HeyJude and KerryJ in SL

I was looking around JoKaydia II the other night and came across a beautifully landscaped garden, and a huge beautifully furnished house. There was someone inside - her name was Pandora, I could see her through the window and desperately wanted to connect. I flew up to the dancefloor balcony and entered from upstairs, it was funny how intrusive I felt just dropping in like this. Soon enough I found out it was Kerry J. who I think may be part of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework and then HeyJude (Judy O'Connell) appeared too! It just shows you never know who you might meet and I was very pleased and excited to connect with them!

Watch This - Second Life in Skype

Definitely something I want to try and can see potential for!

Collaborative Video!

Collaborative Video brings the opportunity for rich collaborative learning - I am hoping it develops into an easy platform to access and customise(rip and mix?) video clips in individual and creative ways, it is exciting because this is a concept my colleagues and I have been talking about for a couple of years and have been waiting to see developed and realised

"Wikipedia To Get Its Video On
Under a new partnership unveiled today, Kaltura, maker of embeddable collaborative video webware, will bring video to the Wikimedia family of sites. The beta program, which is being dubbed “an open, collaborative video experiment,” will allow users to add and remix rich media via an embeddable player on wiki pages."

I think this is another milestone for educators to take account of and a powerful learning tool.

Second Life on Mobile Phone!

Is this what we have been waiting for or what?! We know that yesterday a camera or video feature on a mobile phone was really something. Over a short time they have become common place features, readily available for use in teaching and learning (although not utilised as much as they could be). The technology that sees Second Life on mobile phones will also become commonplace - and then we will have the convergence of real world learning and avatar based social networking and learning in a virtual world Bring it on! Watch the video over at Parystec - also follow the link for more details on SL capable phones.

Voki in a wiki!

Great idea from Classroom 2.0. I particularly like the idea of being able to phone the speech in for the character to speak, but I dont think it works in Australia. I think there is some fun to be had with really pretty princess characters with very deep male voices too! Here is my voki, I have kept it very straight -



Get a Voki now!

Reading

Before 2007 is too far behind me I want to capture the books I have read so I dont forget them. As with most bloggers and people who spend time on-line I sift through a large amount of written and visual material, and luckily for me I was shown how to use del.ici.ous so I can always find it again.



So I will list the books and make some notes about them here in this blog post - then I can tag it "books I have read" :)



Collected Poems - James McAuley



This book was a loving gift from a second hand bookshop, the first of many - I am so glad that when I was asked if I liked bunches of flowers that I said I would prefer a book! This has been a great call, after all there are plenty of flowers in the gardens of the world!



The poems spoke to me- how did James McAuley know as a 21 year old how someone like me (45 years old, four young adults growing towards leaving home) would feel - the poem The Woman in the House made me wonder

Here are some of the lines that made me feel like James McAuley had been standing next to me:

The young have a bird's bright eye,
Their tender desires are unkind.........


Now they will move in the sun
And change like water and wind
For them will be how many
Things ending, things begun:
For me there is only one
Beginning, which is an ending
When everything else is done.



Inspired by his poetry and wanting to give a gift that would stand in time to my own 21 year old musician son I purchased some James McAuley first editions for his birthday. As any openminded and sensitive musician the gift was not lost on my son. Although the last straw may have come as he lay in bed with the flu on his 21st birthday and instead of being able to party he was captive to my reading aloud from the collected poems! From my point of view - perfect, I had my son to myself, (altho sorry he wasnt well), from his point of view and not without humour, well, it was a birthday he would never forget.


Chris Lowney - Heroic Leadership

I have blogged about this book before, but I still think about its four main tenets, ingenuity, self awareness, love and heroism everyday. I have taken on the Jesuit practice of reflecting during the day about how I am going in respect to these and how I could do better.

John Baldock - The Essence of Rumi

The quote on the back of the book says it all, and what isnt in the quote is in the tales of Rumis life and Sufi stories:
"Get drunk on Love for Love is all that exists. Unless you make Love your business you will not be admitted to the Beloved".

Richard Neville - hippie hippie shake

I am glad I read this because I didnt realise the extent of discrimination towards participants in the counter culture of the 1960s. Discrimination looks the same no matter where or how it is practised, and it is always sore, oozing and ugly.

Two things stood out for me - the "hippies" almost got it right in terms of freedom and love - the cover of the book shows a group of young people on the beach in Ibiza and they look as happy and healthy as anyone can be. Too many drugs that wasted them - not everyone though. Although it was interesting to understand the influence of drugs on the art and music of the time and feel the spirit of the quest for a new world (is here some parallel here with Second Lifers and Web 2.0 progressives?).

Simone De Beauvoir - A Very Easy Death

Intense, rich in description of nature and humanity. Family, love, life and death as counterpoints to each other - when is just being alive no longer a life? I f ound this story had the effect of reconciling me to death, maybe just because it laid out all the details of deteriorating illness that arent usually talked about.

Stephen Edgar - Where The Trees Were

I heard Stephen Edgar read from this book at the Wednesday night poetry reading at Sappho bookstore Glebe. Having heard Stephen read and meeting him I was very touched to have the book presented to me as a gift by my loved one to take the book home - you know that delighted feeling when you are unexpectedly given something you know you will really like?

The poem Penshurst was my favourite because I grew up around there and had a strong recognition of what the poet was saying. He describes so well the hidden nature of the suburb, the "street in suspense, deserted...." "the wives indoors posessed by their invisibility" and even the far off sounds of the trains "muffled, far off" "that simply hung", the suburb "the reassuring weight of houses, safe." Thank you for the book Michael and thank you for the poems Stephen Edgar.

I will do some more of the other books I have read another night, there is still at least a dozen others, too much for me to feel in one post.