The Big Blog O' Updates

Hey all today is our first Big Blog O' Updates about what's going on at DCEO with Virtual Worlds.

For starters we are officially attending the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) 2009 August 13th to the 16th in San Fransisco California to represent Continuous Education and Rutgers University. We're looking forward to seeing what Linden Labs (LL) has planned for SL and interacting with other educators involved with virtual worlds. If you're going to be there feel free to look for myself (Ron Festa) and/or Rick Anderson.

Last month we visited the State of Play conference which proved to be an interesting event. Learned more about legalese then anything else, but still proved to be educational and while we were at it we learned quite a bit about other virtaul worlds out there. Apparently we also generated quite a buzz in regards to our plans at DCEO during the "Birds of a Feather" event. So much in fact I ended up getting interviewed for a RezEd Podcast! Very exciting stuff, feel free to listen to it: http://tr.im/uX4L

Interested in chemistry? Well I have some interesting news. Some folks from the Protein Data Bank in FAS Chemistry here at Rutgers are experimenting with highly detailed virtual reproductions of protein structures in Second Life and we've agreed to allow them to use our sandbox at RUCE 3 (The Rutgers Stadium) for their initial experiments so feel free to stop by every now and then to see if they're currently building a protein strain.

Also while we're at it we are currently preparing our pilot for our faculty workshop, Faculty Introduction to Virtual Worlds: A Hands on Workshop using Second Life, so if you're faculty and interested in using Second Life in the classroom here at Rutgers University keep an eye out this Fall for our full fledged workshop.

-Ron

First!

Yeah wasn't sure what to call the first post of our new blog so why not "First!"? Anyways this blog is a news blog for the Rutgers Division of Continuous Education & Outreach's Second Life project. Both our main team as well as our Co-Ops within the University will be posting the latest and greatest news regarding Second Life, Rutgers University, other virtual worlds we look into, and anything involving related projects.

Yes I know it sounds boring at first, but one of our goals is to make things not boring. We intend to make education fun and more cutting edge for everyone at Rutgers. Over the course of the next few weeks we will be revamping our website to improve everyone's experience and offer more features. This includes our blog here, information about our Twitter (didn't know we had a Twitter did ya?), our public discussion group, various videos & pictures, etc etc.

-Ron