last October i wrote about a creative use of sim-on-a-stick as an art catalogue. Beacara, the creator of the concept, was overwhelmed by requests and not only ran out of the OpenSim loaded USB sticks but the town hosting the art event did too!

Beacara now has a video of her art catalogue on a stick (below) and the art is great but i think her different builds to display the art are very nicely done and also easy for a total noob to understand and move through. very well done Beacara! =)

she sent me some notes regarding the video:

Do you recognize the Palm house created by Vanish from OpenSim Creations? It is a good example how helpful it is not to have to build EVERYTHING yourself. I just changed some parts inside.

The person at the end after the end :-) is not me but one of my students who assisted during the presentation.

The building with the exhibition of Liselotte Krieg is one of the Gropius-Masterhouses. It was a project I started with my students (and finished alone, just to have a kind of showcase – the video). When I find the time to rebuild the Bauhaus exhibition, I’ll make an .OAR for free download, might be nice for education.

excellent work and innovative use of modern media to create what is traditionally a very expensive paper catalogue (and you are being green too). the Bauhaus build would be an excellent addition as an OAR download, it is a lovely build (btw, i don’t often use capital letters because i follow early bauhaus philosophy regarding typography)

thanks Beacara and your machinima is also very nice! =)

Enclave Harbour’s website will serve up additional content for its workbook such as videos to act as alternatives/supplements to going in-world and current event links for each activity. the site is now set up as a “networked” multisite WordPress blog. up until a few month’s ago, those were called multi-user blogs. sites like the Huffington Post are WordPress multisites that allow dozens, even hundreds, of blogs to exist under one domain name

the idea for us is that each science field trip activity will be its own blog so that it can have multiple pages. it’s more of a website using WordPress as a CMS (content management system) than a blog because i don’t think subQuark will enable comments. each “activity blog” has its own URL like this: http://enclaveharbour.com/desalinationplant (it’s a live link but only has default content atm)

the theme we use randomly selects header images for the main site - pics below (the twenty eleven WP theme)

so now you know about multisite blogs! w00t! it took subQuark a night to get it set up, seems it’s a bit harder than a default setup, but pretty straightforward with a little Googling

this idea could work well for teachers or an OpenSim grid. teachers can allow students to make their own blogs (not a novel idea, teachers have embraced blogs as effective teaching tools for years) and you can set it up so that users create their own blogs – imagine something like InWorldz or 3rd Rock Grid with a Huffington Post type blog! the main blog can be configured to be an aggregator of all the networked blogs and make for a pretty fresh site!

of course there is administrative overhead and this is probably not what most OpenSim grids wants to focus on

apart from the Huffington Post example, CUNY uses one for its graduate programs and that site serves up the grad school website PLUS all of the professors’ courses as individual blogs! =)

over sixty (60) different Google policies are being rolled into one encompassing privacy policy

seeing as many of us in virtual worlds treasure our pseudonymity, this type of change may be significant and you can read about it here on Google and here on VentureBeat

you can get an idea of how it all rolls together by logging into your Google dashboard: https://www.google.com/dashboard/

so what does it all mean?

well, Google needs to make your data more valuable so that it can thrive as a company. creating a more complete picture of you makes your data more valuable to advertisers

do you wear large underwear? well your Hanes’ ads can be more tailored to you starting March 1st (pun intended)

what pseudonymity and anonymity?

last night in Mr Obama’s State of the Union address (PDF transcript) he mentioned something that has bothered me about secondary education – the No Child Left Behind Act. one of the issues that many feel is negative about that programme was directly mentioned:

To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test . . .

that has huge ramifications. teaching to the test sucks because many teachers are evaluated on how well their classes do on standardized tests and those outcomes can affect employment! testing certainly has its place, but in the US it is often seen as “the” measure. this testing-centric measure of success extends beyond secondary school into the university setting and i think it is one reason that a study found that 36% of US students have no improvement in critical thinking skills after four years of college!

creativity and passion are what inspire learning – not what the answer to question 23 is!

