Second Life University

Universities register for virtual future | CNET News.com

According to this article on CNET News, "more than 70 universities have built island campuses in Second Life."

I think there is one known faculty member here at Northern Arizona University who is just barely starting to play with Second Life -- but not teaching. And if any of my students want to use Second Life for their final project this semester, they are welcome to do that. For me, it is hard enough to find time to sleep in my first life, let along to spend a lot of time on a second one.

That being said, I did sign up for the Second Life Educator's email list, and I was amazed and pleased to see the educational resources that Linden Labs is providing to encourage teaching in their virtual world. Maybe I need to find something in my first life to give up so I can explore Second Life more....

(The image above comes from this SLurl - "Second Live URL.")

Open Culture: University Podcast Collection

Stanford U. and UC Berkeley have gotten quite a lot of media coverage through their affiliation with Apple's iTunes U and Google Video to put audio and video podcasts of lectures up on the Internet. However, there are a lot more universities that are podcasting themselves in different ways to their students and the world.

The Open Culture Blog has put together a comprehensive list of university-sponsored podcasts. These are podcasts that are often accessible through some university (or other institutions of higher education) website portal. Business school podcasts are listed on a separate page.

Open Culture does not list independent university podcasts, such as my Geography for Travelers podcast, which supports my classes, but is not run through my university. Although the Open Culture blog has a more general list of podcasts, they are more culture than education-related.

More comprehensive directories of educational podcasts, covering K-12 and higher education, can be found at:

• Educational Podcast Directories
  
  

Formatpixel - Serious Online Graphic Publishing

Formatpixel is allows you to create gorgeous high resolution, page-folding, online magazines, similar to the Latitudes travel magazine our of Italy. This would be a wonderful tool for a graphic arts class to get their feet wet with quality online publishing. The list of online editing tools includes the following:

Editor (WYSIWYG)
- Insert pages
- Use the Spread Planner to arrange the order of, add and delete pages
- Layer objects on your pages in front of and behind one another
- Apply colour to your pages
- Apply background colours to your project
- Utilise the snap-to-grid functions and alignment helpers
- Upload your own images with the built in image library [ see Image object ]

Text objects
- Change font face
- Change font colour
- Change font style [ normal, bold, italic ]
- Change font alignment [ left, centered or right justified ]
- Change the background colour
- Add drop shadow
- Change the kerning [ spacing between letters ]
- Change the leading [ spacing between lines ]

Media objects
- Import your own JPG, GIF or PNG [ including support for transparency ] files
- Import FLV Video files
- Create your own formatpixel image library
- Edit the names of your images or delete them
- Crop your images
- Add blending modes to images
- Apply colour filters [ normal, greyscale or sepia ]
- Apply a customisable blur effect
- Scale object

Shape objects
- Change shape [ square or circle ]
- Change shapes colour
- Add blending modes to your shapes

There is a free account option, though it is limited to only one project at a maximum of 512k -- which will not get you many pages, but should be enough to introduce students to the concept of virtual magazines. Paid accounts go up to 20 UKPounds for 20 projects and 20MB of storage.