According to Associated Press:
A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher's sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.
Reportedly, She was charged with illegal access onto a computer and manipulating electronic data.
In April 2008 Reuters was purchased by The Thomson Corporation and it is now Thomson Reuters. The old Reuters opened the first news bureau in Second Life, Thomson Reuters is still in Second Life, reporting on news in this other world.
In Wednesday's class we will view the Reuters video as well as the DVD Second Life: A Documentary by Anders von Reis Crooks [View Trailer]. The class blog assignment for next week will be to comment on the video and look at trends in our real world as well as technology trends and share your personal vision of where you think this all is going.
Invite your friends, the class and the conversation is open. Dwight Bentel Hall room 226, 6 p.m., Wed, October 8, 2008 at San Jose State University.
Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, J-school, ssloansjca, Second Life
Google was down today
For about an hour today Google was down. We could not access anything Google, not Blogger, not Gmail, not anything. This is finals week. There is a lot of talk about using Google apps for class work. I have even been interviewed by a local TV station on the subject. I started thinking, what if I had depended on it for my final? There are so many links from the lab where my students take their exams to Google and there are so many possible points of failure. So many things can break at the worst possible time. Backhoe disconnects, firewall problems, and many other network and server issues far from my classroom can cause my students to not be able to accomplish a critical task at a critical time. Today it was an inconvenience. If it had happened in the middle of an exam it would have been a disaster. It made me wonder, can we trust Web apps for Education?
Technorati Tags: Web Apps, Web 2.0, Google, ssloansjca
Jeremy Kemp Gets SJMN Recognition
It is great to see when one of San Jose State's really talented faculty gets due recognition. Today, when I was looking at the on-line edition of the San Jose Mercury News I saw just such a thing. SJSU faculty member Jeremy Kemp was highlighted in a story by Kara Andrade. Andrade said, " On any given day, Kemp logs into Second Life from his laptop and finds his students struggling with the building of virtual objects, such as flying carpets, and helps them learn online skills. He often chats with his students using the Second Life voice tool, which helps him tune into his students' frustrations."
Kemp does not just use Second Life. Kemp, along with Daniel Livingstone of the School of Computing University of Paisley, Scotland is one of the two developers of Sloodle. According to Joe Miller, VP Platform, of Linden Lab, which created Second Life, "One of the things that I’m most excited about is a mashup between Second Life and the learning management system, Moodle. Its called Sloodle."
The writer for the Mercury News did a great job covering Kemp's class, but she just touched the surface.
This is going to be huge for higher education. We are extremely lucky to have one of this technology's leading innovators right here at San Jose State University! Kemp deserves a lot of recognition for his great work.
Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, Second Life, Jeremy Kemp, Daniel Livingstone, CSU, San Jose, California State University, Moodle, Sloodle, ssloansjca
About Jeremy Kemp
I first met Jeremy in his capacity as a manager for the SJSU distance education program. He trained my help desk support staff on a half-dozen occasions. My student workers enjoyed his instruction and commented favorably on his teaching style.
Later, Kemp became involved in the Second Life community and brought his knowledge to campus with expansive passion. He is now teaching in the School of Library and Information Science at SJSU.
I consider Kemp an to be expert without peer in the arena of Virtual Worlds. I think our university is very fortunate to have him in any capacity we can get him. He has spoken to my class on this subject several times. One of the most exciting of those occurred on October 25, 2006. On that date spoke to my journalism class virtually alongside a famous SJSU alumni. Kemp presented to my class along with Aaron Uhrmacher, Senior Account Executive at the PR company Text 100. Kemp was in the class, Uhrmacher was in another part of the country. Despite being thousands of miles apart, they both presented to the class in real time side by side on the screen from within the virtual world called Second Life. The tool Uhrmacher and Kemp used to talk to each other and the class was Skype. It was a wonderful immersive experience. We recorded the session and released it as a podcast a year ago.
He did an excellent lecture on promotional aspects and public relations features of Second Life. I know he is well known in that community because he was able to secure a notable PR executive to co-present for the lecture. The students raved about the experience in a subsequent conversation we had about the class.
