Transcosmos is releasing a virtual world called "Meet Me" specifically designed for the Japanese market.  They hope to create a more conservative environment as an alternative to SecondLife.  Clearly the hope is that Meet Me will find a large niche market as a virtual environment, similar to the success Mixi has had in the social networking space.  I'm always happy to see these environments that are somehow language specific so that we can use them in our language courses.  I found this link via Bryan Alexander's Infocult blog:

Meet Me

Croquet has also developed significantly from when I last saw it, as seen in their demo on YouTube.  The ability to create windows that can contain content or link to other parts of the world is fascinating.

One of the reasons Web 2.0 has had such an effect on education is that it allows our students to write in a truly public voice. No subject is better suited to take advantage of this capability than journalism. Newsvine is a combination of a social networking a news site that offers them this opportunity. Articles are shown on the site from traditional sources such as the AP, but users can also submit their own articles to the site to be ranked and rated by other readers. Students may even earn a little money in the process.

Valleywag has a very nice map of social networking sites and their popularity by country.

I notice they don't have Mixi in Japan, which is odd, but they have the international examples I already knew about, along with a few others. If you're looking to extend your classroom and bring students in contact with people from a certain country, this is a great place to start. 

In a June 22nd event in Second Life, the MacArthur Foundation announced the beginning of a year-long exploration of the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds.

The exploration will take the form of a series of conversations, real-world conferences on these issues, and competitive grants, all accessible from the virtual world.

The highlights of the June 22nd event were a conversation between Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, and MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton, and the announcement of a $550,000 grant to the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy to lead the effort.

From the "We make our buildings, then our building make us" Department...

Retro-tech as solution to Information Overload
The time-management maniacs over at 43 Folders pointed to Paul Ford's recent piece on NPR entitled Distracted No More: Going Back to Basics . Ford provides an all-too-familiar criticism of the web: it is a time-sink and a major distraction. He isn't against distraction altogether, and muses eloquently on the importance of random associations that appear as one writes and thinks. His issue with the web is its superficiality, a sense that it is broad but not deep. His solution: retrotech. He hasn't given up on the web, but when he wants to do some serious thinking and writing, he takes out a low-tech laptop with a black and white screen and no internet connection, and boots up wordperfect for DOS. What's interesting about this is that he doesn't advocate a return to really old technology (the pen and the notepad), but older technology that doesn't afford the same level of immediacy and access. What does this mean for us on campus who are bathing every last inch of our social spaces with wireless internet? Who push laptops like drug-dealers push their wares? How does the web handle the human need for reflection?


For those of us who sometimes work the Information Literacy side of the street, Ford's piece and its link from 43 Folders is suggestive of new ways of thinking about information literacy and liberal arts education. What if part of information literacy has to do with the selection of the appropriate technology (both hardware and software) for a given task? In a world awash in too much unmediated information, should we be paying more attention to the time management gurus (Stephen Covey, David Allen), whose work increasingly has to do with managing the flow of information in your life? Allen's latest title "Ready for Anything " could almost be an advertisement for what we want to say about our graduates, suggesting that there may be a strange confluence between some of the claims we make about liberal arts education and the goals of content-neutral time management systems.