I was very pleased to be invited to speak at last Thursday’s BrainGain event on virtual worlds. This event was co-sponsored by Harvard Business School and the Harvard Interactive Media group.
The emerging theme of the event was the high-quality of virtual world experiences for education and business. The word “experience” was used frequently, and there [...]
I was able to attend the opening of the Video Games Evolve exhibit last Monday at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. It’s amazingly cool that this kind of institution made the decision to host an exhibit on video games.
I had quite a bit of fun playing with Spacewars! and looking through the fantastic assortment [...]
How can any teacher resist the lure of Talk Like a Pirate Day? And the even greater challenge of integrating it into a course in a meaningful way?
I find that beginning web design students have trouble with the concept of a namespace, and for good reason. Imagine that you have just learned the concept of [...]
After reading this story over at Clear Night Sky’s blog (which also recently had the print to Second Life gem), I hopped over to MiniEgo and created an avatar.
It’s worth noting that MiniEgo provides many options for customizing your pixelish avatar, and the art is really adorable. In spite of the options, most of [...]
This week, I created autoscript, a simple LSL script generator for Second Life. The concept is to translate the way you think about interactive design - what should happen, and when - into functional code.
Scripting is one of the most creative parts of designing immersive spaces, and I hope this will make it accessible to [...]
I just returned from the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago. I really appreciate all of the wonderful people that I had the chance to meet (or smeet) or just spend time with. There wasn’t nearly enough time for all of the conversations that I wanted to have!
There were a wide variety of presentations. We’ve [...]
The title may be a bit misleading, but P.M. Gleiser may have written the coolest research paper ever: an analysis of social networks of heroes in the Marvel Universe.
It turns out that superheroes don’t have social connections like normal humans… they resemble “technical networks”, such as the Internet. Want to be a superhero? Act more [...]
We all have web sites with annoying features that we use regularly anyway. Greasemonkey is a Firefox (only, but it work across operating systems) extension that allows you to alter a web site - after it is loaded into your browser - with JavaScript.
For example, Twitter recently change their direct message web page to present [...]
This summer, I’ve been involved in the process of creating a new undergraduate curriculum essentially from scratch. I was reflecting back on this process, and I realized the development of a robust and relevant curriculum shares many attributes with the process of developing robust and functional software.
Modern software development is a largely modular process. Each [...]
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Sloodle Presentation at the NMC Symposium on Creativity, originally uploaded by hilarymason.
We’re currently at the mid-point in the NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life. So far, it’s been fantastic! The presentations range from those on fashion [...]