Saturday, September 18, 2010

#PLENK2010 in SL and UStream

More complicated fun!
Things are coming together for the cohort of people who use Second Life as an important part of their personal learning environments.
Sean Fitzgerald has started a new wiki to coordinate things a bit. http://plenk2010insl.wikispaces.com/

We met for a while tonight in Conviviality Corners and tried imagining a few things. One proposal was to incorporate a in-world RSS feed aggregator for the feeds of the PLENK SL cohort or anyone blogging about virtual environments in a PLE ( as a PLE). We could post Stephen's master list of feeds if he is okay with that and if we can find the proper code.

I was playing around with an idea that avatars could gather to participate in the PLENK Elluminate sessions. Kind of like getting together in the bar to watch a football game.

I'm pretty sure it can be done with UStream and the in-world shared media. I tried it out tonight. After downloading the Desktop Producer version of UStream I started a UStream broadcast. I think grabbed the url for the UStream feed and put it on a shared media panel in Second Life. I then opened an Elluminate demo session on my desktop and switched UStream to screen capture mode. I was able to view the Elluminate session on the wall in Conviviality Corners. I will have to play around a little more to see if people can participate in the Elluminate chat from within SL and whether the audio will work properly but it looks promising.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Glen,

Can you record with your ustream account? If so then we could arrange a time for those people who missed a session to watch it together, surely? Play it during a different timezone, perhaps?

In fact, if this works out, you can make it available to all of PLENK2010 to watch whenever they want.

Cris said...

I think the idea of meeting in SL to participate in the Elluminate sessions is crazy brilliant ;-)

Looking forward to it!
Cris/2B Writer

Stephen Downes said...

> We could post Stephen's master list of feeds if he is okay with that and if we can find the proper code.

Fine with me. Here's the links:
http://connect.downes.ca/feeds.htm
http://connect.downes.ca/feeds.xml

Glen Gatin said...

@Sean considering that recordings of the Elluminate sessions will available, do you think there would be an advantage to recording again? I would like to add a link to the Elluminate sessions to a virtual library in Second Life similar to those in the Connectionism Reading Room.

Glen Gatin said...

@Downes, Thanks Stephen.

Anonymous said...

@Glen, the recordings are still in java, so I assume they couldn't be streamed in world (have you tried?) You'd have to be set up to screencast and stream them every time someone wants to watch them in-world, and I'm sure you wouldn't want to be available for that! :-)

Best to record them once, if it no hassle, then they can be watched in-world on demand by individuals or in a group.

As for people outside SL, there may be some who can't play the recording. Maybe they're on an old computer, or a netbook, or even an Android phone. I assume the recordings would be in flash, so they won't play on the iPhone or iPad (a few owners have already expressed frustration about not being able to view the sessions).

Now all we need is someone to screencast and stream the group *inside* of SL watching the live Elluminate sessions and make those available!