The following are screenshots of the first iteration of terriforming for the UNSW Atoll in SecondLife. I’m pretty happy with how it looks at the moment, but what remains to be seen is how well it fits with the learning elements/activities we’re fleshing out.  So at this stage it’s uncertain how much (if any) of this design will make it into the final version, however I felt the need to produce something tangible tonight. So here you are.

By way of my colleague Barry Cheung, today’s Sydney Morning Herald (“Videoconferences distort decisions, study finds“) points to the results of a study of video conferencing in which researchers indicate decisions can be distorted by the nature of the medium.
The research sample included “44 medical professionals who took part in early morning medical seminars via business-quality video links, and 99 peers who were in the room with the presenters.”
According to the study, the participants who were in the same room as the presenter were more likely to base their judgment …

QUESTION AUTHORITY
Originally uploaded by Wurz
This week in CCK08 covers the topics of power, control, validity, and authority in distributed environments and I’m quite interested to see where the discussion takes us; especially in light of yesterday’s excitement in the Moodle forum.
The week began with an authoritarian decision to force everyone in the course to subscribe to the week’s forum thread – whether they wanted to or not.  Downes’ preliminary post to the thread read as follows:
Moodle offers me the option to ‘force everyone to be subscribed to this …

Last night I was reminded of the fact Adobe has a free web conferencing tool available known as ConnectNow and thought I might take a few minutes to put together another walk through. This video is best viewed fullscreen – click on the Monitor icon in the lower righthand corner to maximise the view.
The tool is available after creating a user account at http://acrobat.com. This page also provides access to a few other tools, including an online wordprocessor (Buzzword), file sharing area, and online file storage tool.
Based on …

In the last 12 hours I’ve met and held discussions with colleagues in Mexico and the Netherlands. In both cases the mood was quite relaxed and friendly. There were no particular aims or objectives; nor tasks or responsibilities to be “owned.” In the same way you’d have chats at the coffee cart or the water cooler, these discussions were both social and professional at the same time.
The fascinating thing about this is that I haven’t experienced the same combined levels of engagement, lighthearted social interaction and professional …