if what the US president said becomes valued by the educational community, then we may see a greater use of resources like OpenSim. OpenSim can be a great creative channel for both the teacher and student, and it’s a resource that is fairly accessible (more so than many hi-tech and high-priced current classroom trends)

now that US teachers may be more free to get back to teaching as a passion and not a test score, i hope to see continued exploration of OpenSim as a useful tool

one of the stumbling blocks for OpenSim adoption has to do with content. Second Life rules regarding content but Second Life is not appropriate for secondary education

having a starting point, such as OAR files with terraforming, landscaping, buildings, and tools, helps make adoption of OpenSim more successful. coincidentally, Graham Mills has just started a fantastic resource list of educational OAR files! it’s a Google Doc and a clever way to gather this information in one place

http://bit.ly/edu_oars (permalinked on the side “go to” links –>)

thanks Graham! =)

K-12 Ed tech director Erik N. uses OpenSim & sim-on-a-stick for his students and has contributed an OAR that you can find in Graham's listing

machinima – that word intimidates me a little and it shouldn’t – it’s just a word. when i think of machinima, i tend to think of a video that is really nicely polished, has great post-production effects, epic soundtrack, clever acting, and a production crew of several people

machinima can be a little more technical than making things in-world – what with terms like CODECS, 1080i vs. 1080p, chroma keys, kbps, 16 bit vs. 24 bit, variable sampling, hdmi, and a host of acronyms that can make you turn an run (you down with OPP ? yeah you know me <- omg, that was 21 years ago!) o_O

all those acronyms do mean relevant things to making machinima, but they shouldn’t stop you from trying it out. a few basic principles can get you started – like viewer size, a way to record it (like Fraps), and a way to do simple editing (like iMovie or Windows Moviemaker). later on you can get all crazy but those few things are enough to make a video that you can upload to YouTube (two past video posts: 1 | 2)

the best way to get started is to simply give it a try and see what happens. don’t expect to be all Spielberg on your first try and the bottom line is in the content that your are delivering. if you want to make a tutorial on how to build something, then the way you explain and show it are far more important than your production prowess

YouTube is the number one eLearning source in the world and it’s not because everything looks like a million dollar movie. the Khan Academy got over $10 million from Google in 2010 to make more educational videos and a quick click over to their site shows you that it’s not sophisticated, but it teaches extremely well

if you have been looking for some motivation to make the big plunge, then maybe the call for machinima for the 5th annual Virtual Worlds – Best Practices in Education conference will entice you. and you don’t have to be a teacher to enter. here are their categories copied right from their website:

Be Epic! (1-2 min target – 3 min max)
Be creative, bold and inspiring! Shorts in this category are based on the conference theme – “Be Epic.”

Virtual World Outreach (1-2 min target – 3 min max)
Show us why you are here, your virtual community and place in the Metaverse. Are you in multiple virtual worlds? Show us that too!

How-to/Instructional (3 min target – 4 min max)
The perfect three minute machinima. Can you teach something well in three minutes? Show us how you do this.

Educational (5 min target – 7 min max)
Show us an educational machinima that is currently being used for the F2F, blended or virtual classroom.

Teen (2-5 min target – 6 min max)
Show us your best! Open to more than Second Life – give us OpenSim, Halo, WoW, Minecraft! We’re ready for it.

Digital Storytelling (2- 5 min target – 6 min max)
Do you have a story? We have an audience.

Brave Beginner (1 min target – 2 min max)
For first time producers who have never made or uploaded a machinima to YouTube before. So be honest (first-timers only) and be brave!

Other (1-5 min target – 6 min max)

don’t be put off by thinking your idea isn’t good enough or that your technique is too beginner. some of the most effective videos are done in very simple ways (like CommonCraft – their work rocks and is pretty funny to watch – like their surviving zombies video)

the due date for submission is february 15th and it’s not limited to OpenSim; Second Life, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, and even Minecraft are okay too! =)

uber big thanks to GridJumper for bringing this to my attention, i may team up with subQuark to make an educational entry  =)

schmancy pants camera eh? =D

yesterday i mentioned making videos for media-rich eLearning. in this case, OpenSim acts as a 3D animation application to create video for illustrating middle school science activities

planned and written sripting would help make a better video than below to make sure key elements are in frame long enough to be meaningful (adding narration and closed captioning would be ideal)

for educators on a budget, making video like this is within reach. Fraps ($37 for the full version), Windows Moviemaker (free), and sim-on-a-stick (uber free! w00t!) make for a very inexpensive 3D video studio. add to that the relative ease with learning how to build in OpenSim (especially compared to Blender) and any educator with passion and enthusiasm could make their own videos for use in the classroom =)

