I'm sorry to have missed him but I rather thought epredator might have a bumpy ride at the CETIS meeting. I'm expecting something not dissimilar myself next week, JK's comments notwithstanding. 

In case anyone needs "cheering up" (and I'm being ironic, of course), Joe Essid blogs a slightly different tale of woe here as he beats a strategic retreat from virtual worlds: http://iggyo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/technology-learning-question-of-roi.html in favour of mobile. He at least ends on a positive note, with that Forsyth County story. I think it does illustrate the danger of adopting the view that the "grass is necessarily any greener" in the US.

I guess Joe's concerns might be addressed marginally if there was (a) more open academic content, (b) it was easier to deploy. As I dare say ePredator pointed out, OAR and IAR files might help a bit in that context. Fleep Tuque is developing a support site for OpenSim educators -- it's very early days but it shows promise, I think: http://opensim-edu.org/blog/  

If anyone's interested, I have possible funding from the HEA for a STEM-oriented OpenSim workshop next year. 

Incidentally, I left Edinburgh out of my original list although I've not had the opportunity to peruse the snapshots interviews more thoroughly yet.

Best wishes

Peter
________________________________________
From: For anyone working in education with an interest in virtual worlds [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Hollins, Paul [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 22 March 2012 09:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VIRTUALWORLDS] Whither VWW report?

Karen, Mark,

I fear it •is• largely relating to the "current financial climate" IT depts are being asked to reduce costs significantly and on the whole are unwilling to take in their view "unnecessary risks" or compromise network integrity (again costly).

Innovation in teaching and learning where it is percieved to be costly or is outside the conventional university business model will be sacrificed however short sighted this may appear to be .

Weather we like it or not "virtual Worlds" are seen as very last year (evidenced for me by the response to Ian Hughes (e-predator) at the JISC CETIS conference this year .

We must in the short term just keep persevering with small incremental development as we climb on to the "plateau of productivity" with Virtual worlds , it will be tough for the next few years !

Paul hollins
Director Institute for Educational Cybernetics The University of Bolton


-----Original Message-----
From: For anyone working in education with an interest in virtual worlds on behalf of Karen Johnson
Sent: Thu 3/22/2012 9:24 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VIRTUALWORLDS] Whither VWW report?

Oh heart felt agreement Mark!  It seems that everything is more important
than IT, except for that small part relating to Micorsoft Office (and even
that doesn't get used properly).  Why is it that so few universities seem
to understand?  Is it just the economic climate - I don't think so.  The
majority of universities seem to have always had a strange relationship
with IT/new technologies.  What is it that frightens them so much?

Tim

On 22 March 2012 09:07, Mark Childs <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>  I think the issue isn't so much that universities aren't taking an
> interest in SL, or other virtual worlds, but that mainstream support is
> still very poor at many institutions. There have recently been a smattering
> of blog postings defending the role of IT Service departments in supporting
> e-learning (e.g.
> http://www.masmithers.com/2009/12/09/direct-from-the-innovation-prevention-department/),
> and I find these arguments to be largely disingenuous - if not completely
> naive. In recent weeks, working for different universities, I've
> encountered IT departments that will install SL just for a workshop, then
> uninstall it directly afterwards. At another university I was guaranteed a
> computer lab that had SL running on the machines, only to get there and
> find that it wasn't. Luckily the incompetence of the room timetabling
> people was cancelled out by the incompetence of the IT people (they'd
> forgotten to set up admin protection) so the students could download SL and
> we could go ahead with the session. This is a constant battle educators
> still face, that really we shouldn't be. Virtual worlds technology has been
> around for so long now that ITS departments should have caught up. If you
> have your own machines, and your own funding, using VWs for teaching is
> possible, if not, then most educators in most institutions will be forced
> to give up.
>
>
>  Dr. Mark Childs
> Senior Research Fellow Elearning
> Faculty of Engineering and Computing
>
> Skype ID: mark_childs
> SL: Gann McGann
>
> Book: Reinventing Ourselves: Contemporary Concepts of Identity in Virtual
> Worlds
>
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reinventing-Ourselves-Contemporary-Immersive-Environments/dp/0857293605/
>
> "Give John K a gun and he will rob a bank, give him a bank and he will rob
> the world"
>
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* For anyone working in education with an interest in virtual
> worlds [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Virtual World Watch [
> [log in to unmask]]
> *Sent:* 21 March 2012 12:48
>
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* Re: [VIRTUALWORLDS] Whither VWW report?
>
>
>  Peter-pops,
>
>  On 21 Mar 2012, at 12:30, Miller, Peter wrote:
>
>   For my sins I'm giving a presentation at a RL conference on use of
> OpenSim in my subject area next week. I'm trying to anticipate awkward
> questions and one of the most obvious is the lack of uptake at an
> institutional level. Now the obvious answer in my case is that OpenSim has
> only recently become a viable alternative to SL, at least in my area, and
> that SL has/had its own issues, some of which OpenSim addresses more
> successfully than others (cost, running behind firewall vs no web viewer
> or mobile option).
>
>
> In this context, regardless of the merits or otherwise of my own
> activities, it would be useful to know which universities are providing
> support at an institutional level and it might be handy to have a quick
> peruse of the VWW snapshot if available. Otherwise, of course, I can read
> the online extracts but I assume they are just a subset of the final
> report? Or is the report just too depressing?
>
>
>  Depressing? No - cautiously more positive about Virtual Worlds in
> education than (personally) have been since the summer of 2009. Though
> perhaps more optimistic about OpenSim and similar, than Second Life.
>
>  The print version of #10 (#10.2) was somewhat out of date before it was
> even sent out and had one glaringly bad error in it, as a few people
> (somewhat gleefully and unhelpfully) pointed out.
>
>  #10.4 has the same snapshot submissions - all of the legit ones are on
> www.virtualworldwatch.net so you can take them from there. Will wrap some
> updated and hopefully more future-proof (i.e. not out of date within a
> week) text around these and put back up soon - funded work is a priority
> and VWW is (again) in non-funded status. I think I'll rob a bank*; that
> appears to be where all the money / funding has gone to.
>
>  John Kirriemuir
> Virtual World Watch
>
>  * - if either the authorities, or US immigration, read this, I wish to
> clarify that was a joke.
>
>  Access the list, archives and filestore via the web on
> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/VIRTUALWORLDS
>
>
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>
>
> Access the list, archives and filestore via the web on
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>
>


--
Tim Johnson (aka Karen aka Bluesky Larkham)
Adviser in Digital Literacy
ILS
University of Worcester
Worcester   WR2 6AJ
[log in to unmask]

Creator of UKnme in SL
UK Nurse and Midwife Education Group
Drop me an email or IM me in World if you would like to join.
We welcome everyone technicians, librarians, nurses, midwives, e-learning
specialists, medics and all professions allied to medicine

Access the list, archives and filestore via the web on http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/VIRTUALWORLDS

Access the list, archives and filestore via the web on http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/VIRTUALWORLDS
Access the list, archives and filestore via the web on http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/VIRTUALWORLDS