Sometimes being a builder and scripter for educators in Second Life™ leads to the oddest requests.
This, for example, is a British domestic gas meter. The kind of thing I have in a cupboard in the corner to meter how much gas my hot water boiler and central heating use (not so much central heating in mid-May in a heat wave it has to be said).
This little beasty isn't made of sculpties (although I did try a new tool called SLOFT to make one, which is going to be the subject of another blog post sometime, and it might still get a sculpty overhaul) but the counter and the spinning dial both work properly. There are issues which will be detailed much more fully on my upcoming portfolio description.
This isn't a vanity build either, this is a strong educational tool. One of my contacts in Second Life teaches plumbers, and one of the things they have to do is use gas meters to measure power consumption by appliances. Touching the meter will allow you to start a test, measure (just like IRL) the time for the dial to rotate (randomly generated in the appropriate range by the script) and then calculate the power consumption in kW. You then touch the meter again, give your answer and it instantly checks from the stored data if you are within the allowed 5% error range. If you are it tells you so, if not, it tells you both the time you should have recorded and the number of kW you should have calculated from that.
The upshot? The students get instant feedback and the ability to determine where they made their mistake: in the timing of a rotation or in the calculations if they got the time correct. Although this was a one-off, I'm hoping to get various other builds of a similar theme from this group in the months to come.
Someone sent the link for this to the SLED list, but I thought it was worth reposting here.
Although it's all about education in the USA, it asks some interesting questions about educational globally, and about using new media and, for example, SL for education. The link came from the Dangerously Irrelevant blog. I've just hit up their RSS feed, after finding a fairly wide variety of quite thought-provoking articles on the front page.
Caution: reading this blog could be quite time-consuming and runs the risk of making you think!
Nim's Island is a kiddie's film, based on a children's book. I'm not sure I remember the last time I watched a U film (that's Universal, suitable for all, in UK classifications).
That said, there's quite a lot to keep the adults entertained too. The eponymous heroine learns that two objects of different masses fall at the same speed from Galileo - her friendly pelican for example. From an adult perspective what keeps the story going, and going well, is the difference between the two Alex Rovers, and between them and Nim. Alexandra, played by Jodie Foster is a neurotic, OCD suffering, agoraphobic author. Alexander is her all action hero, played by Gerard Butler, but with whom she has long conversations at various points.
Nim, in that way that only children can believes whole heartedly that the stories of the male Alex Rover are all true, and isn't impressed by the femaie one that shows up, despite overcoming quite a lot of real and even more psychological adversity to get there. There are some inevitable jokes "I was promised the big plane to Rototonga" when she's looking at a two-prop 12-seater... "That is the big plane."
But, there are some truly excellent moments too. Alex is scared to go out of the door to collect her mail. At the same time, and at Alex's behest, Nim is out scaling the side of a volcano (she happens to live near one) to see what they look like on the inside. The juxtaposition is beautifully done, and moves the story nicely too.
Oh, and Nim's dad is also played by Gerard Butler. It probably doesn't take too much to guess there's a happy, and for Jodie Foster an unusually romantic and soppy ending.
Even if I was still in the habit of buying DVDs this wouldn't make it onto the list of DVDs I'd buy. If, however, I went to a friend's house and they had kids the right age to watch this, I wouldn't object to seeing it again.
In both educational terms, and in terms of my general satisfaction with the build, I think we've had an improvement. Of course you would hope to do that in a rebuild, but we had more of a rebuild than most educators, or builders, routinely get, because our entire sim had to be packed up and put away, then reopened and built.
This allowed us an unprecedented level of choice in the design process. Not entirely by chance Desi and I were also asked to sit on panel for an American Gothic Literature class and answer questions, both about the literature and the creation of builds to support learning it in Second Life™ earlier this week. This has led me to ponder the process a bit, and so to blog about it!
For our builds, the core question is always "Does this support the educational outcomes?" Things which are cool, or hard to use, or distracting we try to cut out. Of course, we don't succeed in meeting everyone's expectations, things that work for us might be terrible for someone else, but by and large you can do that. Any teacher does that in planning a class or a resource, at least you hope so!