compared to the outrageous prices for 3D projectors (and their bulbs!) and being constrained to material created by textbook publishers, creating video like this is a real bargain and a great way to express your creativity in a highly customised way and tailor video exactly for your students and to your specific curriculum (and you can add it to your resume to boot!) =)

as you know, what i have been doing for nearly two years in OpenSim is make stuff for Enclave Harbour which will be used as supplemental science activity stuff for middle school kids. for myself and subQuark, OpenSim is a great illustrative tool for science concepts. so rather than a nice drawing of something like cargo blimp, we use OpenSim to make a 3D one. it’s nothing earth shattering or even innovative. it’s an easy way and somewhat accessible way to make 3D graphics. if i were to try to make a cargo blimp in Blender – holy crap, it would take me months. i bet i could spend 2 months easy on that. subQuark is more skilled than me in Blender but i bet it would take him at least 2 weeks to do it. and when done, all you could do is either export some nicely detailed images or maybe a short video of it, doing it in OpenSim allows the possibility of having a student walk around it and get a sense of scale and be more engaged (immersed) with it and with the science principles it is illustrating

teachers and professors do all sorts of neat things in OpenSim from modelling plant cells to molecules to that Fern Seed project i always mention (the million dollar NSF grant project)

the other day i freaked out about the iBook2 authoring tool and the strong desire to see OpenSim on an iPad. ever the voice of reason (maybe it’s the martini talking), subQuark pointed out that it is not unusual for a student to be using something like an iPad in conjunction with something else when doing an activity. for example, it’s not weird for second grade kids to be doing colouring of say a butterfly on a piece of paper and to be using an iPad as a reference tool to see what colours the parts should be (must be wealthy school districts!). he went further by floating out the idea that maybe Enclave Harbour won’t be an actual printed book but be dished up as iPad compatible eLearning. with that in mind, i could see a situation where a student could be accessing the eLearning part of Enclave Harbour and also be going in-world to get the info needed for the eLearning content (it’s just like the original workbook he has been working on, only made into an online format)

i get really stuck in my ways and sometimes it takes a smack upside my head to break out of my rut. after a day of thinking about this, i really warmed up to the idea. if Enclave Harbour’s “workbook exercises” were presented online, it could include much richer material than a printed book. it could offer some of the visual assets like the iBook does – mainly more images (and no need to convert them into 300 dpi files) and videos. while the virtual world component is important in my thinking, videos of specific things with more in-depth examples, would add a lot of value. the virtual world stuff i make is still central to it all and acts as two things in that scenario – the immersive virtual world and a 3D studio to make videos with. suddenly it dawned on me (i told you i was slow) that the virtual world builds now cab serve double-duty and have twice the usability (hey does that make me twice as important or twice as awesome? maybe i can get twice as many burritos as pay!) =D

all of this makes OpenSim that much more valuable to me and i can see that even sim-on-a-stick would be incredibly useful if it was only used as a way to make educational videos (like a tour of a giant plant or animal cell or even of a DNA strand!) =)

it still would be nice to have a tablet viewer and that would increase the possibilities for OpenSim, but until then i’ll enjoy a martini and keep tinkering in-world and enjoying its creative outlet =)

Daniel Voyager wrote a short but poignant post today about the one year anniversary of the Teen Grid in Second Life closing. i think he may be the only one to bring that up, i had forgotten about the date

the teen grid was always small but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important to students and teachers. when Linden Lab removed (merged) the teen grid they changed the TOS to allow 16 and 17 year olds to access the regular grid and they also added language to the TOS allowing 13 to 15 year olds to “access Second Life through an affiliated organization and will be restricted to the private estate of that organization.”

