhealth.org.uk/?p=18 for the video & comments. Supporting papers etc are at: http://healthcybermap.org/sl.htm

Rod 

Rod

Our university IT services have now responded to my request about second life & says:

" I have been passed your Helpdesk job regarding using the Second Life software whereas you mentioned that you thought it maybe a firewall issue...which it is!
Basically it is only being used at present, by two staff members in the university, as it is being monitored to see exactly which ports need to be opened to allow it all to work.  Any staff members (such as yourself!) who require access, need to log this as a Works Request as their machine needs to first be given a static IP address as well as certain firewall rules to be set on their user id.  Also need confirmation of why this is required, so details such as the ones you E-mailed through to the Helpdesk would be required too."

My boss is asking me for a breakdown of the hours I spend on various roles & as EMERGE doesn't have any teaching "buy out" attached I have to find a category to put this time under.

The software seems a myriad of different applications & little coherence between them - when I'm trying to create applications I try to use the KISS principle for the students sake & feel EMERGE may be going against this. I would think that for a web developer type individual this may provide a great opportunity to try out & evaluate this wide range of applications but for an academic it may be too much too fast (& without enough time to prepare).

I'm also wondering about the  July 9 & 10: Emerge community conference, Lowry Centre, Manchester & whether this will be worth 2 days of my time - which I need to justify to my boss. Has anyone who attended the first event in London got any comments which might help me decide?

I currently feel that I am drowning & would appreciate any lifelines anyone has to offer.

The workshop  highlighted various difficulties with using the Emerge elgg site which is counter intuitive. People were trying to complete their profiles (and got error messages if comas were in the wrong place) and find others with similar interests to their own + to find the wikis (and events from the initial f2f meetin) & these were difficult to identify.

For those unfamiliar with social networking software the lack of structure which might be found in VLEs etc caused problems - and the navigation items (top right of front page) do not make it clear what tools or items can be found in particular sections.

The settings and variety of browsers on some of the machines also limited access to some of the resources (eg podcasts).

I've  also  just found out that you can't directly upload images! & have to put them into filesapce.

Despite the technical difficulties this f2f workshop did help people to navigate & also help with discussion and teambuidling. 

Rod 

For my profile, CV etc (including family snap) see RodSpace which also includes a link to my Blog Informaticopia (which I haven't been able to include in the feeds here) - it's been a bit busy the last few days as I've managed to use the freedom of information act to get hold of a copy of a report into the NHS University which I've published on the blog.

I work for the University of the West of England (UWE) teaching health informatics & with various R&D projects around elearning.