I’ve been invited to attend and speak at the Academic Librarians 2012 Conference at Syracuse University from June 12-13. This conference will be a great opportunity to connect with folks interested in building the future of immersive learning and information literacy.
The Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway is hosting a seminar this week on “Virtual Worlds & Educational Technologies.”
The seminar will be held on Wednesday April 25th from 11:00-14:00 CEST, and it’s free and open to both staff and students. Here’s a summary of speakers and topics: Continue reading
Follow the Sun 2012 is a free online conference that runs from March 27-30. Here’s a summary from their website:
“Digital Futures Institute, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, Athabasca University, and our commercial partners are proud to provide this year’s 48-hour, online learning festival at no charge to all participants. The theme of this year’s conference moves beyond educational technology to examine knowledge development and exchange across the disciplines.”
I’ll be giving an online presentation on Thursday March 29th at 2:30am EDT (yes, that’s 2:30am). The topic will be “Integrated Reality and Next Generation Virtual Worlds.”
Here are my slides on SlideShare to give you a preview of what I’ll be talking about, and I’ll update this blog post with a recording of my presentation after the conference is over.
Update 3/29/2012: Here’s the recording of my presentation.
–John “Pathfinder” Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid Inc.
The Virtual Enterprise Conference at Glyndŵr University brings together a diverse range of web entrepreneurs, students and academics to discuss the opportunities for e-entrepreneurship offered by virtual worlds and the social web. It’s hosted each year by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Glyndŵr University.
On Feb 23 at this year’s conference, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on Best Practices in Virtual Worlds. Here’s the full video.
The Right Tool for the Right Job: Best Practices for Virtual Worlds from John Lester on Vimeo.
You can grab a copy of my slides on Google, and you can visit the Jibe world featured in my presentation by going here.
Thanks again to Matthew Draycott from the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Glyndŵr University for inviting me to speak. It was a great opportunity!
– John “Pathfinder” Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid, Inc.
The Tech Museum and The Tech Virtual are hosting a conference on “Interfaces for the New Decade,” Tuesday, November 15, 2011 from 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM (PT). This event will bring together interactive technology researchers, developers, and users for a conference and opening of The Tech Museum’s newest gallery.
The conference has a great lineup of speakers presenting about the future of interactive exhibits. And best of all, if you can’t make it out to San Jose, you can virtually attend the event for free.
All of us at ReactionGrid have signed up to attend the conference online, and during the event we will also be in our Jibe virtual world Expo Demo where we’ll be discussing the presentations.
So sign up to attend the conference for free and visit with us in Jibe during the conference if you’d like to chat with us about virtual world platforms. Hope to see you there!
ReactionGrid's Expo Demo world in Jibe. Visit it on the web!
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) is the #1 ranked university in the country of Peru.
It is also home to a wonderful research project called Grupo Avatar.
Read on to learn more.
ISTE SIGVE (International Society for Technology in Education – Special Interest Group for Virtual Environments) is a group of educators, administrators, and educational technologists who are interested in the development of 3D Virtual Environment platforms for connection and collaboration.
They hold online meetings each month, and on May 17th they invited me to speak to their group about Jibe and Virtual Worlds on the Web.
GAMBIT is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore, created to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium. The lab focuses on the creation of video game prototypes to demonstrate their research as a complement to traditional academic publishing.
Tomorrow (Friday) at 4pm Eastern, Chris Hart (ReactionGrid CTO) and I will be at the GAMBIT lab at MIT to talk about Jibe!
More details can be found on the GAMBIT blog.
There will be a live video stream of the presentation, so you can also tune in to watch.
UPDATE 5/24/11: Here’s a recording of our presentation.
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
I like to write tutorials to help people learn how to do things with Jibe and Unity3d, and you can find them all on my blog. But sometimes it’s easier to learn by joining a live tutorial. Doing it live also lets people ask questions during the tutorial.
I host Live Tutorials using a web-based screen-sharing application called Join.me. Just go to my Join.me page in your web browser and you can jump right in without having to download any software. Once you’re in the meeting, you’ll be be added to a Skype conference call so we can communicate using voice.
My Live Tutorials are open to everyone, and each week I’ll be teaching people how to use Jibe and the Unity3d editor to do something new.
More information about my Office Hours and Live Tutorials (including a calendar of scheduled events) can be found here.
And be sure to watch the #ReactionGrid hashtag on Twitter for special announcements!
If you’d like to schedule a time for a personal tutorial to learn more about Unity3d and Jibe, you got it! Just email me at pathfinder@reactiongrid.com and let me know what day/time works for you. We can meet using my Join.me page and I can walk you through whatever you’d like to learn. Beginners welcome!
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
On January 23rd 2011, I was an invited guest on Paisley Beebe’s “Tonight Live” show in Second Life. Thank you again to everyone on the Tonight Live and Treet.tv team for working so hard to put on such a professional show and the opportunity for me to participate. I had a fun time, and thank you to everyone who attended as well.
I shared some of my thoughts about my time working at Linden Lab, some simple advice for Linden Lab’s new CEO, my new gig with Reaction Grid, the state of education in virtual worlds, and the future of interconnected virtual worlds in general.
I hope I was entertaining. If anyone would like me to expand on anything I said in the interview, please leave a blog comment and I’ll happily reply.
Here’s a recording of my interview.
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 