Yesterday we had an interesting group of visitors in Rosario. We made an almoust 2 hour long tour around the island with several educators. A lot of the people found the island interesting and hopefully will return back to it later. The island is building up slowly but surely. Marinetta consists now of 4 shops and the Virtruve shop has started building today. The farm is almost finished and the League of Worlds headquarters was built last week in Rosario C3.

Educators in Pedrocampulo.

Mambo Milosz adds

The tour made use of the tourHUD that has been released by the Electric Sheep Company. This enabled us to provide a slide show with landmarks, and shepherd everyone around the island with minimal effort. In previous tours we have used various “magic carpets”, but this was much smoother and allowed everyone to roam if they so wanted.

We also made use of a variety of tools from the EduNation shop, which we will incorporating into our future educational activities. Unfortunately I had not had time to set up the Powerpoint Presenter, which was a shame because the alternative that I was using was nowhere near as good.

Now there is grass under the buildings. With new grass the ranch looks more real than before. We have made a fence that rounds the ranch and privatizes it.

Next we have to find a way to do the vineyard and where it should be placed. Rosa Martino’s nursery is waiting for a textures and the final mode of herbs. We also have to find a good place to place the nursery on our ranch.

The ranch

Yesterday I had a series of meetings with people who are interested in developing educational resources in Second Life. I met with some Australians, some Americans and a Mexican. I have also been talking with some artists who wish to hold a large winter festival in rural Rosario.

Some of them marvelled at the grizondi, which I was happy to deomonstrate. Version 1 of these teleportation devices has now been rolled out across the island. It allows instant transportation across the island, and local transportation between locations in Marinetta. Version 2 will also allow international transportation to selected destinations elsewhere in Second Life.

In a couple of weeks my good friend Courtney and I will be leading a group of educators on a guided trip around the mental landscapes of Rosario. To this end, our friends at Arcada are busy revamping the Marinetta Ombro web site in an effort to make it approachable and, dare I say it, intelligible. Whether or not it will become intelligent is, of course, another matter entirely.

I will name names soon, when we have some more details finalised. When the tour happens we will document it and post copious notes here. For the moment I will simply say that I have been persuaded to join the Sloodlers group, an organisation dedicated to the unholy alliance of Second Life and Moodle. You may find out more about this at sloodle.com.

We’ve been planning the building of the train on Rosario. Yesterday the discussion topic was wheather we should have tracks or not. What does the tracks actually do? So while reading the new SLED publication on Info Island I found out about Media, a place that I actually was interested in visiting before, but somehow hadn’t got into it.

However on Media they had a huge complex that was pretty interesting. I also saw that they had a Monorail, which would be interesting for our reserach purposes on the train to Marinetta. My first ride on the Monoail ended in a crash on the bottom of a pond, or maybe even the sea, as it looks as Media is built on the sea.

The monorail took me to the bottom of the sea

On my second try I was much luckier and traveled around the island on the monorail. It was pretty interesting and felt more lika a slow ride on a rollercoster. Fun? Yes. I also tested the inworld music player that Sony BMG had, except that they didn’t have any artist that I’d actually wanted to listen to. So please put up some Kent or something else just as good!