Second Life | | Page 2

Saturday has an exciting edge to it for me. Alan Levine has finally made it back to Sydney on his travelling tour Australia, which he has been documenting in his flipped version of his blog at CogDogRoo!

Alan is an inspiration to many of us, so if you haven’t added his blog to your RSS feeds, then you’d better catch up now! CogDogBlog is Alan’s place to bark about cool technology, web X.0 hype, weird web sites, photography, and other targets big and small.

This is my chance to say thanks Alan! Thanks mate!

Alan is a pretty important guy really 🙂 as Director, Technology Resources and Member Services of the New Media Consortium (NMC) as well as the Vice President Community and CTO with an international group of colleagues. In Second Life everyone knows he’s a dog (CDB Barkley)!

I met Alan recently ‘in world’ during a NSW Learnscope seminar being hosted on Jokaydia Island (where I have the good fortune to regularly meet educators from Australia to talk the good talk). In fact we had a good gathering at HeyJude Hall last night (that’s my place in Jokaydia and I’m Heyjude Jenns ‘in world’). Thanks to Sue Waters (Ruby Imako) for managing all the introductions! Phew!).

I was so excited by the whole ‘in world’ seminar that I didn’t stop to talk or ask questions. Today its different. A bunch of us are meeting up with Alan for shopping, movie and dinner – somehow I think we’ll all be barking furiously for a piece of the action.

Later: From left to right – Angela, Judy, Alan, Westley and Lynnette.

For our schools it is time to take a well-earned break with the term 3 holidays now underway. So it’s time for me to have a bit of fun on this blog too before I get back to more serious matters….

Time to talk about wonderful things…boing boing style …. prompted by my lightweight breakfast reading of the Sun Herald (no, not my choice of paper).

An article there about a device that creates plates, bowls and other tableware on demand and recycles them (a Star Treck fan like me recognises this!) , produced as a prototype by MIT led me to comment “I bet they got that from boing boing!”

A little research showed me that Boing Boing listed the story Dishmaker: Printer for Dishes on February 12, which came from Gizmodo, who had linked to this story 12 months earlier at TreeHugger. Well, here’s a video about the earlier prototype…you are looking at the beginning of replicators for us all 🙂

By the way, boingboing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies, and is listed by Technorati as Number two blog in the world, with Engadget, the number one blog in the world, having replaced boing boing at the top.

Boing Boing is a ‘beaut’ blog full of eclectic news!

Today I read about a recent “in-world” labor protest that took place in Second Life. The company in question: IBM. The aggrieved: 1850 avatars, including some bananas and triangles. Link.

I discovered a beautiful Gallery of Illustrated Endpapers. What are they? Endpapers are the inside covers and facing pages of books. Today, endpapers are almost always blank. But our more sophisticated forebears made good use of endpapers by adding thematic illustrations to them.

Look at the endpapers here.

I also found out about a Terry Pratchett DiscWorld reading order guide; thought about the Walk to Rivendell challenge; and saw how mobile technology worked for a reporter in Myanmar who had had his camera confiscated.

There’s lots more to read on Boing Boing every day – so add it to your RSS reader! Lots of good ideas to provoke discussions in your classrooms.

Now, settle back and watch another video – Dice Stacking – reported by Boing Boing of course!