News on Virtual Worlds: NMC March Symposium and MacArthur Foundation Awards

Natasha Boskic writes:

I attended the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning at the end of March (2009) which was completely done in Second Life.

It was an extraordinary experience with good presentations, with things running smoothly and on time. A variety of speakers with diverse topics made the sessions interesting in their own way, even for the novice users such as myself. We had an orientation to Second Life environment and the conference venues prior to the symposium which helped a lot. Many presenters tried to do something with the audience, and the collaboration turned out to be very successful, such as working in Google doc and other google applications, or “composing music” (creating sounds) with our avatar’s movements, just like using  a wii. The sessions were video recorded and they are available to the public, under “Symposium Program”. Almost a hundred photos from the symposium have been posted in flickr

The other “news” I have is about the MacArthur Foundation. A few days ago, they announced the 2009 winners of Digital Media and Learning Competition. Nineteen projects from around the world were awarded $2 million to explore how digital technologies are changing the way that people learn and participate in daily life.  The proposals were submitted by individuals, for-profit companies, universities, and community organizations for projects that employ games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, social networks, wikis, and video blogs. A short description of the projects is available at: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/. There is one project from Canada, “History Game Canada” (Queen’s University).