A Virtual Guest speaker in Jokaydia

During the second meet up this week we had a guest speaker. It was nice to meet Esme who I know as Jane Wilde from a previous course. Jane has moved to Oregon from Vermont where she was teaching at the Marlboro Graduate School.

I had attend a class on Educational Technologies which she stated could be better named Educational Pedagogy. This class was packed full of information. It was not a surprise that hew presentation would be compelling.

As luck would have it the as any of you may have experience in real life there is always problems with projectors when giving a presentation.  The virtual machine seemed be advancing on its own or by an unknowing classmate accidentally. As she move through the presentation we were all not seeing the same slide at the same time.

We did get to learn about Jokaydia and its founder and how the project is supported. As an open source project we could download our own version and set up our private world. The world exists on a server and Imprudence allows us to access the world.

It was noted how we have been having issues with rezzing and how this could be a resource issue. We learned the site is hosted on a server in Australia and that the previous class had much better loading and not all the same issues we were experiencing. Our tour guide Tis commented on how we were meeting at the camp fire unfortunately we could not see the fire and could actually be standing in it.

As you can see from this image some avatars came across as a blur or ghost of an image.

We learned that the US Navy had used virtual worlds and good reasons to do so were that you could experience something too expensive or dangerous without fear of real injury.

She also discussed other platforms such as second life where there were many users online at any given time. Noting that these worlds could be for mature audiences at least in high school age.

A surprising example of a virtual travel was how she showed a drop of water and how you could enter it from a virtual world to have an inside look. A more intimate example had to do with traveling as sperm where she said there were four virtual seats to share the journey with others. I could not help but think of a scene from a Woody Allen Movie