Welcome to the TCC pre-conference wiki!
Dates
April the 3rd and the 4th ( See also April 3 Outline Learning Times Sessions )
April 3 Tuesday
- 2 Learning Times sessions set up to accomodate different time zones:
- 9 AM PDT (Alan, Cythnia, Kelly, Nick and Ilene)
- 12 noon PDT (Cynthia, Kelly, Ilene).
Download the Second Life Orientation Slides from http://tccpre-conference.pbwiki.com/f/Second%20Life%20Orientation%20by%20Calongne.ppt
- The April 3 sessions will provide a quick overview of Second Life along with some information about how to download, join, select a name, and get started with an avatar. We will cover how to move (walk and fly), use basic camera controls, how to change appearance, teleport, etc. We will go over these basic instructions in the Learning Times sessions. (see below for outline of session)
- 6PM PDT : For those who already know how to use Second Life - or know how to use it by 6PM PDT on April 3 - join us for a special NMC Teachers Buzz for a discussion on tips and techniques for using Second Life effectively. Meet with "veteran" educators who will share advice about using Second Life with the TCC newbies. We will hold this on a new NMC Sim, Teaching. Before going to NMC, in Second Life, you will need to join the NMC Guests Group in order to get to the NMC campus. See instructions at http://www.nmc.org/campus/Getting_Started#Getting_to_NMC_Campus . (Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching/112/117/23">http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching/112/117/23 Alan, Nick ) (What's a SLURL? It's a Second Life URL that will take you to a map of Second Life where you can launch your Second Life software, sign in with your Second Life username and password and teleport into a specific location; it may ot work in IE7, so a second method is using secondlife://Teaching/112/117/23 in a web browser which launches the SL client ) You will also join the TCC Group
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After the Teachers Buzz, meet TCCers for a social - place to be determined! It will depend on how many avatars make it to the Teachers Buzz!
April 4 Wednesday
- As Second Life will be off-line from 7am-11am PDT Wednesday, we will have 3 Learning Times sessions set up to accomodate time zones. These sessions will be geared more to a discussion of educational uses: What kinds of classes and programs are being offered, pros/cons of using Second Life for educational purposes, etc.
- 9AM PDT (Cynthia, Ilene, Nick, Kelly)
- 12 noon PDT (Cynthia, Ilene, Alan, Kelly)
- 6 pm PDT. (Cynthia, Ilene, Kelly, Nick)
NMC's year in Second Life:
http://www.nmc.org/sl/docs/secondlife-nmc-for-tcc.ppt
Visit the Virtual Tour of Second Life created by Jeff Hiles at http://edumuve.com/tour/
Programme
Instructions for Programme Participants
You can join Second Life for free.
You will need to have some particular computer requirements. The Second Life software may not run on your computer, but give it a try! Even if you can't run Second Life, join us for our Learning Times sessions to find out more about the potential of this environment.
(See note below about running Second Life software from a flash drive. This could be useful if some of you are trying to use a computer lab where you do not have administrator privileges. )
1 ) To get started:
Go to http://secondlife.com/ and click "join" in the upper right hand side of the screen and follow the directions.
Important: You'll be asked to select a name. You have to pick from a list of last names. You get to decide on your first name. You will NOT be able to change your name. Keep in mind that if you pick a long first name, everyone will have to type that long name whenever they want to say hello to you.
For more information about getting started in Second Life, see Getting Started in Second Life from the NMC (New Media Consortium) http://www.nmc.org/campuswiki/index.php/Getting_Started
For those of you who want to join in the Teachers Buzz session at 6 pm PDT (April 3) on Second Life , look for the information on joining groups in Getting to the NMC Campus. You will need to be an NMC group member in order to come to the Teachers Buzz.
2) Once you select an avatar, send your avatar's name to corwin.carillon@gmail.com
3) Join us on Learning Times for some tips and techniques about getting started.
We will hold sessions on Learning Times at 9 AM PDT and 12 noon PDT
(After logging in to Second Life immediately after the Learning Times session, you will receive a blue drop down box with an offer of friendship from one or more of us (Ilene, Corwin, Lyr, Ann, CDB, BlueWings, etc.) which you should accept.)
4) Once you have joined Second Life and downloaded the software, when you login for the first time you will arrive at one of the Second Life Orientation Islands to learn how to walk, chat, change your appearance, move objects, fly, etc. If you'd like to see what his looks like, download Jo Kay's Second Life Comic: Visiting Orientation Island.. or what happens when I log in?
5) After the orientation, meet on Boracay at ( http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boracay/190/81/29 ) and talk to other TCC attendees!
Our Favorite Places to get Info about Second Life
TCCers package
Lyr has a package of clothes and toys that she can give to the participants. They can pick up 3 or 4 male and 4 or 5 female avatar sets (shapes and clothes)
Registration
The TCC pre-conference activities are open to all TCC registrants and to...
However for organizational reasons, the groups shouldn't be larger than 20 avatars for each orientation session. We will break up into groups if necessary when we get into Second Life.
Organizers
Collaborators
Note about running Second Life from a flash drive by Brett Bixler who gave us permission to post his instructions:
For some time I’ve been looking for a way to run SL off a Flash drive. This will enable students at Penn State using public labs to run SL, keep up with the frequent updates, etc.
I finally have a batch file (for the PC) that seems to do the job. It may work for you as well.
Here’s how I did it.
I installed SL on a Flash drive.
I created this batch script. A batch script is just a text file, so you can copy this script into any editor and save it as RunSL.bat:
: This script will launch Second Life.
: When SL is closed, it will delete temp directories that cause PSU Lab problems.
: For this script to work, the folder containing the Second Life application
: (SecondLife) must be in the same directory as this script.
@ECHO OFF
ECHO Please leave this window open.
ECHO IGNORE ANY “Profile Storage Space” MESSAGES YOU SEE!
ECHO Now launching Second Life…
ECHO.
PAUSE
CD /d %~dp0
CD SecondLife
START /wait SecondLife.exe
RMDIR /q /s “%APPDATA%SecondLife”
ECHO.
ECHO Second Life is closing. Now cleaning up your temp files…
ECHO.
PAUSE
CLS
EXIT**
Student directions:
The batch script named RunSL.bat will launch Second Life when you launch it. When SL is closed, it will delete the SecondLife temp directory that is stored on the C: drive in the Documents and Settings folder. This will keep the PSU labs at UP from forcing the user to manually delete these files, as the user’s file storage space quota is exceeded when Second Life runs. Second Life runs fine without these temp files.
For this script to work, the folder containing the Second Life application (SecondLife) must be in the same directory as this script. You cannot change the name of the Second Life folder, or the names of anything inside the Second Life folder.
If you are running this off a Flash drive, install Second Life (download the software from http://secondlife.com) directly onto the Flash drive (~70MB), copy this script onto the Flash drive in the same directory, and run this script to launch Second Life.
The Second Life application is frequently updated, and most of these updates are mandatory. If you launch Second Life and must update it, please follow the directions Second Life provides. Make sure you have enough free space on your Flash drive (~100MB) to perform a successful update.
-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I haven’t tested this extensively, but it seems to work fine so far in my environment.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with others that may have a similar need. Please don’t ask me to modify this script for you - it’s the first (and hopefully only) script I ever wrote, and I had help!
Any comments or observations are appreciated!
From Penn State Virtual Worlds
http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/virtualworlds/?p=90
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