You are Never Alone

Some useful links that have emerged today:
Judy O’Connell has a posting Second Life Classroom - Not School, Not Home in which she talks about the difficulties in getting ’system’ colleagues to take 3D Virtual Worlds seriously. Discussion is emerging but is the reluctance to think about it all linked to the fact that everything, even investigation, looks so time consuming?

Tom Cotton pointed me to the Croquet Consortium “… a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable.”
On first glance though, to me, it looks like a programmer’s world, rather than for me who just wants to be a user. This is the same feeling I have about Second Life - you really can only develop a space by either programming it yourself or employing someone to do it for you. I just want to be user rather than a programmer - something like a drag’n'drop world where I can select from already available bits and pieces to construct my world.

 An SBS Program tomorrow night (Tuesday 17 April) may be of interest 
08:30 pm FUTURE FOCUS - NEW CYBERSPACE WORLDS
A booming business has sprung up at the crossroads where virtual worlds and the real world meet. In auctions inside these realms, imaginary real estate and virtual islands are selling for hundreds of thousands of real dollars. Weapons and characters are also being exchanged every day for a few dozen gold coins. Millions of ‘gamers’ worldwide spend on average 30 hours a week playing in these boundless realms, creating their own new personalities as players in the game (known as ‘avatars’). (From France, in English, French and Mandarin) CC WS

The Second Life News Source at http://www.sloz.info/feed/ has alerted me to “As per the offical Linden blog, there’ll be six hours downtime for the upgrade of the grid [on Wed 18 April] - with viewer update required. The details of the new features / improvements can be found here. The most exciting addition for a lot of users will be the embedding of the LSL Wiki into the browser.” 
A number of bugs will be fixed, but will presumably be accompanied by the need to download yet another upgrade to the Second Life software.