DIIA Blog

DIIA Faculty Development Specialist Leslie Jarmon received a grant from the Transforming Undergraduate Education program to support a University of Texas System innovative teaching initiative based in Second Life. Dr. Jarmon leads the nation’s first system-wide program to stimulate creative approaches to instruction, increase student access and success, and manage or reduce instructional costs.

The program will “use the virtual world environment to cultivate working communities of learning and discovery transcending the complex, interdisciplinary UT System, empowering students to become innovators and thought leaders throughout Texas, the U.S., and the world,” according to this week’s DIIA spotlight article by Michael Barrett.

The Chronicle of Higher Education picked up on the project here, and Dr. Jarmon was featured in a UT-Austin OnCampus accolade here.

Joe Sanchez, co-founder of The Educators Coop, served as a panelist at the SXSW Interactive 2009 panel: Gaming as a Gateway Drug: Getting Girls Interested in Technology.

Joe, who is a doctoral candidate, former DIIA staffer, and current UT Austin instructor, shared his insight with the audience based on his experience teaching, writing about, and developing instructional programs using social media, including Second Life.

Others on the panel included (L to R):

• Dee Kapila - Girlstart
• Megan Gaiser - Her Interactive
• Sheri Graner Ray - Sony Online Entertainment
• Cindy Royal - Texas State University
• Joe Sanchez - Educators Coop

Today’s Campus Technology relates that the Santa Clara University School of Law is recruiting students within the virtual world of Second Life. The Dean of Admissions’ avatar welcomes prospective students in an interactive workshop where they view an in-world video of the Dean and ask questions or chat among themselves.

“We believe we are the first law school in the United States to use Second Life to interact with prospective students,” said Julia Yaffee, senior assistant dean of external relations. “We need to meet prospective students where they are, and more and more, we find potential law students in various online arenas, including virtual worlds.”

DIIA is a leader in adapting emerging technology in service of higher education. For information about how DIIA uses Second Life as a teaching and learning tool, contact Leslie Jarmon at 232-3302. Jarmon will present a session on Second Life as part of DIIA’s Instructional Development series on Tuesday, March 3 from 1:00-2:30 p.m. in FAC 327. To register for this session, go here. To register for other DIIA instructional technology workshops, go here.

The heroic efforts of a number of people and institutions both here and abroad have brought to fruition an amazing visualization now available in Google Earth. It was made public yesterday and it is an exceptionally well executed and detailed model of Ancient Rome, circa 320 AD. Bringing together archaeologists, architects, technologists, academics and others, this project, dubbed Rome Reborn 2.0 is hopefully a taste of things to come for other ancient places around the world. My hat is off to the people at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. This will be the gold standard by which other ancient virtual worlds will be measured. Incredible work! To view this marvel, load up Google Earth, turn on the Ancient Rome in 3D layer in the Gallery folder and then select one of the yellow icons in Ancient Rome. The pop-up window for any of the yellow icons will allow you to turn on the ancient terrain (do this first), then load the buildings and monuments. In total there are 6,700 structures modeled so give Google Earth time to load the models and textures. It is well worth the wait. Google Earth is the perfect platform for this sort of project and inspires uses of virtual worlds modeled on our actual planet as opposed to something like Second Life. A visualization tool like this will enable researchers, students and armchair archaeologists to experience the Rome of about 320 AD. All we need now are sounds and Roman avatars roaming about. For more detailed information see the blogs and links below:

1) Google Earth Blog gives a nice overview.

2) Oogle Earth gives a detailed look at how it was done.

3) UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

4) Rome Reborn 2.0 main website

Keene