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I think the student protest is a great idea. I was also bummed by the news that Lively was closing. I am a technology teacher who uses SL regularly but I think lively is so much more practical educationally.
We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.
To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content.
So no question, we will see a lot more of this as the economy takes a further downward spiral. I was impressed that Pownce, though finanicials may have caused them to close, they did plan an exit strategy that took their community into account. As a community developer at WeAreTeachers, this is something that we think about all the time... how do we add value and support teachers, and keep the lights on. Most Web 2.0 apps are built on click throughs, traffic, members, numbers, banner ads, etc. as their model for revenue. We have built a different approach.
In this Web 2.0 arena as I work with various social media groups, and see this first hand from the "Lively" side of the table. It's easy to talk about all the problems and ideas for generating community, revenue and click rates. I think that from your end it's good to petition, but I also think that is equally important to come up with solutions and ideas for keeping the service alive. We will see a lot more of this.
Again, I applaud your students' efforts and will definitely sign the petition.
This is a beta 3D world that's free that I have been exploring as an alternative. Not sure if this is helpful or not. Again, tight economy, not sure what their status is. But it's really cool.
And as an aside, congrats for using technology as a viable tool in the classroom!
Have you looked at the open source OpenSim - http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page yet? It lets you set up your own Second-Life-like islands.
For a publicly accessible site you would need a webhost an someone with a bit of technical nous, but it's not insurmountable. You could probably set it up on a school server if you only need local access. You can even set it up on your own computer, but that precludes multi-user access. It's fun having a island on your computer though, and it's handy for practicing building without going online.
If you look around you will find educators who are already using it, such as these guys - http://www.openhabitat.org/
There are new free and commercial hosting grids popping up all the time - http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List, though I don't know if they'd have the safety/security requirements you'd be after for educational use.
It's only a matter of time before someone sets up an education-focused grid.
And what do I think? I think that's it's risky depending on commercial services, and better to go with self-hosted, open source options where possible. :-)
If you look around you will find a few educators already using it, like these guys: http://www.openhabitat.org/
To set up a publically available region you would need a web host and a someone with a bit of technical nous, but it's not insurmountable. There are new free and commercial hosting grids popping up all the time - http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List
, but I'm not sure they have the security/safety you would like for educational use.
It's only a matter of time before someone sets up an education-specific grid.
You should also be able to set it up on a school server without too much hassle if you only want local students to access it. You can actually run it on your own computer too (although you don't get multi-user access then... but it's good for practicing building skils offline).
us test and join in. AT this point, I've gotten permission forms and going
to let my students help me make the decision - we're going to be evaluating
and posting the information we find on their blog -
http://digiteendreamteam.blogspot.com and we'll see. Open Sim is something
I'd love to do, but I'm not going to load our servers down any.
Thank you for the great information! I'm going to pass this along to the
students.
Good Luck
1) Join Lively
2) If you're available - we'll release the protest room links on Tuesday and
hold the protests from 2:15 - 3:00 pm on Wednesday! The kids are planning
speeches and everything!
Thank you so much!
If you go to your RSS feed here
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolCatTeacherBlog
and view the source, you will see that the link for this page is
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CoolCatTeacherBl...
Notice that this link is to a Feedburner URL, not to your URL. That means that everybody viewing your page is first sen t to feedburner, only later going to your site. That's how Feedburner collects stats.
The problem is, if Feedburner ever goes out of business (is shut down by Google) or begins charging for referrals, all of your links listed out there in RSS feeds will break. As it is, your website becomes slow and sluggish any time Feedburner struggles, which is often. Finally, your RSS is Feedburner RSS, which is, frankly, a twisted mess of bad code. So it is more likely to suffer aggregation problems.
So, you're saying that the links in RSS readers would be gone -- I haven't seen that anyone is linking to the feedburner link vs. my blog link - if that is the case, that is very bad -- I'll check that and see.
Speaking of feedburner, think it is having problems today and you're right it does hiccup a bit. Just trying to get my arms around what you're teaching me - not sure I completely understand yet -- am going to have to look at this. It should do feedburner through RSS - it gives me the ability to add a lot of cool things to the feed, however, you're saying that is not good and I should use blogger's atom feed? or rss feed?
Just trying to figure out the best option here and to understand. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me - I know you're so busy.
I'm with Emergent, the company that makes Gamebryo. Yes, Lively is built on Gamebryo, and yes, Gamebryo has a license fee required for it's use. I wanted to let you know that we do have an academic program that allows schools to use Gamebryo for free - however it's an underlying engine not a 3D virtual world application - so I am not sure that will get you what you need.
John Austin
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
I'm less sure of the argument that there should be a "free" platform for education - As an educationalist, I appreciate free services, though as a web master, I know that someone, somewhere has to pay for the service.
I guess this situation has highlighted the difficulties of relying on something that's free - its potential life span. And, ultimately, who should pay? (For example, should I, as a UK citizen, benefit from, say, something that's ultimately paid for by US consumers through advertising - or, should I pay & US citizens get it free.
At the moment, I am using a lot of free services, though I am increasingly aware that someone, somewhere has to pay for it.
https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/index.html
Emma, these are all free in the sense there's no charge for the software -- you need to provide your own computer to run a server (Croquet is an exception -- it runs peer-to-peer between client machines).
I'm going to be teaching a graduate course on virtual worlds for education in the spring, and Lively was one of the platforms I'd considered. I ultimately decided not to use it because it doesn't run on the Mac (which many of our students use).