Week twelve

Basic use of the default Microsoft Internet Explorer was certainly familiar, as for most people, but with Mozilla’s Firefox I’d only remembered some of their earlier unreliable versions (pages didn’t load, or the browser ended up crashing).  although I’m aware that Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been the preferred choice for many people, so it should be more reliable in the current format.

The Opera software site offering their Opera 9.6 browser seemed to be something different and a bit more of an alternative to the more popular or mainstream I.E or Firefox,  they have a little more quirkiness in their website so I’d possibly give Opera 9.6 a bash instead.

Mashups were something I’d never heard of before.  After a little browsing around the mashup awards site a couple of interesting things were discovered.  They don’t seem to be the most technologically refined and sometimes end up stalling, although they are meant to be easy to set up and done with limited technical skill. 

The Wikipedia Vision http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/ displays a world map of (almost) real time edits taking place on Wikipedia.  This itself doesn’t offer a great deal of work potential, it was slightly addictive to watch though and sometimes fascinating to follow edits as they popped up on the world map, on anything from obscure furry animals in Scandinavia to members of the Pussycat Dolls.

Week ten activities

The introduction to virtual worlds has so far been the most interesting part of learning2.0 and worth exploring further.  I’d seen news reports about Second Life before, as on occasions it has hit the headlines where various controversies had emerged, most recently a story about “virtual world” affairs leading to real life divorce… there were a number of stories over the last couple of years about the world of virtual worlds.  After setting up an avatar (which was fairly straightforward) we’d managed to enter Second Life and wander about, unfortunately it was not possible that day for everybody attending the workshop to make it to virtual Imperial College London.

It could be worth having another go and trying to get anyone that wants to (possibly using 5 minutes during the wrap-up session?) back in to Second Life and over to virtual Imperial.  In terms of work or academic teaching value, there are certainly possibilities such as the virtual Medical School (SAF building) exercise demonstrated, for students to gain some sort of experience and learn certain aspects of their subject, even if it were slightly detached from reality.

Overall virtual worlds seem to have the broadest and biggest range of possibilities (work/academic/social) out of all of the things we’ve been introduced to so far.  There was something recently about how an avatar of a real life person could eventually become living itself, in that the person wouldn’t necessarily have to operate their avatar in the virtual world.  This has certain possibilities, for example the real life descendants of a real life person who had been dead for a long time (maybe great-great grandchildren) could locate their virtual ancestor through the virtual world and meet with them to learn about their family history. 

It is alarming at the same time when considering how virtual worlds could perhaps become too advanced.