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Fab Five

Outstanding EDU spots

• MIT Media Lab - the Meeting Room
  Zetetic Aubret is building new kinds of meeting spaces that empower people to do things they can't do in first life meetings. The Meeting Room tracks chat history in vertical space, offers a voting floor with position history, an agenda voting system, and a to-do generator that hands out tasks that are visible to everyone present. Zetetic writes, "We are designing meeting spaces for Second Life that take full advantage of the features that set it apart both from other mediated environments and real-world meeting rooms. We hope that these meeting spaces will be useful tools in their own right, as well as providing a framework for the design of future interactive spaces in virtual worlds." If you're holding meetings in Second Life, consider testing The Meeting Room. He's looking for feedback.



• Sloodle Dev library and classroom
  Sloodle is a mashup of SL + Moodle, the most popular Open Source CMS (course management system). Created by SL residents and college professors Buddy Sprocket and Jeremy Kabumpo, the project is hosted at San Jose State University, CA and Paisley University in Scotland. Visit the SL San Jose State Campus to try the Sloodle Object Dispensor, sign up for a Sloodle class, and visit the Sloodle wiki. While you're visiting Sloodle, be sure to take the ePortfolio tour by Wainbrave Bernal and Jeremy Kabumpo. The EPortfolios in Second Life exhibit at SJSU's School of Library & Information is an exploratory space that showcases the variety of ePortfolios developed on the 2D web and extends and enhances those innovations with the immersive, 3-dimensional features of Second Life.



• @Lab Gallery
  The Aesthetic Technologies Lab and Ohio University Without Boundaries are featuring a unique installation in the Art & Music Building of the Ohio University campus. IN THE SWEET BYE & BYE SL is a project of @Lab's resident Jacque Quijote. The artist calls it "an African-American allegory, illuminating paths we walk, stories we've been told, and dream places we haunt...it is a transgenerational memoir, the collaborative dialogue of mother and son." Jacque calls the project "an investigation of immersive design in progress."



• Globe Theatre on Renaissance Island
  The Globe Theatre project is sponsored by the Alliance Library System and Info Island. According to estate co-owner Korrigan Keynes, the residents of Renaissance Island brainstormed building the Globe. Charlene Trudeau of SkyBeam Architecture was hired to do the build. She researched the original theatre and stayed as true to its design. Dolgoruky Umarov, a RL Shakespeare scholar, arrived on the island late spring and offered support and advice to Charlene. Korrigan says, "We envision that the Globe will be used by educators who might want to bring their classes there for an immersive experience and by those wanting to perform."



• The Sistine Chapel Recreation, Vassar College
  Stan Frangible built this scale model of the 15th century Sistine Chapel with more than 500 prims and 200 different textures. You can get close to Michelangelo's frescoes and touch the tapestries of Raphael. Stan built the Sistine Chapel in Second Life "as a proof of concept, to explore how virtual reality might be used to learn about art and architecture, by experiencing the scale, context and social environment of a real-life space."