(Educational) Self City on Teen Grid

Dutch MDC [Lost in the] Magic Forest finished developing an island on the Second Life Teen Grid for the Waag Society a little while ago. As I don't have TG clearance it took some time before I picked up this story.

The Waag Society is an organisation which started in 1994 as 'Society for old and new Media', de Waag'. Founders were Caroline Nevejan and Marleen Stikker, who is still Waag Society's director. Before, Stikker was the mayor of the Digital City, the first internet community in the Netherlands.

The Society's -soon to be called 'Waag Society'- mission was to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living. After a complete restauration of the Waag building, a small group of enthousiastic idealists began their activities in 1996.

The island in Second Life (TG) is called Self City and is an educational project to experiment with new teaching methods for pupils with special needs in the age of 12-14. It is about students which cannot function properly in a normal classroom, often through social emotional or light mental handicaps.

Dobre VanBrugh from Lost in the Magic Forest says:

"We developed a complete city on the island with a movietheatre, (fake)gambling hall, basketballcourt and a Heads Up Display (HUD) to assist the pupils in their interaction (see screenshots). The scientific findings of the new teaching method in Second Life have been gathered in this report (Dutch only): Research Report Self City"

AjaxLife an Odyssey

"In Homer's Iliad he (Ajax) is described as of great stature and colossal frame, the tallest and strongest of all the Achaeans, second only to his cousin Achilles in skill-at-arms, and the 'bulwark of the Achaeans'. He was trained by the centaur Chiron (who had also trained his father, Telamon, and Achilles' father Peleus), at the same time as Achilles. Aside from Achilles, Ajax is the most valuable warrior in Agamemnon's army (along with Diomedes), though he is not as cunning as Nestor, Idomeneus, or Odysseus. He commands his army wielding a great hammer and a huge shield made of seven ox-hides with a layer of bronze. He is not wounded in any of the battles described in the Iliad."

[source: Wikipedia]

In Short, Ajax is colossal, Ajax is a winner. Doesn't he just Rock?

The Trojan war is long gone, but Ajax has come back to life in AjaxLife, as an Ajax based Webbrowser for Second Life.

Katherine Berry, a TeenGrid resident has created an impressive Ajax-based client for the virtual world of Second Life. Linden Labs themselves have been working very hard on the "sim-caps project", in changing asset management, backbone construction and what have you got in preparing a move from UDP to HTTP.


"The “caps” in “sim-caps” stands for capabilities. This is a well known design pattern whose biggest success has been web cookies. Now before you all jump on that, realize that cookies, properly implemented, are what make the internet go ’round. It is how every major site with accounts keeps you logged in."


This AjaxLife webviewer might well be a messenger of what fully HTTP enabled Second Life may bring when it comes to accessability.

Here's a short piece of the original post describing AjaxLife:

Due to some combination of boredom, wanting to talk to people in SL, and inspiration from a vague memory of something Interfect Sonic did, I decided to start work on an AJAX based SL client.

It’s still under heavy development, but the result so far is an application/page/site called AjaxLife. It now works on the MG (I think!)

Features

• Basic map
• Teleports
• Accepting/declining teleport offers
• Local chat, instant messages (partially — you can’t start them except with online friends)
• Inventory received notifications
• Friend on/offline notifications
• Balance change notifications, etc.

In short, a project to watch closely as it has a lot of potential. If Second Life integrates with the web it will not be long untill we see the first widgets and toolbars appear.

Here some mandatory snapshots provided by Katherine:

At the start of this blog I wrote that the Trojan War is long gone... There might be a catch.

For now, the AjaxLife is running on Katherine's server. Some of my friends were wondring what it would in terms of password logging.

This is the official statement on Katherine's blog:

"If you want to use it, and trust that I won’t look at your password (which I can’t, and nothing that this does is logged, but you should always be careful and stuff), you can test it at https://secure.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife-s/login.kat"

Geek Meet aftermath

After today's official Geek Meet was over several interesting discussions came by on other Metaverses and SLCC convention 'standards'- or rules of engagement whatever you wanna call it.

Especially noteworthy was Moo Money's emphatic speech on Teen Grid.

"It's a sad state of affairs over there, they're the forgotten grid with a terrible economy. The Lindens rarely visit and there is barely any teen owned islands. I had to get an educational sponsor, Global Kids, to say it was okay to be on their island and then I had to submit to a FULLLLL background check, including 10 year address history.

They can buy 3x the amount of items for what we pay for one here. This leads to teens stocking up on items before they transfer over and selling them for profit which makes me so sad, it breaks my heart.

I don't know about the rumors of TG joining MG, BUT once age verification is in place, LL basically opened the back door for them to come in. I spoke with a few that have said that if their friends all migrate over, they'll have no choice but to do it as well. They don't want to be alone.

They keep their inventory, but their friends list is wiped, as well as calling cards, groups, and landmarks. Some of the teens are just as good or BETTER at building and yet they can't even make a decent profit on their furniture."