i don’t know if any such organisations ever came into existence and suspect that the abandonment of the ed/non-profit pricing sent a clear message that Linden Lab was no longer interested in helping any such groups

i’d like to think that kids who enjoyed using Second Life may have set up their own private OpenSim network and kept doing their thing. kids are definitely adept enough to be able to setup OpenSim on their own

the only image i could find online for the Teen Grid - from an aug 14th, 2010 post i did

both subQuark and i have written about the need for OpenSim (and Second Life) to run on an iPad. that in itself is a no-brainer – the iPad is becoming ubiquitous in general and especially in education

there are many K-12 schools and universities who use iPads and even some that distribute them as a needed piece of hardware. even though, according to W3Schools, only 0.4% of all internet traffic is via the iPad it shapes the entire education industry

yesterday at the Guggenheim, Apple announced its iBooks textbook platform with the intent to dominate educational publishing (video below)

e-books have been around for a while now and are typically seen as one of many channels of book distribution. Apple will change that and it will become the predominant channel to get books into students hands. there are lots of advantages – one device holds many pounds of books, books can be interactive and have 3D models in them as well as video and audio, and it is easier for authors and publishers to create new editions each year (or each semester! thus forcing students to buy new, rather than used, books)

the inevitable ubiquity of the iPad in the classroom underscores the need (desire) for an iPad accessible OpenSim model

if you are an educator, you may watch to watch the iBooks Author video – it’s pretty compelling

CARI.net and Limestone Networks are data centres with top servers, great customer service, and they host lots of OpenSim deployments. either one is a good choice and i am biased because we have been on Limestone for 17 months without a hiccup

every now and then i go on their sites and build my fantasy server (something with 8 cores and 48 gigs of RAM for $599 a month! that should run 8 sims with 45,000 prims each!)  ≧^◡^≦

typically i’m not able to configure identical machines to make exact comparisons but i was able to the other night with the following specs:

• Xeon E3 1230 (4 cores)
• 8 GB DDR3
• 500GB SATA2 hard drive
• Windows 2008 Standard (64-bit)
• Unmetered Bandwidth (10 Mbps Uplink)

monthly costs: CARI $270 | Limestone Networks $249.99

both are free setup and both are current specials.  these specs would run a great 4 to 8 sim grid and even do 16 sims (same specs we run – see image below). i may be conservative but i like following the 1:1:1 rule of one CPU core plus one gig RAM equals one SL-like sim. the “extra” 4 gigs helps carry the weight of the servers that in Second Life that do messaging, friends, groups, maps, inventory, media, voice, etc

the difference in price is close at about 8% and i’d do a bit of review research to see which fits your needs better (caveat emptor) =)

from my niche experience, i never get close to maxing out the CPU except when terraforming (that seems to spike to 70% for me). typically our CPU runs under 10%

with that in mind,  you can configure a great server close to the above specs for $151 a month at Limestone Networks

• Core2Quad Q9300 (4 cores)
• 8 GB DDR2 (vs. ddr3 above)
• 500GB SATA2 hard drive
• Windows 2008 Standard (64-bit)
• Unmetered Bandwidth (10 Mbps Uplink)

is running your own server worth it?

that depends on your needs and tech comfort level. you can go the route of a leased server and have about the most freedom possible. you could install OpenSim yourself (a large number of OpenSim people seem to have this skill which alludes me) or hire someone to install it for you (expect to pay between $350 to 500 for that)

OpenSim hosting companies might be a close match (or less) and include expertise and support for piece of mind (SimHost ran a special on a similar setup for $160 a month last summer). for us, SimHost is a real value

one of the pluses of OpenSim is that there are many flavours from the low-hassle and totally free sim-on-a-stick to the infinitely scalable cloud hosting from Kitely to a deluxe personal server like the above

SOPA and PIPA (all poo poo if you ask me) have been slowed down and 8 US Congressmen withdrew their support of it due to your voice!

but . . . it’s not over yet

the people wanting this abusive power, the Motion Picture Association of America, are now ramping up the money and advertising campaign to push this forward. it’s no secret that money dictates US politics and the Motion Picture Association has lots of money. the MPAA also described yesterday’s protests by you, me, Wikipedia, and Google as “irresponsible publicity stunts” and as an “abuse of power”

wow! the nerve eh? i didn’t realise that Wikipedia and Google answered to the MPAA! just in case any power hungry and greedy MPAA people read this, Google and Wikipedia can do whatever they like!

if blacking out the google logo earns the MPAA’s criticism then imagine what will happen if SOPA eventually passes!

here are two examples, as i understand it, of how something like SOPA or PIPA can impact us:

1) i write a tutorial about Sony Vegas as a nice video editing tool for machinima (as i have in the past). someone at Sony thinks that associating this blog with their product harms their brand or infringes on their copyright – they can have my site legally removed from search engines and taken down. now i could launch a lawsuit against them to prove i am innocent but what are the odds that i come up with money to do that or am able to beat Sony’s hundreds of lawyers?

