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College Fair 2009 in SL

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Text and Photos by MARCHENA RAJAL This year, virtually 40 colleges and universities from around the world registered to participate in Second Life’s second main grid college fair. The SL College Fair tradition began 4 years ago on the Teen Grid. Two years later, it has moved over to the adult grid to attract undergraduate as well as graduate prospective students. This year’s fair was held October 25 and 26, along with a speaker series that included an impressive cast including Claudia Linden of Linden Labs, who addressed a full sim, discussing how Linden Labs is eager to work collaboratively with the College Fair to continue to broaden its audience and scope across higher education institutions in countries all over the world. Linden also shared how the Labs is seeking to make Second Life more age friendly so that mixed educational offerings can be accessible to everyone. Other speakers talked about various ...

Education | Sunday, 1 November 2009

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The Educational Possibilities of Open Source Worlds: A Layman's View

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Text and Photos by PIA KLAARIn the past couple of years, many educators have been migrating to newer virtual worlds under the OpenSim platform. So what exactly does this mean and how can it be translated into actual teaching and learning experiences?What is OpenSim?OpenSimulator, often referred to as OpenSim, is an open source server platform for hosting virtual worlds. From its FAQ " OpenSim is a platform for operating a virtual world, and supports multiple independent regions connecting to a single centralized grid. This is somewhat similar to the web, where anyone can run their own web server, tied together through the internet. It can also be used to create a private grid, analogous to a private intranet."OpenSimulator has been built upon the architecture of Second Life. But it is not a clone. It is a piece of open source software with the ability to support the Second life viewer protoc...

Education | Saturday, 3 October 2009

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