I was talking to my web programming seminar about regular expressions and made an allusion to the xkcd comic on that topic. Unfortunately, none of them had seen it, probably because none of them were familiar with xkcd.
Students should become familiar with the concepts and practice of the discipline, but also with the culture and [...]
The vendor containing this hat was recently deleted from Virtual Morocco by an employee of Linden Lab without any notification to me. Why? Because an anonymous person complained that it is “broadly offensive”.
Virtual Morocco was created to be both a tourism promotion platform and a space for cultural exchange. It was built entirely by undergraduate [...]
I was immensely privileged to participate in the first ever Teen Second Life College Fair. The event was on the Eye4You Alliance TSL island. At least 18 institutions were represented (see some of the booths in the image to the left), and approximately 200 teens attended.
I gave a short presentation on my own educational [...]
I’m teaching a basic web design course this term that covers design concepts, XHTML, and CSS. The students are from a variety of backgrounds - some have knowledge of HTML, some are non-majors or non-credit students looking to pick up a useful skill, and many are complete beginners who are required to take the course [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I just saw this great use of Second Life over on the “selducator” blog. This teacher and students were staging a production of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Rather than creating traditional sets, they created their environments in SL, and acted out the play in front of them. Check out one of them [...]