From: For anyone working in education with an interest in virtual worlds [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Karen Johnson
Sent: 13 September 2011 09:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VIRTUALWORLDS] Distracted by pie

On 13 September 2011 01:17, Virtual World Watch <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

*Taps on the screen* anyone out there?

In response to the occasional "What's happening with Virtual World
Watch?" "Is it coming back?" "Where have the snapshots gone?"
questions...

Nothing really much has happened with the (funding absent) VWW so far
in 2011 - in fact, the last post is from December 2010.

Round about the end of last year, the website was hacked (badly, as
some folk saw) and partially rebuilt, though a lot of the content is
still missing. A full rebuild, though attempted several times, didn't
work out; my lack of technical skills, lack of patience, and rickety
old wordpress versions were not a combinations. It also didn't help
that I ended up spending an unexpected four months over several trips
in the USA, and the ramifications of all that caused spare time plans
to be torn up (funded work is ringfenced; the rest is on a "when
there's time" basis). I also spent too much time being distracted by

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pie&w=87775696%40N00&s=rec

However, the newest version of Wordpress (3.2.1), along with other
upgrades, a change of package and update procedures, has helped
tremendously and stuff appears to (finally) work now. The domains
(we're also .com now) and hosting have been renewed for another year,
and we also have a bit of informal technical support in the form of my
domestic boss (who is a US college systems librarian in real life).

Apart from one last platform memory problem, we can put the remainder
of the content back in over the next few weeks, most importantly being
all the snapshots. This will be a relief, as it was unnerving to look
at the webstats for the first time in a loooong time and see that the
site still, oddly, gets a lot of traffic.

More good news. As have said recently, VWW (finally) has a confirmed
small amount of independent funding to do one snapshot. We aren't
restrained to doing a standard PDF/RTF report, so am thinking of a
possibly better way of doing both the data collection and publishing
the results. One thing for definite is that we want to avoid the quite
ridiculous problems that bedevilled the last two snapshots, and were a
disincentive to do any more. The snapshot has to go live on here by
Friday December 9th 2011 by the latest. Also, it'll include Ireland as
there were a few requests from there to participate in any future
snapshots.

In more good news, we're also negotiating to do an e-book on examples
of virtual world uses in education, which looks promising. This won't
come out (or, digitally appear) until deep into 2012, partially as we
need to fill in a lot of knowledge gaps and catch up. That's another
incentive to go hunt and find examples of virtual world use.

Speaking of which, we've been quietly having a look around UK academia
of late, and it's quite interesting, after an extended period of not
looking at virtual world stuff, to see what's changed. Unless that pie
has zapped my memory, there seems to be some new/unfamiliar names who
are doing things in both HE and FE; but more using OpenSim and
similar, than Second Life. That's just an impression, but will be
asking these to hopefully explain what they're doing. I'd hazard a
guess, but there seems as much, if not more, open virtual world
activity in UK HE/FE now than there was in 2008 or 2009.

In Second Life I'm still Silversprite Helsinki, and can be found on
various islands when not based in the ruins of the conference centre
building on Eduserv Island.

So, timetable for VWW 2.0:

To end September: Rebuild this website + put remainder of content,
especially snapshots, back in. Work out format of data collection and
dissemination for next snapshot.
Early October: Sort out social media aspects of VWW 2.0.
October to November: Data collection for autumn 2011 snapshot.
November: Finally get some decent hair for my avatar.
Early December: Summary (format unsure) of snapshot.

Time for some pie.

Regards, and thanks for your patience,
The Virtual World Watch 2.0 team
(John, Butterfingers and Reeses)

www.virtualworldwatch.net

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