CESI meet and presentation

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on September 28, 2009

We attended the Autum ‘09 CESI Meet at the Digital Hub in Dublin last Friday. The night was divided into mini-presentations (7 minutes), nano-presentations (2 minutes) and soap box corners. It was brilliantly organized and I loved the way everything was kept moving at a cracking pace by the merciless timekeepers.

I gave a talk on Opensim during a nano-presentation which followed an earlier talk on Second Life by Tim Savage from Trinity College Dublin. So virtual worlds were well represented on the night. Every talk was interesting but a few in particular stood out for me including Enda Donlon on Xtranormal (a wonderful text-to-movie web service), Stephen Howell on Pencasting (recording lecture notes and audio in a kind of hybrid podcast-screencast) and Ban Ryan on using the fun technologies that children love to teach them in class (eg. Nintendo DS).

Overall the night was a wonderful mix of inspiration and conversation, wonderfully organized by Mags Amond, John Heffernan and the rest of the team. Simon Lewis has written up a more in-depth review and you can see a few photos from the event below. Our first CESI meet will certainly not be our last.

Second Life training course at Dublin City University

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on September 4, 2009

We delivered a training course in Second Life to seven lecturers in Dublin City University on Tuesday. I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable courses I’ve ever delivered as the group was literally giddy with excitement all the way through.

We had a fascinating lunchtime chat about the potential for virtual worlds in language education and marketing. And on our return did a group field trip to Dublin SL, one of the best sims on the whole of Second Life. Dr. Theo Lynn captured a snapshot of our wanderings around Grafton Street -