I will be one of the facilitators of the workshop, Educational applications of virtual worlds at this year’s State of Play conference in Singapore: Some theorists argue that games are great environments for learning, but terrible tools for teaching. Is it true that we are still struggling to incorporate games and virtual worlds in the […]
After a winter hiatus, State of Play Academy is back in session with an exciting new series of forums touching on a number of legal and legally-related topics ranging from Public Disclosure and the Fourth Amendment to Election 2008 and the Remix Culture. Sessions will run through June 8. Times for each class are different, […]
About a week ago, Prof. Pete Fitzgerald of Stetson Law School dropped me a line inquiring about using Second Life to offer his first-year Contracts students to engage in what I might dub “legal anthropology.” The fact that Linden Labs was now processing millions of dollars of transactions caught Pete’s eye, and he realized that […]
State of Play Session MP3 (large!) Below are raw-text notes I took at the education session at State of Play. I’ll write something more coherent when I catch some time. At right you can see Becca and me participating in our own ad-hoc backchannel via Berkman Island. Doug: transferability. Games as terrible environments, not for […]
Last Thursday I had the opportunity to lead a lecture/discussion in Second Life for CyberOne-Extension about relationships, networks, and how to build relationships through one-to-ones. The night before I had attended a training by Milosun Czervik on behalf of the SL Library Group on presentation tools available in SL. I picked up some really useful tools at the Milosun’s presentation, most notably a chatfeeder (works like a teleprompter — you pre-write the talk and press a button to “speak” each line from the text) and AngryBeth’s whiteboard…
In probably our most successful Academy lecture to date, Colin Rule, EBay’s Director of Dispute Resolution, presented a lecture on dispute resolution in virtual worlds. Here’s an excerpt of the class description: …On August 27th I led a class at Southern Methodist University in Plano, Texas through a negotiation simulation in There.com. After spending about […]
SOPA and CyberOne both garnered some attention today from Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch. Hopefully with more people paying attention to the phenomena, MUVEs will gain some level of acceptance and become both potential media and subjects for legal study/teaching.
We had our first potential conflict I know of in State of Play Academy last night. A bunch of kids (I’m guessing young teenagers or tweeners) showed up towards the end of class and started milling around, doing their There thing. For the most part they were respectful, though somewhat intrusive. Luckily most did not […]
This Tuesday and Thursday, 8:30-9:30pm EST, Lauren Gelman will be discussing legal protections for bloggers at State of Play Academy. Here is her description of the event: Learn about legal protections for bloggers at State of Play Academy! Are you a blogger worried about your liability for things others are posting on your website? Your […]
On Tuesday we resumed our twice-weekly courses in There.com. Though we encountered our first serious technological glitch (the lecturer was unable to log into the space from work, likely for firewall reasons), we ended up having an interesting conversation nonetheless about what and how to teach in virtual spaces. For example, is it necessary for […]
