Monthly Archives: April 2014

Hot Wheels Dobe

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Our 14 year old doberman Jasper has been slowly losing mobility in his hind legs due to canine degenerative myelopathy.  He has no pain, is happy and alert and loves life.  He just stumbles a lot now because of his uncooperative hind legs.  Unfortunately, this means it has been getting harder for him to roam around outside.

Jasper and his best friend Samantha (our mini-dachshund)

Jasper and his best friend Samantha (our mini-dachshund)

This past weekend I set him up with some back wheels from the wonderful folks at HandicappedPets.com, and Jasper could not be happier. Now he gets all excited when he sees me preparing to put the harness on him, and once again he can roam all across our backyard with ease.

Jasper and me in the backyard

Jasper and me in the backyard

It’s amazing how quickly animals can adapt to new circumstances and then carry on with life like nothing has happened.  I think they can teach us a lot about how to focus on enjoying life to the fullest.

Roll on, Jasper.  I love you!

 

Brief Thoughts on Ebbe’s Keynote at VWBPE 2014 in Second Life

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It was good to hear Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab’s new CEO, speak at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2014 Conference in Second Life today.

Ebbe addressed a number of pain points with the educator community in Second Life and brought some healthy visibility into how he sees things moving forward on a number of technical levels.  I really appreciated the time and effort he spent in addressing educators.

But I have some constructive criticism.

Cultivating any community requires a lot more than just understanding its technical requirements for a particular piece of software or to be “listening to needs.”  Communities are organic and constantly evolving entities with complex interdependencies that are often far from intuitive.  And when you give communities new technological tools, they typically use these tools in very unpredictable ways.

In other words, it’s not just about collecting technical requirements and reading submitted feedback when you have the time.  It’s about taking the time to actively investigate and participate in a community so you can cultivate its success and identify completely new market opportunities in the future.

There’s a reason people dedicated to sociology and cultural anthropology and community development exist.  This stuff is important and hard and requires focus.

It’s the same reason why companies that focus solely on engineering goals while ignoring complex sociological factors tend to find themselves perpetually running after a community rather than leading it into the brightest possible future.

-John “Pathfinder” Lester

Giving a Virtual Worlds Lecture – April 7 @ 6pm PDT in Second Life

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blog post sjsu headerOn Monday April 7 at 6pm PDT I’ll be giving a Virtual Worlds Lecture in Second Life.

The title of my talk is “Finding the Balance between Pedagogy and Technology.”  Here’s a summary:

One must always seek a thoughtful match between pedagogy and technology. Different virtual world platforms are suited for different uses, ranging from collaborative work environments to immersive goal-oriented simulations. The speaker will discuss current virtual world technological trends involving specific gaming technologies like Unity3D and the growth of Open Source platforms such as OpenSimulator. A discussion will focus on helping educators choose the right tool for the right job, matching pedagogical goals with technological affordances.

My presentation is part of an ongoing series of talks hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University.  Here’s more information about the colloquia, and here’s a SLURL for where I’ll be speaking.

Part of what I’ll be doing in addition to showing slides and speaking will be a live demo of some of the content import/export tools in the Singularity Viewer.  You’ll get so see how you can easily backup content you’ve created in Second Life or Opensim to your hard drive and how to get that content into other 3D platforms like Unity3d and Blender.

Content import and export in Singularity Viewer

Hope to see you there!

-John “Pathfinder” Lester