Archive for November, 2008



Finding the pictures

Published on November 27, 2008

My thesis now has many pictures embedded within it – and my pen drive is full of pictures entitled things like ‘pseudonymise this’ and ‘C2 pic7’ in various formats. The question is, which of the many versions hidden in my different folders are the versions I am supposed to be working with? I’ve just devoted […]


Academic blogging

Published on November 21, 2008

A good blog post on why academics should blog.


And now for something completely different

Published on November 14, 2008

A news story from early September about my twin nephews – expert canoeists, who have both won medals representing their country. My sister notes that when the article says Peter was selected to race in Spain, it actually means Denmark :-/ Oh, and here’s how to make six-month pics with a pinhole camera. [Note to […]


Handheld Learning references

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Some useful references I jotted down while at the Handheld learning conference. Ollie Bray’s site – currently one of my favourite blogs. danah boyd’s blog. The Edubuzz blog – which, I notice, currently contains a link to a widget that displays your Twitter updates on your blog. Tessa Watson’s blog, which has useful information and […]


Second Life chatbots

Published on November 10, 2008

While at the Virtual Worlds JISC day up in Stirling, I saw a demonstration of in-world chatbots. The Daden Prime sim has a chatbot avatar, Abi Carver. You can visit her in world, or talk to her on their chatbots.co.uk website. Like most chatbots, she’s fairly limited as a conversational partner. However, I’m told she’s […]


Virtual worlds links

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Some web references I picked up at the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. Exit Reality is an application that allows you to present every web page as part of a 3D virtual world, and to move the same avatar around them. I’ve been a bit limited in my ability to try it out, as […]


Second Life Needs Pyramid

Published on November 9, 2008

More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=en/content/abstracts Astrid Ensslin, one of the organisers of the conference, reported on a very interesting piece of research, adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the real world to the virtual world. Maslow identified that people have to prioritise their physical suvival needs and their need […]


Google Map of World of Warcraft

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You learn the strangest things at academic conferences. Not only can you now zoom around the real world via Google Maps, but you can now also view a Google Map of the World of Warcraft. Apparently, by combining information about the measurement of significant features on this map, and the distance you can cast certain […]


Just share it

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Interesting post on issues relating to SocialLearn by Scott Leslie in his EdTech blog. These are his sub-heads: Planning to Share versus Just Sharing We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even […]


Touching Virtual Worlds

Published on November 6, 2008

More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. Jonathan Roberts and Nigel John are doing some very impressive work on being able to touch the virtual. Their research relates to training medical students to perform operations, and developing haptic technologies to do this. They pointed out that touch is not a single sense, […]