Marketing is all around us, and represents perhaps the most prevalent form of communication today. Within that context, Micro Persuasion: Guest Post: Leo Babauta on the Tao of Marketing sheds a useful light on its current realities.
Author: Donn King
NPR features SL educator
NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday featured Michael Demers, a geography professor at New Mexico State University, talking about how he uses Second Life to help his students learn more effectively. You can listen to the segment online.
Of course, so far I haven’t been able to get it to play myself. [sigh] Your luck may be better.
Update: I managed to get it to play. Worth listening to!
Raise vocabulary, lower hunger
Cool site: FreeRice. See if you can figure out why it fits the theme of this blog. Warning: can be addictive.
Focus on what you want
This has struck me before: stress management seminars focus on what you don’t want. We learn in basic public speaking to focus on what you do want. In “Don’t fight stress. Promote peace,” Alexander Kjerulf lays out a more effective approach in very concrete terms.
Education Support Faire in SL
Linden Lab has planned an Education Support Faire for Jan. 25-30. Read details at the SL blog. You can find it at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Supporte/151/152/36.
Interesting animal communication
This is on CBS News, but it involves a place right here in Tennessee, and the way they spin the story has interesting communication implications. Check out The Animal Odd Couple.
PSTCC faculty to conduct SL workshop
One of our own will be conducting a workshop for faculty across all of Second Life interested in using SL for teaching. This notice went out yesterday from the Community Colleges in SL group to all its members:
Group Notice From: Pipsqueak Fiddlesticks
Hi Everyone,
We are canceling this Wedneday’s meeting in favor of a teachshop on Monday 12/8/08 by Travis Willsmere of Pellissippi State Community College. Travis has wide experience in-world and will be sharing some of his knowledge with us. Landmark will be sent soon so watch for it. 🙂 I hope you all are well and surviving finals! Pip
I will post a link to the site, along with the exact time, when it becomes available.
When you open up a channel…
…expect people to use it. I’m not completely sure where this falls in our categories, but I’m sure it has something to do with communication:
See more pwn and owned pictures.
Thanks to Bryan Booth for the heads-up on this one.
At the same time, I found a great example of unintended messages:
Community college resource in SL
You know, I can find more in the first five minutes I’m awake every day that needs doing than I have time to get done all day.
Without going into all the links involved in finding this (thanks, Greg, for getting me started!), I want to share with you a great resource especially for the community college faculty who read this blog. If you have Second Life installed on the machine you’re sitting at, you should be able to go to the CCSL presence by following this link:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%203/81/151/25
You need to also find the group and join it for free.
They have a lot of resources for teaching in SL, and as nearly as I can tell, they are somehow connected with the EduIsland folks who can provide space for teachers who want to use SL, but whose institutions do not yet have Island or other space for them. I am way behind on how this works, but I will post more information when I get it.
In the meantime, you probably also want to check out their Web site, a Wiki with tons of useful information.
SL wiki useful resource
I sometimes miss the obvious. The SL wiki has been under development for quite some time, but I forget to refer to it. As with most wikis, it is useful because it is a single place for users to pool their experience and expertise. It includes some basic “help” sort of pages, but also include reference pages to things like the LSL scripting code (the language scripters use in SL).