Some information about me for those who feel a need to know about this sort of thing.

A regularly updated list of papers presented at conferences since 2003.

For the last four years I have been engaged in producing and creating a large-scale project that began as an attempt to create an online synthetic world, and moved swiftly into the more interesting attempt to model a synthetic culture. This paper will discuss the issues we have encountered in our project, focusing on the complexities of a many-authored communal discourse around a becoming space.

L’angelot made a video for the Eurovision Song Contest. It was banned. Here it is, along with a short biography of the man himself.

The Inclusive Holiday is a mixed media work begun in 1996, and still continuing. It is based, in large part, on the gnostic writings of Philip K Dick and Dave “Dave Cutlass” Cutlass, the importance of whose work is largely overlooked. What is presented here is a schematic outline of the main narrative thread of the piece.

In this paper I try to tackle a problem that has been disturbing me for some time now: the way that the self-serving term “virtual reality” has been allowed to fashion and shape much of the discussion that takes place around this topic, to the detriment of everyone except a small group of hucksters and cheerleaders.

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.

This paper describes a way of working with teaching in a field like new media; a method of teaching in a fast evolving field, where people more and more must teach themselves in order to keep up with the development in the techniques and trends. The paper outlines a course held in the autumn of 2003 in Arcada a Swedish speaking polytechnic in Finland.

Some sources of sounds licensed through Creative Commons, and thus available for varying degrees of reuse.

Marinetta is the capital city of Rosario, a fictitious island situated in the Mediterranean Sea. It is also the title of an ongoing educational multimedia project that began in June 2002 and is intended to last for a minimum of five years.

The Entropia Universe is another online synthetic world that claims to have a “real” economy. Currently it claims to have about half a million members.

The annual Eurovision Song Contest was held in Helsinki this year, and took place yesterday after a week of special events, street parties, and Arcada’s hugely ambitious DINA Host City broadcasting extravaganza.

When you have logged into Second Life you can find Rosario using the following steps.

When asked, students, almost without exception, reported that there was something wrong with the virtual worlds they had seen. We asked them to be precise about what they meant. Eventually we got two enlightening answers. One: there is something hollow at the heart of the worlds. Two: it feels like you are wandering around amateur stage sets. The consensus seemed to be that the worlds felt like cardboard boxes painted in one way or another. As one student said, “When I went to the Venice world there was no Venice-ness about it”.

There has been a thread on the Second Life Education mailing list about griefers, of which there have been a plentiful supply recently. This set me thinking and I posted the following note, which I will expand at some point into a more considered piece.

This is the outline for a project for the course ePedagogy: Issues Management / Strategic Specialisation. It was written by Owen Kelly & Camie Lindeberg in June 2006, and revised in August 2006.

This is the abstract and explanation that I sent to Steve Bronack this morning. It is my submission for the LoW conference (number five in the annual series), to be held in Hong Kong this Ocotber.

Yesterday, at the fourth League of Worlds conference, I made a presentation entitled Augmentation, Immersion and Identity in Rosario: the trading card game, and the slide show is available at Zoho.

Two Dutch students, Sebastiaan Schelfaut and Matthias Buyle, who are studying architecture at the University of Ghent, Belgium, wrote to Arcada last week to ask if we would take part in a survey about our use of…

A tool for screengrabbing your Second Life avatar so that it can be stored and used locally.

Perplex City has a cross-media approach to a narrative entertainment that embodies a lot of what Camie and I have been discussing for the last two years. The only difference is that they have actually implemented it.

A short note about some decisions that we agreed with Stefan prior to the Hamburg epedagogy conference.

I had first heard of the SecondLifeLink application about a week ago and had determinedly ignored it. Finally, however, I had three invitations in Facebook to install it and “meet my friends virtually! see my friends’ avatars! share my favorite destinations!” So I stopped to think about it a bit more.

We have just completed a forty hour festival in Rosario, our virtual culture experiment in Second Life. It was a night-time festival that lasted for ten consecutive nights and, because SL has four hour “days”, this meant that, in reality, it lasted for ten one-hour sessions, which took place every four hours.

When you first join Second Life you will choose from a number of standard avatars. However, the point of the avatar is to represent you (or the character you are playing) in the world. A standard avatar is probably not a good idea then.

hass arived at Arcada in the rain, and expects to take off for sunny Rosario soon
has installed Firefox 3 on both laptops, with only a minor loss of add-ons (Furl, and Box.net)
believes that the signs suggest there will be a major earthquake on Rosario in the next day or so – followed by the return of The Fog
has got a long way with the rebuilding, with Catharina; and is very happy to know that Eva has got a long way with the web site too
discovered Balliwick at www.spinmass.com – it makes creating RAW files for SL terrains a MUCH more intuitive process…

has been shopping, found some unexpected Bovril, and is now catching up on his mail
has downloaded several of Doc’s albums from Jamendo, and Project Retouch (after listening to Project Divinity again this morning)
has presented optional Marinetta Ombro courses to IT students, chatted with Eva about css and cMaps, emptied his in-box, and left for home

is demonstrating Hellotxt to first year students
is back in the lab, preparing for a Marinetta session

is waiting for news
has a first draft of an important plan ready, and awaits some reaction
is testing out a wireless network. Second Life, anyone?
has been dogfighting in Rosario in the name of enhanced pedagogy

This paper outlines the second stage in the development of a long-term project at Arcada Polytechnic. Marinetta is an online multi-user 3D depicting the capital of the island Rosario at the south of the Mediterranean Sea. Marinetta is intended to provide a virtual community with a real sense of location, and to offer distance education in the college on the island. Marinetta has provided a platform for practical student projects in the areas of production, design, and programming as well as for thesis projects involving experiment, research and analysis, and facilitating cooperation between departments.

There are four steps that you need to complete before you can even start the course assignments. These are listed here. Each step links to a page with more detailed instructions.

The course will be in two parts. Each part will consist of a task or set of tasks. There will be two end dates. The details are here