2) you build a Stargate looking teleport dealio in Second Life and instead of the BSG fiasco of last year where a few sims were affected (Tateru’s post on that), MGM Studios can have Second Life completely shut down! =(

millions of people from all around the world spoke up yesterday and were heard. and we all need to continue to be vigilant to keep the internet free and open

the internet should not be a corporate dictated censorship tool – it’s a tool to make the world a better place and share information freely despite what Mr Murdoch thinks (owner of News Corp (the world’s second-largest media conglomerate)

are you in the US?

please consider signing the Google anti-SOPA petition. thanks =)

Maria published her monthly counts and analysis of OpenSim growth yesterday and she counts a total of 22,651 OpenSim regions and these include OSGrid, and public and private grids that report their numbers. her totals will always be less than all deployed OpenSim regions because not everyone reports their numbers

22,651 regions is a new high for OpenSim and approaches Second Life’s 23,619 private estates and isn’t too shabby compared to SL’s total sims of 30,840

while you can’t compare an OpenSim region to a Second Life sim as exact equals, you also can’t say that OpenSim is small from a land perspective. of course user accounts are still tiny for OpenSim compared to what SL has. they claim 10,000 signups per day but what’s the value in that number? i have 33,000 Twitter followers and what does that prove? maybe that i am OCD but as far as success goes, sims is a meaningful number since they represents the main revenue stream for Linden Lab

OpenSim can no longer be seen as a second-rate alternative to Second Life

people are showing the viability of OpenSim with where they decide to set up home, shops, and clubs. this does not mean Second Life is dead, it just means that equal or better options are available

Second Life lost over 1,000 private sims in the last year which could be as much as 3 to 3.5 million dollars per year (a loss of about 5% of LL’s annual revenue). some of that is flat-out attrition – people leaving that don’t want to do virtual world stuff, but some of that are people choosing something else that meets or exceeds their needs

Maria points out that 391 private sims inSL poofed last month and i’d say a good number of those were from the “no setup fee” special LL did October 21-23  (gee, i’d like the setup fees from my 19 sims refunded! i could buy a car!). the first month’s tier would have started on November 21-23 and that $295 is a big chunk of change to come up with!

so what does this mean?

for OpenSim it means we will likely see the number of regions surpass those in Second Life in 2012

overall, it means that virtual worlds are doing well and becoming more widely adopted. despite the small drop inSL sims, the growth of virtual worlds when you combine Second Life with OpenSim is significant with a total of over 53,000 sims/regions

SOPA is legislation in the US that could have profound impacts on the internet and even on us in virtual worlds

US legislation will impact the world and understanding SOPA is worth the 2 minutes of the video in the article below

Explainer: Understanding SOPA

yesterday i posted about Dorena Verne successfully configuring sim-on-a-stick for hypergrid use. it’s an interesting hack because it may be easier to just run the OSGrid preconfigured setup but there could be advantages to being able to hypergrid from your actual USB-based OpenSim grid

i posted the Google gobbledeegook transalation which should in no way reflect the good work Dorena did. luckily, Dil Spitz, was much brighter than yours truly in making a very good translation of Dorena’s PDF! thanks Dil! =)

Dil also makes the very good suggestion of “it might be better to reserve the grid-coordinates of the own-sim instead of just using anyone.” and i’ll add that this is a modification that may take additional tweaking for you to make it work

so here is Dil’s translation, complete with Dorena’s screenshots, as a PDF for Sim on a Stick to the HyperGrid

thanks Dil and Dorena! =)

Dorena set Simona free onto the HyperGrid! here she is in Dorena’s World

i’m not quite certain what Dorena’s World is – it seems like a German version of the OSGrid but maybe more communal with a very small fee to connect your grid (makes sense, the cost to run the OSGrid depends on donations)

Dorena’s World is coming up on its second year anniversary and judging by the video below, it’s an awesome looking world!

happy anniversary Dorena’s World and thank you for showing how to setup hypergrid for sim-on-a-stick!

update:
Dorena is concerned that the translation and edits done by Dil may not work. if you try this, please keep that in mind. as with anything online, you’re on your own! as i stated in this post, it seems like doing a full-blown install on your own machine is the way to go because your grid would poof every time you disconnected. either way, have fun! =)