Chris Thorne's Comments

Welcome to AVW.

Hello Chris and a very warm welcome to you!

You are now an administrator of the Australia group. Thanks Chris. This is for you to post items of interest concerning Australia and gather a community.

Hi Chris
I'm waiting for a primary school version! I'm also involved in a trial of vws for use in schools.
What about you?

I'm doing MEd Tech, getting more involved in the development of educational environments now which is interesting.

Hi from Melbourne!

Hi Chris,
I'm in the process of investigating SL for my library at SCU. The uni has a grant to buy an island, and I want the library to be there from the start.

I wasn't actually involved in writing the grant, but wish I had been. I'm doing a big presentation on the 24th of July for my Library, and am mapping out a tour, stopping by Murdoch and maybe looking in on the Snow Crash book discussion amongst other things. Should be fun!

Thanks Chris, we just last night got our first Australian customer for grid hosting. I was thrilled! We have been in web development/3D for over a decade but only since recently joining virtual worlds have we gotten an international client base and a cool new community of friends that is hopefully making the world a little closer. Thanks for going out of your way to send a nice message!

Hi Chris

Thanks for the warm welcome. Nice to meet a fellow Aussie even if we are somewhat distant from each other.

Cheers

Denise

Hi Chris

The only way we were able to progress the purchase of a SL island to pilot the use of 3D VLE in courses to demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of 3DVLE but also the many limitations in delivering courses via a commercial platform such as SL. I first applied for a University Teaching and Learning grant (we have annual internal grants for research relating to T&L), which was enough to buy the island, pay a research assistant/developer to "populate" it with buildings, vitual meeting spaces, sandboxes for students and to pay LL a year service contract to maintain it for 12 months while trialling in courses. I outlined the benfits of 3D VLE, the limitations, the gaps in research knowledge in relation to learning outcomes from use of 3D VLE and the issues (lack of accessibility for some student groups, ethics, IP, legal etc) as well as clearly identified outcomes/deliverables inlcuding guidelines, case studies, publications and competitive research grants including an ALTC competetive grant (which was successful) and an ARC Linkage (to be submitted in November). I also applied for Divisional Research Funding for support to develop a proof of concept re accessible interface design which helped supplement the T&L grant. The three successful grant applications can be accessed from the project website:http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/3dvle/

The other option is for you to leverage off the back of our ALTC project - we already have 12 Australian Universities collaborating with us and the goal is for the platform we develop to be open source and free to all universities in Australia.

Maybe you can link your research with ours in a collaborative sense to maximise the benefits?

Cheers

Denise

hi chris, if you visit www.augrid.org you will find a region map and connection details. choose a region location somewhere around the aussie sims for now, at some stage will create an education plaza, actually i'll do that today, then you can choose a spot around that plaza. the goal is to have good aussie representation and areas related to each area so if you tp to the education plaza then you know its all education around that area same for the medical plaza etc. would be more than glad to have tou connect if you have any problems or just want more info don;t hesitate to contact me. thnks for the kind welcome.

Sounds good - let me know when you are back and we will try and connect up.

Cheers

Denise

your typing to log in as a client? try connecting directly to norgan plaza, i am still working on the finer points of the grid and have yet to do good thorough testing.
Let me knwo what happens if you tp to norgan plaza first, this is the central sim, i have also made some changes this morning so tyr it again.
my msn is nathanorgan@hotmail.com if you want to chat to me while trying to connect.

I think there is something not documented in ur instructions or something I don't understand. Do I have to use a special client program - like a recommended opensim client? I tried using my second life client program - changed the shortcut by adding -multiple -loginuri http://augrid.org:8002 -loginpage http://augrid.org/loginscreen.php -helperuri http://augrid.org/ as indicated on ur web site, but it stops waiting on region handshake and never connects. This is when I login using my ausgrid password. Not sure what you mean by connect directly to norgan plaza, there is an edu plaza link showing in the client, but clicking on that just launches a web page.

there are some teething problems but it seems quite stable for the most part and in fact is out performing any other grid i have seen. would be glad to have you help and i am looking at hosting some regions for uni's and schools and would be more than glad to have uwa buildings there.
so far i have built a large round auditorium but there is plenty of space around and your are encouraged to join up a region to the grid if you have the facilities.

in world i am "Norgan Crazys" so im me if you get in.

Glad to be here!
Interesting question Chris. I would say that the two are merging. We can see this with Facebook + Active worlds, Facebook + Vivaty, Bebo + Facebook. And with Lively, we can expect will mesh with Google Maps + Google Earth + sketch up etc. I anticipate further layering and mix and match according to intention and requirements of a given task.

By the way, congrat on inclusion in Siggraph. I am going to Virtual Worlds Expo/Conference in September in LA. Justy missing you! Hope to catch up in OZ sometime. your work sound very interesting.

Whoa nice hat! Nicely broken-in.

And welcome to the Lively group too. Hope to get some free radicals bouncing around there soon.

Thanks Chris,
For making me feel welcomed
Look forward to greater things on our Virtual Worlds :)

lol ;]. hey.