Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?

Have Google joined the online 3D virtual world market? Well it looks like they have, but it looks like it's still pretty early days with the Beta release of Lively.

Lively certainly seems to have a lot of potential and a lot of good things going for it, in addition to having the might of a company like Google behind it.

• The 3D rooms run in the browser and only require the download of a very small plugin (about half a MB) as opposed to the huge downloads that Second Life and There.com require.
• Anyone can create their own room, pretty quickly and easily, and embed the room into a web page like the one below.
• The rooms aren't connected so if you want to use this with students, it's less risky as they are less prone to 'wandering' into unsuitable areas.
  
• The amount of customization of both avatars and rooms is limited at the moment, so this might well help to discourage the more 'adult' orientated users who tend to crop up in Second Life so much.
• Word is that you can add and watch YouTube videos within your 3D room, which could make a nice addition to a distance course and enable your students to have film / video night together.
• The 3D comic book type graphics look good and would surely appeal to teens or younger learners.
  
• It's free at the moment at least.

Here is my 3D room embedded into my page

But this is what it should look like!



Before you get too excited though:

• I've had more than a few problems getting this to work for me either in Firefox 3 or IE 7 and you can't run it on a MAC yet.
  
• Lots of the tools for editing the room and avatar that appear in the help instructions, never seem to appear on my screen, so once I've created my room, I don't seem to be able to edit it at all.
• There's no voice chat only text chat.
  
• Because it's only just been launched the actual population is still pretty small, so actually meeting someone to talk to is a bit of a challenge

Anyway, despite all this, I think this is still one to watch, not only because it has Google behind it, but because if it can be made to work well and run in the browser with lower demand on bandwidth and small downloads, this could open up the potential of virtual worlds to many more people and that can't be a bad thing.

Some of my other postings on virtual worlds.

• 3B Village 3D browser
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• Looking at There.com
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Immersive Image Environments
• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Creating multimedia stories

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The Encyclopedia of Life

This is a wonderful new site with some fantastic images, most of which are licensed under creative commons.

The site is still in its early days, but the intention is that it will become a kind of wikipedia of life on Earth with a vast collection of text and images and possibly other media.

Original source of image and license

There's already quite a substantial number of organisms with images listed and many of the images and illustrations are really remarkable.

At the moment the site owners are looking for people to be curators of pages or species, but later this year there is a plan to open up the pages so that anyone can contribute.

This is a fantastic resource of information and images and has loads of potetial for teaching exploitation. One of the creators of this project is Edward O. Wilson and you can also find some short video clips of him talking about issues related to the environment on Big Think. All useful and interesting stuff if you are thinking of doing any lessons on the environment or if you just need some flashcards or images to use in teaching projects.

• The link for Edward O. Wilson on Big Think is:
• http://www.bigthink.com/user/edward-o-wilson
• The link for The The Encyclopedia of Life is:
• http://www.eol.org
• To get some tips and suggestions for how to use Big Think go to my article 'Video Debating website'

Hope you enjoy it.

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Create your own sms groups

With the vast increase in the number of people with phones capable of receiving sms, having your own group for your students seems like a pretty good idea.

GupShup provides you with the ability to make this happen for free. You 'simply' register for free on their site and then start creating groups. The site has quite a few groups there already and some with more than 2,000 members. The groups are split into categories and there's a couple of pages of educational ones, which include quite a few word of the day type services.

Once you register you can either send out messages to the group through the website or by using your phone.

I guess the downside of this is that your students are going to be paying every time they send a message, and I've no idea what the rates are likely to be. I tried to register using my own phone here in Morocco, but never get the confirmation message with my registration code, so that's about as far as I got.

• Anyone else tried this?
• Do you know of other similar services that are free?

Would be very interested in hearing comments from anyone else doing anything like this.

To try GupShup go to: http://www.smsgupshup.com

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Send Free Video Messages

SnapYap.com looks like a nice free tool for sending video messages. It doesn't involve downloading any software as it uses the Adobe Flash plugin. You just have to allow access to your webcam and microphone.

You can either exchange messages with other registered users, email links to your messages to people or send them a link to your messages page.

This video from Snapyap.com explains it all.


I haven't tried this yet, but I think it could be quite an interesting communication tool and a nice way of developing materials for students and it's free!

Let me know if you have any luck using it.

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More Second Life Tutorials

Following on from my posting last month on building in Second Life, here are 4 more video tutorials showing the basics of Inventory management and how to create folders and notecards within the inventory.

The first tutorial looks at how to open the inventory and create a new folder within it.



The second tutorial looks at how to create new notecards for sharing text and activties. This for me is one of the prime sources of deliveing materials to students as the text on Notecards is much clearer easier to read and manipulate than text on textures, so I find this a key function to enable effective teaching within Second Life.



The third tutorial looks at how to find things within the inventory by using the search. This can help to overcome what can be quite a frustrating problem.



The forth and final tutorial in this set looks at how to clear up the inventory and delete some of the multiple instances. Keewping your inventory under control can help make it easier to find things and also speed up your avatar when you log in to Second Life, as there will be less inventory items to download.




If you are new to or haven't tried Second Life yet, then I hope you find these videos useful and they encourage you to try it out. The videos were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent. You can access all the tutorials on my YouTube channel here:

• http://www.youtube.com/NikPeachey

My other postings on Second Life and virtual worlds

• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

By all means leave a comment, but all comments aare moderated so it might take a while to show.

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Up and Coming blogs

I'm rather pleased that my Learning technology blog (number 41) has been recognised as one of the 50 up and coming must read blogs, by Teaching Tips.com.


Their top 50 have been sorted and catagorised with some brief description about why each one makes the grade and why you should read it.

• 50 must read up and coming blogs

There's some interesting stuff there and it's well worth a look. So have a search through and add the best feeds to your reader or personal homepage . If you don't have a feed reader or homepage, then have a look at my article on how to create one using Netvibes, as it does save you a lot of time.

Teaching tips.com have also put together a list of 100+ resources for teaching without course books and that's well worth checking out too.

Hope you find something useful there.

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Becoming a citizen journalist

Ever thought of becoming a journalist in your free time, well now you can with Instablogs!

Instablogs was brought to my notice by an email that arrived in my inbox asking me if I wanted to become a 'citizen journalist'. I have to say that the thought is quite attractive and this might be something to get students involved in on some level too.

I had a quick look at the site and it is interesting and looks like a credible news site. It splits the articles geographically by continent (good to find so many countries represented rather than just the US or Europe as is the case with so many sites) and also splits the news by topic, with the usual things like, entertainment, technology, sport, politics etc.

You have to register to actually write an article and in the email I recieved it did mention payment for articles, though the amount was very small, so I don't think this would be a motivating factor.

As I said, this could be quite a useful resource for students or for materials for your students, partly because it does cover such a broad geographical area, and it might well be interesting to compare some of the 'citzen' news with articles from more mainstream news sources like BBC or CNN.

It might also provide your students with some great motivation for writing too as they could possibly get their work published and people have been known to launch careers from such sites!

As for me, the main thing that puts me off writing for the site is that it doesn't have an education section. If it did well... I don't know.

• What do you think?
• Would you write for a site like this?
• Is this site an attempt to empower people or just a cynical attempt to get cheap content?
• Should citizens be journalists or should that be left to the 'professionals'?
  

I'd be very interested to hear your views, so please do post a comment if you have one.

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