VWBP 2013 - Beyond the Stage

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education as described in their site, is a global grass-roots community event which focuses on education in immersive virtual environments.

What qualifies as a virtual world?

A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a unique environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create ideas irrespective of time and space. Virtual worlds can be either 2D or 3d. They may be co-located or distributed. The core aspect that defines a virtual space is that a virtual environment provides a uniquely shared space for emerging relationships and serves as a foundation for the development of knowledge creation and sharing.

Examples include Second Life, OpenSim, Unity, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, World of Warcraft, Eve Online and many others. These virtual environments are characterized by an open social presence and where the direction of the platform’s evolution is manifest in the community. This is unlike systems such as WebEx, Sococo, VenueGen, and other platforms which are focused on more utilitarian purposes to a closed audience.

This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice. But it can also be enjoy it by anyone who has any interest on virtual worlds, education, innovation, creativity, changing the world or is a long life learner....

There, innovative educators share their achievements and challenges that they face in enhanced learning technology as well as their vision of future collaborative learning in virtual worlds and games.

This year, the conference covered across virtual worlds and hosted presentations in Second Life, OpenSim/Jokadia, and Cloud Party.

Here, you can watch and listen to the great presentations shared during the event.

Watch live streaming video from metaversetvbusiness at livestream.com

This was the Opening keynote from Gentle Heron of Virtual Ability

 

Closing Keynote - Dave Cormier

 There were so many wonderful activities, presentations, poster exhibitions to attend to..it was impossible to see everything... But this kind of effort is much more productive than a real life conference in the terms that everything that was shared is going to continue being shared for years.... an opportunity to come back and reflect on ideas, voices, images, dances, memories of people working together to share what they can to contribute in different ways.. so it's available for anyone in the best way they can learn from it.

Pio was just delighted walking around... she has planned to be in the volunteering team... but life and its usual unpredictableness came and broke the plans of a planned organized volunteering.. instead she just showed up in the event and said here I am if you need me and just walked on enjoying and helping everyone in anyway she could..

Chaos, serendipity and F.U.N was what she got. Her experienced on working on last year volunteering team covered the bare necessities of functioning effectively while enjoying the event.

She could get to places early so photos were possible... Lag didn't bother her much..  better graphic card is on her xmas list for this year... hopes, she can get it.. This allowed her to relax and enjoy the many artifacts of knowledge present everywhere she went. If you want to look at some of them .. you  can visit Pio's page in Facebook for silly non professionally taken photos..... Here part 1.... Here part 2

Well, Pio is still walking around .....now... the many resources there are left after so much shared... So, she will be posting more of her reflecting, findings, collecting, curating, commenting, feelings, .. keep reading.. leave a comment, too... What's written here ..it's mostly to help Pio keep track of the places she's been to... but it will be great to have little conversations once in a while...

Keep shining love and peace!
Pio