Second Life

Time to jump into the world of virtual environments and gaming. This is truly the hot topic I’m seeing for conference programs, listserv discussions, and more. It’s being explored here at NC State, and I really need to learn more about how they fit into the learning environment, and how we can use them in Student Affairs.

Not sure if I’m going to like this, or understand it, but I’m now a resident of Second Life. My avatar’s name is Dare Dagostine, and I currently have zero Linden dollars and no land holdings. I don’t know what any of that means yet.

I also am a resident of Wolfland, which is the NC State-sponsored virtual world, and am known as DareDevil. (I’m not a full citizen yet, just a tourist with a temporary visa.) Everytime I log in, I get this message from the Immigration Officer: “Sorry, there is no world called ‘wolfland’ running at this time.” So nothing is happening. Probably user error since I’m all new to this!

So feel free to stop by and say hello to Dare Dagostino or DareDevil.

Jott

My colleague Eddie Lovett recently encouraged me to try out Jott, a (currently) free service that lets you make a phone call to yourself, essentially, that is then transcribed and available to you via the web. Eddie loves it. I’ve signed up but haven’t used it yet. Not sure if there would be any uses for Student Affairs yet, but this is obviously the trend in technology…connecting everything and everyone through all possible devices.