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.

Multilingual at the Gateway 

To accommodate the many languages we expect at the conference, we are making arrangements with language oriented community gateways to help newcomers enter Second Life in a language they are comfortable with.  The Rockcliffe gateway  (English-speaking) is taking the lead in organizing a group of cooperating gateways representing other languages.  The current list is on my website at:

Special Help for VWBPE Participants

When the conference site is open, we will provide the cooperating gateways with logos, signs, and notecards (in English) to help the new arrivals find the conference site. The cooperating gateways will translate the text into gateway language.

As of now we have the following languages (ans special circumstances) represented:

• English:  Rockcliffe Community Gateway
• Disabilities: Virtual ability  Easy entry for people with limitations on ability to use a computer. 
• Portuguese: GAM_Grupo de Apoio Mentor
• French: BOURBON HELP / AIDE ACCUEIL
• Italian: Itland Social Network
• Polish: POLISH COMMUNITY 
• Chinese: Chinese Portal
• Turkish:  Bosphorus
• BeNeLux Community Gateway

Since this is a lasting resource, we will maintain the list after the event to make it available for other multilingual conferences.

A.R.T: performances for the VWBPE conference. 

The actors in the Avatar Repertory Theater are busily planning their contributions to the Conference.  Their main problem is selecting content.  They probably have over 50 hours of content that is already rehearsed and presentable.  (After all, that is what repertory theater is for.) 

Some of that content is under copyright, particularly the Howard Barker performances: 

World Wide Theater event in Second Life

They got permission to do ’13 Objects” as part of the international festival celebrating the work of this prestigious playwright, so they may be able to get permission again for some excerpts.  If not, they will have lots of other performances to draw on.  We know that theatrical presentations in Second Life may be regarded as broadcasts and may be (often are) recorded for rebroadcast on the web.   So the ART player need broadcast rights for any public presentaion. 

Their main presentation will be an hour of short performances on Saturday, March 13.  Those will be done on Cookie, probably in the Greek Archon Theater.  That’s the venue they use every Friday for their regular event “Art Plays Around.”   

Some of the actors are also working on presentations to support the speech by

• Joff Chafer,
• Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow,
• Performing Arts Department,
• School of Art and Design,
• Coventry University.  

Joff will be speaking on Friday about Theater in Second Life.  He performs with the Avatar Repertory Theater as Joff Fassnacht.

The idea of performances to go along Joff’s talk is that he can substitute these for the traditional slide show and/or power point.  I can imagine the disappointment.   If Joff gives me some graphics I may even put them on my website, just for old times’ sake.  Power-point really does fit the flat web quite well.