Have a look at the interesting mindmap of this course about virtual communities and social media at Stanford, the instructor is Howard Rheingold. In fact you can get an overview of the course material using a concept map or this Prezi presentation: Virtual Community/Social Media Course on Prezi
Let’s do something wild and combine two fascinating developments. The first one is about augmented reality. As I said in a previous post, I’m not totally convinced that looking through a smartphone camera is such a compelling experience. What about glasses? The conventional wisdom says that it won’t work: people… Continue reading
Talking about virtual environments and machinima (see previous post), here is a very nice example: today in Second Life the Virtual Mine is being launched: The Virtual Mine is a complete 3D virtual mountaintop removal mine created by Deep Down in the popular world Second Life.  The virtual mine, developed at BAVC’s Producers… Continue reading
Machinima is a crucial aspect of the use of virtual environments for journalism. It basically involves shooting video inside virtual environments and games, eventually mixing this with video from the physical world. Examples can be found for instance on the YouTube channel of Draxtor Despres. The blog Phasing Grace now… Continue reading
Games, especially video games and online games, are incredibly fascinating. They can be beautiful, intriguing, social, but in order to become a success, they need to be engaging. There is a kind of gold rush to games by marketing specialists, human resources experts, experimental economists, psychologists, neurologists, educators, and they… Continue reading
This seems great: Title: World of Teachcraft: The Learning Quest Date: November 2 – December 16, 2010 Location: Rockcliffe University http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/215/73/23 Campus portion 5 pm SLT Tuesday and Thursday (On Rockcliffe in Second Life) Reporting over 12 million paying subscribers, World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular massively multi-player online… Continue reading
We’re living in streams or flows of information: think status updates, tweets, texting, rss-feeds… It’s an era of niche markets, of networks rather than destinations and what we need are tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content. That is what Danah Boyd eloquently explains on Educause Review…. Continue reading
It is said that in a few decades time 80 percent of world population will live in cities. Those cities will depend on a superstructure of networked technology in order to provide food, water, energy and communication. The Impakt Festival 2010 Matrix City in Utrecht, the Netherlands, will discuss (…)… Continue reading
I am thinking back to the students I met at a journalism seminar. What does one basically want to tell graduate students that goes beyond techniques and some insights in where journalism and media might be going? Something more about values and attitudes? I found this famous Stanford University video… Continue reading
I love playing Pocket Legends from Spacetime Studios on my iPad (my avatar is the courageous but clumsy Wilbear). The game has all the characteristics of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft: quests, group action, contests between players and player groups etc. It’s pretty good graphically… Continue reading