MediaX Conference - Second Life Education Tour

I am participating in the MediaX Conference at Stanford. I'm taking people on the tour of Second Life.

Here are the locations we will visit:

• Virtual Hallucinations - a simulation showing the experience of people with schizophrenia


• Lexcity - Language Lab - visit a language simulation in which residents are immersed in an english language learning city fit with a hotel, theater, musuem, worship house and residential homes.


• Democracy Island - a project with NYU and the New York City government to collaborate on the development of city projects such as airport and neighborhood


• CA190 Gaming class - a game design class taught at Montgomery College. Students built game art using Second Life in team based work groups.


• Educator's Coffee House - sit on a comfy couch and watch an Aimee Weber movie of the solar system as an example of educational movies that can be produced in second life


• Teazer's University - hourly classes on building 3D objects in second life


• Dartmouth University - visit downtown hanover and see how educators use this rendition to teach emergency response training.

There are over 10 universities participating in Second life teaching everything from architecture to sociology to game design. The possibilities are immense. Get your free account and dive in.


Highlights from the conference.
People are aroused in games. Their excitation lowers during stalking or when a page load but when they click or kill their excitation increases and stays high. Byron tested this theory using skin probes. Dan Schwartz presented on teachable agents where they develop gaming tools that teach reasoning to computer agents. Take aways "gaming brings people to learning." Stanford is building a "green dorm" in which they will create a "zero net carbon" building that does contribute to ozone. He also spoke about cars the Lexus hybrid has both performance and low carbon emission. He presented a vision of a garage roof that contained solar panels that would ru your car for 12,000 miles per year. Wow. Today we are driving hybrid, he believes in 2015 we will driving electric cars. Speaker shares how the onset of file sharing cause a peak in live perfromances even thugh cd sales dropped. He shows that artists are earning more money now. Less money is going into the hands of the publishers.