Second Life - on the Web!

Yep, got myself another life on the virtual world by signing up for a Second Life account. Been quite an experience so far...... teleporting to other worlds and chatting with one avatar. Still learning about the usefulness of virtual worlds and how to harness it for education purposes. Some sites visited included CDC Island, Meteora, NOAA, and NP island.

Some things I learnt :

You can chat online with whoever's on the island and it will appear on everybody's screen. You can press the talk button to communicate.

You can also do a bookmark of an island while you are on it. Just click on the World tab and then select landmark. To see this, just go to my inventory and check out the landmark folder.

You can also click on the search button (bottom toolbar) and then select the events button, pick a category, like education and then type in say, economics or French and search for say a lecture or something. Alternate catergories include things like shopping :) and culture etc.

If you zoom out on the world map (bottom tool bar) you can see the virtual world with green dots denoting where pple are, and the pink stars where there is a lot of activity. Just click on these dots and you can be teleported to the selected location. Voila! Or if you are already at an island, then click on mini-map to see where other pple are in case you want to be teleported next to them.

As for connecting with friends in second life, click on the communication button and a text box will pop up.

Once that happens, you can search for your friends by keying in their second life names. When you have found them, just click on the add button. An invite will be sent to your friend. If accepted, you will have a virtual friend whom you can go on virtual tours with. You can teleport your friend to right where you are. You can see if they are online by clicking on the communication tab.

Ay yes, to hide your own name (in case u need to), just go to preferences and change one of the options in there.

So much for the time being, hope to attend a lecture on economics on Second life soon. By then, hopefully, I would have learnt how move less clumsily on second life. Hey, I really enjoyed the flying bit :)

Learning about Skype

Ok, some more free stuff on the web that I found useful. Skype - you can connect with friends over the internet using their voice call or video call facility. And surprising, the voice quality is really good. Nice and clear. Lucky thing the web cam worked after I swopped my computer with another one that someone returned to the office :) No problem if you just do a two-party video call, but once you do add people (that's the button on the top right-hand corner), the video goes poof and you end up with a three-party voice call instead. Not too bad really, but they should have made it quite clear upfront that the video calls are just between 2 parties and no more.

Surprised me to that when you add people, you can select up to 24 participants to join your call. But if the group gets too large, it would be quite difficult to tell who's speaking isn't it? One probable use for this skype facility would be doing like a video call in class - an external speaker could be invited to speak on a certain subject, and this call could be projected on screen. Could be used during elearning week/business continuity week too, for students to ask questions, or for colleagues to interact outside of the office. Ah.....Oh yes, must remember to click on that video icon to turn on your video function. And you could also do a grouping, so that you call all relevant parties at one go too.

One other feature on Skype would be the Share screen feature where you can open up a document and show it to the other party online.

Here's the link to Skype The latest version is 4.1. Here's the user guide on Skype for video calls.