Randal Hudson's Blog

Object-Name: Randal Hudson

Region: Cybrary City II (248064, 244224)

Local-Position: (221, 210, 24)

Wow, what a
crazy meeting tonight. Puglet and I decided to surprise Dewey with a
swimwear event. It was fun. Great discussion about PD in SL. Photos to
come.

 Ok, here is a pic from the meeting.  It shocked a few folks but what is second life if it isn't fun!  Our discussion was excellent in regards to teaching folks enough about SL in order to teach in SL.  No firm plans as of yet but we are working on them.

Object-Name: Randal Hudson
Region: Terra incognita (278528, 280064)
Local-Position: (87, 93, 28)

We are partying with Decka at the first ever concert on Terra. I will post some pics later. It is 3:00 AM my time and 8:00 PM Australian

OK, I have finally finished my first Second Life script. I had set up B2Evolution for Decka to use on her web site to host blogs for her lab rabbits. Months ago she asked if there was a way to email blog posts with B2 and I said I thought so. I did the research and found that B2 supported blog by email and began looking at ways to blog from within SL. A friend of Decka's, sorry I don't remember his name at the moment, had a blog hud that I looked at to see if it would work. Given the way B2 handles blogging by email it wouldn't work without some serious tweaking. Then I looked at an Open Source email tool that gave me an idea. I experimented with a number of scripts and found it just wasn't going to work because SL added a number of lines of text at the beginning of the email and this would keep B2 from grabbing the email because you have to put your username and password on the first line of the email.

I spent hours trying to get it to work. Tried to find ways to remove the SL text at the top of each email and found that it was near impossible. So I cheated. I went into the B2 code and changed a couple of lines and bingo, it now works. Just gave Decka a copy of the HUD tonight so she could test it out. There are some drawbacks, length of post in particular, but all in all it will be great for just jotting down thoughts while bopping around SL. Eventually I hope to set it up so that you can create a note card and drop it on the HUD and it will ask for username and password and send the email. Now I just have to get cron working correctly to automate the reading of the emails. Wish me luck!

Object-Name: Randal Hudson
Region: Turvile (288256, 267264)
Local-Position: (238, 146, 57)

This is a test direct from second life

This morning, Mothers Day, at 9:00 AM, Dewey Jung called a meeting for those that were interested in getting prek-12 things happening in Second Life.  It was attended by about 10 AVS and was quite interesting.  Given that it was mothers day, we decided to just plan a meeting for next Sunday at 9:00 AM.  But as usually happens in SL, much discussion was had about the different topics we wanted to chat about next week.  Many people wondering about the actual educational uses of second life for the k-12 space and how to actually use it instructionally. 

There are many issues that need to be resolved before I see SL truly being used in the K-12 world outside of collaboration, sharing, virtual meetings and potential professional development activities for teachers. Safety and security of students being one of the biggest ones.  We discussed a separate space for education, districts running there own versions of SL, mentoring teachers as they enter the SL world and others.  All of these and more will be discussed at next weeks meeting.  Looking forward to the debate!