Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2010 conference.  That’s the official name.  Dates, 12-13 Mar. 2010. 

I reported on it before, when the call for papers was announced:
Virtual World, Real Education in Second Life

Now all the papers are in and the conference planning gets underway in earnest.  The Lindens are giving us 20 sims for the conference-- to be available about now.  So the builders can get busy on the design.  And the Program committee can get busy on reviewing the papers. 

The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference is a community-based project, with meetings held entirely inworld (in a virtual reality).    It is by nature multilingual.  That means we have to accommodate newcomers with many different languages.  In the next section I describe our efforts in that direction.

As I promised in the previous episode, this episode gives detailed instructions on how to bring an advance team into Second Life through the Rockcliffe University Gateway.  Only a few of the details are specific to the Rockcliffe Gateway.  You can modify them to fit another entry point.  The posters and notecards are free to copy at Cookie Visitor Welcome Center.

Instructions for leading the advance team into Second Life

Advance Team:  A leader and a few Skype-capable people.

1. Log on to SL yourself and go to Rockcliffe University Gateway

2. Establish a conference call on Skype to include yourself and the others on the advance team.

3. Send the people to this web page:  Rockcliffe University Consortium, Gateway page 

This article is another in our series: The Avatar's Guide to Gatherings  Subtitle: You don't have to be a geek to use Second Life.  You may use it for:

• classes (as teacher or learner), 
• conventions. (The Second Life Community Convention could be in Second Life.), 
• symposia (ADVANCES IN GREEN SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY).  

This article gives suggestions on how to help groups of non-geeks get into Second Life.  Without trying to remake them into geeks.

(Disclaimer: I am half geek.  I speak both geek and English.  Here I try to keep everything in English. The instructions here are written for novices so you can copy them out and give them to your supervisor.)

Gathering a flock of people in SL

This job starts with a leader, preferably somebody who has experience managing such a gathering in the physical world.  So we start with advice to the leader. 

Networking is what triggered this topic.  I saw a question on the Vio business networking channel about the possible limits on meeting sizes.  That's how networking operates in Second Life.  I could answer that question, so I did.  But I realized that other people would want that information, too.  I put it in an earlier article and in the Hobo Kit (intermediate section), too.

But there are other things people need to know about how to produce meetings in Second Life.   And the conversation in the Vio channel made me think there are people around who would want to have that info.  So I made a list of the main problems that I have seen in connection with running meetings in Second Life.   And, because I favor problem solving over problem listing, I turned the list into actions that a newcomer could take to tame those problems.

Online registration closes in 2 days, this Thursday, 16 October, at 23:59 London time, for next week's Virtual Worlds London conference and expo.  It's 795 GBP to attend - unless you stick the code 'REZZABLEVIP' in the box on this registration page - the full conference and 95 GBP to attend the expo-only, but again you can stick the code 'REZZABLEVIP in the registration page. Rezzable may give away 30 29 28 FREE expo badges. These will get you into the Expo Hall during both show days, 20-21 October 2008. The pass also gains you access to FastPitch.

Virtual Worlds London, 20-21 October 2008, is the leading European event for businesses seeking to understand and maximize business strategies within virtual worlds. VW London takes place at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, two blocks from Parliament. On the speakers list are amongst others Marc 'Linden' Kingdon and our very own CEO Jon 'RightasRain' Himoff.

It's all quite a big topic these days--yes, Virtual World is hot stuff. Lot of money getting dished out on many new platforms that will hit the market hard in 2009 (see our watch list here) . Makes us all the early lab rats adopters in this exciting space blah blah blah. But, actually there a few events that seems to have some energy and some interesting things going on and there is one even coming to visit us here in London! Yes, VirtualWorldNews.com (is a little hype-overload, but also has lot of good info on stuff and their weekly newspam is ok) is running an event called er...Virtual Worlds London anyway, you probably get the main idea here--it's about virtual worlds and in London. Event runs October 20-21 which is a lovely time of year here as well (some other good London deal promos here).