You’ve got to find it slightly inspirational that a 2 foot tall indian muppet wearing underoos has the vanity to actually die his hair. At least this made me feel better. This….and the half tablet of vicodin. I always wanted a pet monkey, but now I want one of these little guys. I would give him a sword and we could have battles.

For the love of god I really am starting to be ashamed to be an American. Why should I care about Gary Coleman’s marital disputes, Janet Jackson’s philosophy on love and discipline, or what Britney Spears had to say about Bionce and Tina Turner. Is this really the crap that America is concerned with? Apparently it is. And its not isolated to the smutty, idiodic little world of Entertainment Tonight. Apparently our (yes, your’s and mine) congressmen feel it is their responsibility to spend an enormous chunk of their time (our time) determining exactly what performance enhancing drugs may or may not have been used by some former baseball player(s) and which former baseball trainer(s) or player(s) may or may not have lied about it during the interminable initial waste of time investigating the ’scandal’. I swear to god I’m considering either emmigrating or hanging myself. And as I sit here watching the biggest loser dancing supernanny wife swapping American idol apprentice gladiator geek, I’m already stringing my neckties together wondering if the light fixture in the cieling can support my weight.

After a white knuckle sled ride on 81N yesterday afternoon, I did make it home from three days of the PETE&C geek-fest. My presentation on Second Life went well and I send out big cudos to my ‘virtual’ friends Kathy Schrock, Kevin Jarrett, Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon for contributing to my talk on the implications of SL on developing learning communities and the future of distance education. Thanks to those folks we were able to provide a really good demonstration of how real-world connections can be made and fostered within SL. Generated a lot of discussion and excitement I think. Session notes can be found here.

I wasn’t able to get notes posted about Steve Dembo’s keynote yesterday. He gave a great talk and if I have time later, I’ll summarize my written notes on here. Until then, Kristin Hokanson over at The Connected Classroom recorded the presentation. Hope I’m not taking any liberties by reposting it here.

I should mention one thing that I took away from Monday’s Keynote by David Pogue. Two words - SKYPE PHONE! Chris and I played with Skype on our Verizon XV6700’s today. We are both running the WM6 ROM hack on these devices. We downloaded the CAB files and installed with no trouble. Minutes later we were connected to our wireless network chatting over the internet from our cell phones. (Note that the XV6700 are wifi enabled) I should also mention that we then used the BT Audio program to force feed the audio to our bluetooth earpieces. Extremely simple and works well. This will definately get me to use Skype more often.

Lloyd Onyett - Indiana University of Pennsylvania
aka Komputer Merlin

IUP has several islands, incl. Crimson Island and Archaeology Island

About 75 teachers at IUP involved to some degree.
Training education students to use SL.

Very general overview of SL using powerpoint primarily

John Branson from CCIU presents on Second Life. CCIU uses it as a professional development delivery platform of sorts.

Actually quite a few of the audience were familiar and even had SL avatars.

Linden Labs adds 22 servers per week.
140 businesses

Mentioned ISTE, EduIslands, InfoIsland, NASA, NOAA, etc.
Provided a nice overview of the SL ‘basics’

Demo of the CCIU home in SL.
covered basic movement and avatar control, HUD layout and controls
Lot of interest in SL
communication

interest in economy, controls, archiving presentations,
time spent in SL

Search functions
Tour to Vassar School of Art - The Cistine Chapel model
Tour to NOAA

Intersting discussion regarding intellectual property rights and the validity of information.