Archive for February, 2007

This is a monthly archive of all the entries from all the sections and categories of the site. You can access it from the calendar in the sidebar, wherever the calendar appears.

Weeworld and I

I looked at WeeWorld a few months ago, and I have to admit that I was neither impressed nor unimpressed. I was just puzzled. There are not many things that I can genuinely say I fail to see the point of, but this was one of them.

WordPress 2.1.1

I upgraded about fifteen minutes ago, and all seems to be well. The upgrade is primarily concerned with bugfixes, and it seems to have fixed the bugs I had noted previously.

Privacy: the defence force

This site promises the impossible, since there is no way that they can remove material from the Internet Archive, to people who don’t know any better. In its tone, and its appeal to the clueless, it reminds me of government anti-drug propaganda from the nineteen fifties.

Electric Sheep & CBS

According to Yahoo News sometime yesterday afternoon, Electric Sheep have just scored a major financial success.

Avatars, actors & identity in Rosario

I have been interested in, and concerned about, the nature of identity in virtual arenas such as SL for some time now. My interest bubbled to the surface again last week when I responded to an entry in Bryan Alexander’s blog Infocult called Towards Third Life.

Privacy: the final frontier

The question about how notions of privacy can be maintained, in what some are calling a “surveillance culture” and others (including me) are not, is both interesting and complex. It has permeated some of the discussions on the ePedagogy course, and indeed Christina and others are currently working on a project that looks at this topic.

Wagon Train: some answers

The other day I was thinking about the fifties television western series Wagon Train. I was thinking about it because I remembered that Gene Rodenberry had pitched Star Trek to the television networks by describing it as “Wagon Train in space”.

Spore and Will Wright

Will Wright is the man who invented Sim City and then went onto make numerous variations and elaborations of that, culminating in Sims, Sims 2 and Sims Online. He has given a lengthy and detailed interview to the Popular Science web site about his new game Spore, which he describes as a “massively single player online game”.

Jimmy Campbell, RIP

Jimmy Campbell died on February 12th.

Analysing virtual learning environments

There is no clear standard for judging what constitutes a virtual learning environment. The term has been used to brand everything from a set of collaborative desktop tools to a fully immersive virtual world. Perhaps, then, we should choose a different starting point, and concentrate on asking questions that will allow us to decide whether a specific self-described VLE will be suitable for our needs or not.