Tomorrow I have the opportunity to facilitate a seminar for journalism students. Preparing the seminar I was surprised how strongly virtual worlds and gaming influence me. No, I don’t believe people will routinely watch and read the news in a World of Warcraft setting, dressed up as Orcs or Trolls…. Continue reading
Identity is a fascinating subject, in some complicated ways it also determines the attraction and/or rejection people feel for virtual environments. The idea of being mediated by an avatar, who shares many characteristics of your real life persona, but who also is different, confronts people with the fact that their… Continue reading
Checking on what’s happening around the Liquid News project on the #liquidnews Twitter feed, it seems the project is advancing: Toni Hopponen from Sparkbox posted on his blog that Liquid News will likely use his service to publish articles, opinions etc. of experts involved in this project. Sparkbox is a… Continue reading
Journalists and data visualization, working together with comuter scientists, researchers and artists… Visit the site at Stanford University, produced during a 2009-2010 Knight Journalism Fellowship. Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to… Continue reading
People often complain they don’t have  time to blog. This week I’ll have two seminar opportunities to try to convince people that even very busy people can blog – provided they are ready to change some daily work and life routines. Journalists and students amaze me when they appear at… Continue reading
Liquidnews, or the Liquid Newsroom, is an emerging news project that’s all about the above strategy, radical openness. I found out about the project on Twitter via the #liquidnewshashtag. It’s where a group of people, many of whom are journalists, discuss a project for a “liquid” or a “virtual” newsroom. They… Continue reading
In this post I’ll talk about some rather simple immersive tools. They have to do with what knowledge is about, with visualization and non-linear thinking and presenting. Do not fear: there’s no need for high-end graphics. The elements on which this simple immersiveness is based are non-linearity, interactivity and visualization…. Continue reading
This is the virtual reading and meeting room for the connectivism courses in the virtual town Chilbo in Second Life. As pointed out in a comment on my previous post, there is a Second Life cohort (group PLENK2010) getting ready to experiment and a wiki has been launched. One of… Continue reading
It’s that time of the year again I start asking myself whether to register for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” again. I did so previous years, and even though I never managed to follow-up on the activities till the end, I always learned stuff and… Continue reading
So Twitter should be fast and easy. And fun of course. If not, they won’t ever go mainstream. For someone covering Second Life, it all sounds very familiar. One of the interesting points I learned watching Robert Scoble’s live video stream during the Twitter press conference this week was that… Continue reading