Kemp and I have had many great conversations since then on the subject and he has never hesitated to be a rich resource in providing me with ideas and the fruits of his research in this area. Thanks to Kemp I am planning to incorporate Second Life in a very direct way this semester. We hope to convene the class for a class session in Second Life.
Kemp is a gift this university has. I cannot say enough good things about him. We are very lucky to have him.
Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, Jeremy Kemp, ssloansjca, Second Life
Today I had lunch with Jeremy Kemp of SJSU
Last May I had the pleasure of spending some time with Dr. Daniel Livingstone from the School of Computing at the University of Paisley in Scotland. Dr. Livingstone came to SJSU to deliver a talk on Immersive and Web-based Virtual Learning Environments: Bridging the Gap with Sloodle. I picked him up at SFO and drove him to San Jose. Livingstone and our own Jeremy Kemp had just received a first-year grant of £80,000 from Britain's Eduserv Foundation to develop their Sloodle project (Moodle in Second Life.)
This is big stuff! In my opinion Second Life is where the Internet is headed. Yes, at this stage it is geeky and kinda on-the-edge stuff now, but give this technology ten years. Remember personal computers themselves were once considered geeky and on-the-edge stuff. From what I see all the signs are there for growth in this technology: from Moore's Law to the cost of oil. In my opinion, the world is going to move in a direction of decreasing the movement of people and increasing virtualization in engaging, dynamic and compelling ways. We are going to be moving electrons more and people less.
Is this profound for education? I think so. Kemp has been traveling around the world, he is spending several days a month presenting about this technology (while flying the flag for SJSU.)
Is it a big thing that one of the early innovators in this technology comes from San Jose State University? What do you think? Today I met Jeremy for lunch. What a treat! Someday I will be saying I knew Jeremy Kemp when...
Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, SLIS, Second Life, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca
Sutor's visit rocked!
Yesterday Bob Sutor, IBM's Vice president of Standards and Open Source, visited SJSU. He spoke to a small group of Business, Engineering, Computer Science and Journalism students and faculty. He put on a great presentation, I wish my whole class could have heard it.
Sutor spoke about open source and how it differs from open standards and about the need for hardware and software manufacturers to comply with open standards to ensure interoperability. He also spoke about Web 2.0 and blogging. According to Sutor blogging, which has been in the mainstream for 4-5 years, is changing the face of journalism, business and politics. Sutor said, "everybody is a journalist."
On the subject of open source, Sutor spoke extensively about Web Services and Apache Web Server, the free application that powers the majority of the world's web servers. "Apache is an example of open source," Sutor said. According to Sutor the first web services standard was published seven years before by both IBM and Microsoft on the same date as his presentation. "There is still a place for proprietary solutions," said Sutor. But, he said, "you can build a business on open source, just ask Google." Google's servers run their own version of Linux according to Sutor. "Education is the biggest adopter of open source," Sutor said. As an example for how open source applies to education and government agencies, Sutor recommended the Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies. Sutor also spoke a lot about Moodle and other open source solutions for education.
Sutor spoke a lot about open standards and how they relate to competition and innovation. From the perspective of the provider competition may not seem good and they may work very hard to convince you of the need to go with a sole provider. But for the buyer competition is good as it drives down prices and drives the providers to innovate. But, in order for this to be possible buyers have to insist on open standards to assure interoperability, according to Sutor. It is hard for some vendors to let go of closed standards. Sutor said letting go of closed standards for them can be compared to the five stages of grief.
Sutor spoke extensively about virtual worlds and specifically Second Life. He showed the group IBM's SOA island in Second Life. Note - IBM SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. The IBM island has customer briefing rooms where employees can meet with each other and with customers in a virtual environment that eliminates the need for travel. According to Sutor there are between 36,000 to 38,000 people in Second Life at any given moment. Second Life has its own currency and its own virtual economy. They are planning to open source their server software which would enable organizations like SJSU to create our own virtual worlds, said Sutor. "This is huge," he said.
We need to do a better job of spreading the word on events like this. I have only captured a small amount of what Sutor said. I was inspired.
Full Disclosure
My wife, Susan Graziano Sloan works for IBM in a different division than Sutor. She works on IBM's DB2 database product and wrote a couple of books on DB2 including DB2 for z/OS.
Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, Bob Sutor, IBM, Open Source, Open Standards, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca
