Incacerated youth and SL

Unfinished blog posts: 3 (bad)
Still have to catch up with posts from SLEDcc conference. Took various notes at time, but now seem too detailed or not detailed enough. Have decided to cut losses and try to cram remaining thoughts into two posts.
Think that all this is from the second day [have checked now, yes it is], but has already become something of a blur, not helped by a RL cold. Upside of cold from point of view of this blog is that finishing blog posts seems less demanding than finishing ppt for talk on Web 2.0 tomorrrow and various work chores, and can use cold as excuse.
Bluewings Hayek talked about Access for All: Working Online with Incarcerated Youth. She started working at the detention centre with a book club, and things developed from there, bringing in more technology for work with the teens related to the public library. They tried blogging and had a digital camera, which detainees used e.g. to film a puppet show for their children.
From there it stepped to Teen Second Life. There are weekly workshops and there is a venture plan initiative, funded by by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The current venture is about "keeping younger kids in their neighborhood off the streets; basically, as they have put it, they don't want younger kids to end up like them." They have to develop the idea, pitch it and get seedcorn money, which they can tap into to work on the project while they are still in detention. They blog on the Global Kids website http://www.holymeatballs.org/ ("DIDI initiative") and they've also done a podcast.

Challenges include the fact that the population is transient, and they can't go online at will as they have to be monitored by someone while they're online. However being able to go online at all is fortunate - in RL I met someone who was working with detained teens in the US and even she couldn't use the internet there. Bluewings' email is kczarnecki@plcmc.org

Modified rapture

Presentations delivered: 1 (good); No. of attendees: Over 30 I think at one point (good)

Had left readers on cliffhanger, or rather me dangling in uncertainty as to where, if anywhere, was going to deliver presentation. If you remember, original venue had disappeared into v-space together with the island upon which it stood. When logged back after calming break found that
a) Fortunately no longer just appeared as whispy cloud and
b) Was message saying that talk would be in Rockcliffe X auditorium.
Went along to auditorium & set stuff up. Some people were in there testing out a media clip which provided some distraction. Eventually notice went out about change of venue, and, as noted, was quite good turnout. Some people also hung round for questions at end. Had a couple of compliments about way presented so that was gratifying. Also ppt did not fall over, people could here my Voice and altogether seemed to have snatched alrightness from jaws of defeat, or, as organiser Kittygloom said, I was able to "roll with the punches."
Main trouble with was amount of time hanging round: in the end didn't really to get too much apart from own talk. However, after talk went home to bathe and change and attended most important event i.e. social at the end of the day.
Here is the ppt on Slideshare.

Using first and second life to develop inquiry skills in the freshman year at a UK university: a happy blend?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: second sl)

Mills on Panoramas

Panoramas viewed on slides: many (good); Panoramas entered: 1 (good); Panoramas created: 0 (must do better)

Have evidently not managed to cram all notes about SLEDcc into two posts, so will continue with this brief one plus one more. In fact recollected actually having MADE some notes about Graham Mills' talk on panoramas, but when opened draft post all that was in it was:

http://sites.google.com/site/
muve4edu/panoramas

However this is v. useful in itself. Graham showed us various types of panorama and talked about what they might be used for. Pic is from his talk, obviously. His blog is at http://tidalblog.blogspot.com/ . So far have followed up by downloading Photoshop plugin that may - or may possibly not - enable me to make a panorama on a sphere. Though am not sure what I'll do with it, yet. Perhaps should work that out first.

Sort of ready .. but is SL?

No of slides uploaded into SL: 44 (bad, probably); No. of notecards created: 1 (good); No. of hours in advance that set up ppt etc inworld: 3 (v. good); amount of access to island where am supposed to be giving talk: zero (v.v. bad)
Have spent long time putting together ppt, putting text into notecard, adding links etc, loading notecard into poster, uploading ppt to Slideshare and setting whole thing up in SL conference room on ISTE.
Started to try trick recommended by Sirexkat, namely creating a little object for each ppt texture, so that by the time you came to that slide people's computers would have already picked up teh texture. Neat, but it was taking *** ages to produce them and afraid gave up after the first 8.

Anyway was feeling moderately hopeful despite earlier pear-shapedness of some technical things, namely that streaming inworld didn't seem to work properly, one key speaker couldn't get inworld and had to postpone and I couldn't get into one of the venues. Hey, that's SL. Also felt it was pity that was manifesting only as cloud of vapour (so presumably people with earlier viewers were seeing hideous Ruth avatar), considering amount of time planning wardrobe. All that cute pinkness and purple, and all one can see is mist.

However became not inconsiderably concerned when realised that all efforts to get onto ISTE islands, any of them, were failing. ISTE as in, where am supposed to present. Decided to do something constructive, so set up ppt etc. on Infolit as could get there no trouble and presumably so could others. IMed one of organisers who confirmed that ISTE 1 had gone missing. Not something that happens in RL unless is some sudden natural disaster or you find self in middle of Dr Who episode.

Anyway am now out of world in sanguine mood. Organiser seemed to have preference for me moving to another set up venue elsewhere, but frankly would prefer to be on home ground. Hey Ho.

Before got into WTF mode I did manage to drop in on Baldric Commons talking about some quests. Interesting. Attention was caught by one about the Giant's Causeway in N. Ireland (I've been there! one might appropriately say that it rocks) where people have to find the salmon of knowledge. I can think of a few people who could do with finding that. Students have to take their pic with the salmon when they find it, to put in teh Hall of Heroes, and the overall goal is to increase interest in the English texts (Baldric is with the British Counil in Barcelona). There was also a time travel quest, in which scenes are set up which have anachronistic objects and people have to identify which ones they are.

In fact this session is only one have actually managed to follow so far apart from hearing some of the Lindens opening speech via the web. What will the next few hours bring? Who knows. By that time there probably won't be an audience left.