5 get a MUVE on

Well we did it. And it worked. Last time I was that nervous was when my (first) wife kept me waiting at the altar for 20 minutes over the odds, while her chauffer searched for a place to park. We are still married 22 years later, don't worry. Today was a technological success, where we linked 5 people together using Elluminate and managed a slightly flakey audio system in a very large and echoey hotel ballroom in Kuala Lumpur. I also did a successful in-world demonstration of Second Life for the LYICT Conference delegates here in Malaysia.

Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu) moderated the panel session from his eyrie in Bremen, Germany, whilst David White came in from Oxford to talk about design issues in SL, Helen Keegan spoke from Salford about augmented reality and mixing SL and real life, and Steven Warburton, who was in London, gave a presentation on the barriers to collaboration and participation in MUVEs. They all got up at a sickeningly early hour to participate due to the time zone difference. And it couldn't have gone any better, thanks to stirling support from the local technical team here in Kuala Lumpur.

Thanks to all concerned, for making this a memorable and enjoyable experience. A lot could have gone wrong, and I was a little worried about it, I admit. But is shows that you can take risks and it sometimes pays off. Next time, perhaps we will use Second Life as the presentation platform. When we have plucked up enough courage....

SL in KL through Elluminate

There has been a change in strategy. I'm a little disappointed we can't use Second Life to do a Second Life panel - it would have been a challenge and quite risky due to technical limitations. So probably a bit 'adrenalined' (is that a word?). But the guys have made a sensible decision to use Elluminate instead, as it requires less bandwidth (we only have 2Mb ps in the hotel conference venue) and the audio and streaming media systems are superior and will be a little less prone to problems.

I'm looking forward to doing this session on Monday, at 0700 BST, but I'm not looking forward to the travelling. It will take me 4 hours to get to Heathrow and then there's the flight - it will take 19 hours to get from London to Kuala Lumpur, and that's before I get to passport control, the baggage carousel, customs, the taxi rank....

Anyone want to go in my place?

Elluminating experience

Just enjoyed an interesting half hour testing out the Elluminate Live! platform in preparation for a panel session I will be doing with Helen Keegan (Salford University) and Nicholas Breakwell (Hibernia College, Dublin) for the Sloan Consortium International Symposium entitled 'Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning'. It will be held on 7-9 May and hosted by Pheonix University, Arizona. The moderator for the session will be Gary Morrison, and my invite to present at the panel is a legacy of last year's EDEN conference in Naples. I spoke then on wikis and social network tools and how they can be used to support nomadic learners. They must have liked it because Gary Morrison wrote about it and then got in touch. Looking forward to it... By the way, I will be speaking at this year's EDEN 2008 conference in Lisbon too - on using blogs for mentoring of student teachers. If you haven't been to one, it's well worth the trip if only for the networking opportunities (people not computers, obviously).

Just started a new e-learning blog on JISC Emerge ('JISC Community Presence') too, which will be an experience. I have many friends already established on this platform, so it's a very nice opportunity to be able to join them all. A lot of this content will be mirrored there in the future. Oh, and vice versa.