I keenly read Ener’s posts and I am almost as passionate about virtual worlds but from a slightly differing perspective. They can be a wonderfully immersive media that can increase user engagement particularly in training and education. In education circles we like to discuss learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (tactile). There are other models [...]

One of the tenets of Enclave Harbor is to help raise environmental awareness while teaching middle school kids a little “real life” science via virtual field trips.  It is fitting to look at the environmental costs of computer usage since we are using OpenSim on a dedicated server that is on 24/7. Today a perfect opportunity arose to [...]

A few years ago I spoke at a number of eLearning conferences about using Second Life for creating fast video footage. Now I use OpenSim, mainly on a USB stick, and the ideology is the same: easy-to-build 3D models combined with fast, real-time rendering makes OpenSim a “rapid development” tool for eLearning. The alternative is to [...]

Unity is very cool, no doubt about it and if I was working on a commercial game, Unity would be a good choice for a browser-enabled teaser version of that game. The posts by Ener in the last week showcasing Unity as a viable way to share OpenSim content are compelling for what the future [...]

I have been following a discussion in LinkedIn’s Virtual World group that has taken a shift into an area of interest to me. It will come to no surprise to the reader’s of Ener Hax’s iliveisl blog to learn that this shift was loudly accented by our own Ener. Linda Rogers (Bread and Roses | [...]

A US House bill looks to eliminate Ed Tech spending as they “trim the fat” from the Federal budget. Many Education Technology programs fund expensive endeavors and many of those endeavors are only realised at more privileged schools. Two challenges with the more expensive technologies often come in the form of on-going training for teachers [...]

Ener Hax has mentioned that I use OpenSim on a USB drive for “real work” and asked me to write a post about this. I will dovetail into Ener’s post last night and frame this with a similar Blender 3D perspective. I have been using Blender 3D since it went open source in 2002. It’s [...]

A few years ago I had read about someone who took USGS maps and converted them to grayscale and mapped them to Second Life terrain files in the RAW format. The technique required Photoshop and some hit or miss tweaking. The complexity of this made it a less than ideal manner for doing what is [...]

Four years ago I set up a social networking presence to help promote Ener Hax and the iliveisl Second Life “land sales” business. Ener Hax is an account name in Second Life but those of you familiar with Second Life know that these names can take on a life of their own (ener hax actually [...]

It is no news that iPad fever sweeping the world, but for eLearning it causes grief and some retooling. Many eLearning tools output to Flash and it’s not just video but interactions such as tests, software simulations, and so on. Some of these interactions simply can not be recreated by other means (especially complex, multi-step [...]

OpenSim makes for a good, and free, tool for 3D animation work. I have spoken at conferences and webinars on the use of Second Life for creating video for branched scenario-based eLearning because it is a relatively easy tool to use. My focus has shifted to our current endeavor for secondary education but I still [...]

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report on Science Education has just been released and science literacy is “unacceptable” according to the executive director of the National Science Teacher’s Association (the NSTA is something that both myself and our OpenSim builder Ener Hax have been a member of in the past). One of our goals [...]

This post’s title is not one that I made up, it is quoted directly from a Senior Software Engineer at the IBM Center for Advanced Learning – “The patent under discussion in this thread is not for Learning Commons. It concerns a design methodology for 3D corporate learning projects.” It comes in response to a LinkedIn [...]

It has been quite the year and Ener not only has chronicled the move from Second Life to OpenSim with over 500 posts in 2010, but also has built many wonderful field trip locations on our grid. Along the path, Ener has provided some great tips for making a move as easy as possible and [...]

One of the things I covered in eLearning presentations about the use of Second Life, and now OpenSim, is that video captured from this type of virtual world is “real-time”. There is no rendering time as found in “real” 3D programs. Those of you reading this on the iliveisl blog take this fully for granted [...]