Summary of SLanguages 2010

On Friday and Saturday, 15-16 October 2010, the SLanguages 2010 conference took place over a period of 24h.

A newly founded committee took over the work from Gavin Dudeney and with the help of Carol Rainbow [Carolrb Roux] set out to conquer the most technically challenging quest ever: to run a conference in Second Life.

And what a team effort this turned out to be.

The 24h conference saw...

  • 47 guest speakers offering 42 sessions
  • 377 unique avatars and 78 unique visitors in the Adobe ConnectPro room (not sure how many were in both venues) enjoyed....
    • 19 presentations
    • 3 plenaries and 1 unconference
    • 8 workshops
    • 2 theatre plays
    • 5 tours
    • 1 Dogme session
    • 2 demo lessons
    • 1 party

Most of the recordings have now been published but they are by no means perfect. We lost 3 recordings and one we could recover by asking the presenter for a repeat session. In Adobe the visuals of the recordings are not as good as the actual screensharing. The audio in Adobe is very good but only as good as the audio in Second Life and overmodulated, choppy and missing audio in SL is quite normal. Taking all of this into account, I think the recording team of 8 volunteers worked hard on the backstage and they had done a tremendous job. Some higher quality videos are being produced as we speak.

I am beginning to think that Adobe's recording are not good enough for the purpose of archiving this precious content. However, using virtual classroom technology as a 'virtual window' into a virtual world is certainly an 'ease of access point'. In fact, to find a technical or a pedagogical solution to ease the access to 3D worlds was one of the goals of the AVALON project. AVALON stands for 'Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline'. This appraoch has successfully been piloted at this conference.

The hashtag for the SLanguages conference is #slang10 and the general tag is - from now onwards - #vlang, as it was decided by the educators during the closing panel.

May we express our thanks for the following contributions:

...Alexandra and Annette for their fabulous teaching tool stand.

...Randall for the venues, teleporters and support staff board