Edinburgh Interactive Festival – Talent Arcade

My first day at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival (I stayed home yesterday), and a pretty good day overall – writing this at the final session of Channel 4′s Talent Arcade, a full day’s program of talks and panels dedicated to helping people get into the game industry. This final session is putting a range of questions gathered over the day to a large panel of experts from the games and related industry.

Below, a summary of my day, including highlights from the Talent Arcade, the single talk I attended at the conference proper, and other odds and ends. A bit rambling, but that was the day for me…

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SLEDcc Preview

The fourth Second Life Community Convention will be held in Tampa, September 5th to 8th. A major part of this will be the SLEDcc - Second Life EDucation community convention. I co-chaired the education workshop last year and the year before, so I’m REALLY looking forward to this one where I get to just turn up!

If you are interested but unable to attend then fear not – a lot of activities will also be happening online. Some of the major talks will be streamed into Second Life, and a range of workshops and presentations will occur inside Second Life. The draft schedule of inworld events can be found here. Attending in-world is free, but please register to help the organisers with their planning.

Sloodle video – VP'08

Last month Sloodle Evangelist Gia Rossini presented Sloodle at the Virtual Policy ’08 event where, by all accounts, her presentation went down very well. She has since made a video version of her presentation, on Blip.tv:

Andy Powell of Eduserv was another panelist at the event, and he has posted some of his thoughts on eFoundations - raising some issues to think about for the future development of virtual worlds for education.

Open Source Second Life… cont.

More developments on the story posted last week… Linden Lab have now established a developer program for developers wanting to work on Second Life/OpenSim interoperability projects. So a grid-of-girds with avatars/users able to connect to different grids is on its (slow) way forward.

With fully open source competitors like Wonderland starting to compete for educators attention, Linden Lab are wise to proactively position themselves for a world which combines institutionally hosted private and open virtual world grids and a public grid.