The next element is "Does this promote immersion?" Immersion is a harder thing to measure of course. But you can promote immersion by combinations of the look, the sound, the colouring, the way in which you move around the space and probably other things. If you're doing a Poe story or the works of Poe, you don't build a light, airy hacienda, you build somewhere dark, looming and angular. You don't add sound effects of children playing on a summer's day, you add chains, heartbeats, screams. You don't have a big open space, you have something that's quite hard to navigate around, or at least with nooks and crannies. (There has to be a limit to hard you make it to navigate, because you want people to use it and explore it after all, unless you make that the challenge.) If you are going to have a screen to play streamed movies, you don't have it look like an ultra-modern plasma screen, you might go for "mad scientist" screen (although that's not really Poe's thing) more reasonably you go for something like a portrait on the wall.
The next element, which crosses over the first two is the content. This is both the educational and the building and scripting content. Is clicking a sign to get a notecard immersive? Is it educational? Is stopping to read the contents of a webpage either via llLoadURL or HOAP as that develops, immersive? Is it educational? Is having the house talk to you spam or educational? The answers aren't easy here, and we use all of these techniques and more to achieve our builds, because sometimes the best thing you can do for the educational side of things reduces immersion.
The final element for us is making it stand alone. Not all of our builds aim to achieve this. Some that do aim for it, achieve it easily, some don't do so well - and we revise them if it doesn't impinge on their use for teaching.
With Literature Alive! we are aiming at a class-space. Students are encouraged, often even expected, to come back alone, but they are not expected to dive in totally unsupervised and learn everything without some guidance and support. Assignments may be based in Second Life or outside Second Life, but by its very nature Literature Alive! is not in the business of teaching building and scripting, it is in the business of teaching literature and engaging with literature. If there is a choice that makes it easier for a random visitor to do things, but detracts from its use in class, supporting class, then we won't take that option. (We might well look for an option that tries to make it easier for a random visitor AND aids teaching in class though.)
If you visit the Inferno we provide the text, we provide activities on each circle, we provide numerous chances for you to pick up overall guidance, and to get advice about what to look for on each level. These add to both teaching and enabling the random visitor to learn about the Inferno.
The Linden Hills side of the sim is, however, harder for a random visitor to get to grips with, by and large.
Why? Well, although I've done most of the building and scripting, the content, and particularly the educational content, is largely provided by the students we've taught.
Did they do it how we would have done it? No, of course not.
Did they learn more about what was going on? Well, some have done really well, they've read Linden Hills and are explaining elements relevant to their section. They have learnt about The Inferno and are making links to the poem as well. Some have done less well, and have tried to avoid reading the book and/or the poem and rely on notes, web-based summaries and the like.
But, has it improved the use of the space for education? Yes, undeniably. For students that put in any effort at all, they have the benefit of trying to teach part of the book. Is there a teacher out there that doesn't believe that the best way to learn a subject is to be asked to teach it? I'd be surprised if there were. If you're in any doubt, have a look at this table. Practice by doing is hard for literature... "Just go and write a book about the evils operating within African American culture" isn't really an option for a class. But, teaching others gives us that same 90% retention level. It also, of course, gives you a chance to practice by doing before the final examination too. Students get feedback suggesting they've got the wrong end of the stick, suggesting they need to cite sources, include page numbers and/or line numbers and the like. They're all "soft" skills that you expect students to have at college level, whether rightly or wrongly, but that you can point out and give them a chance to correct so they remember come exam time. They're not only learning about the material by teaching, they're learning about the skills that are expected in the course by practice in a real (or a really virtual) setting. Excellent.
Sorry if you visit and don't get a good feel for Linden Hills, the focus is always on the teaching, and teaching the class comes first, and it has achieved that aim. It is possible we'll revamp the Linden Hills side of the Inferno once class is over in order to make it more accessible.
Last night on Question Time, Harriet Harmon, deputy leader of the Labour Party, was asked "Can Gordon Brown win the next election?" When she answered "Yes" she was laughed at by the audience.
If you don't follow British politics, this is a bit like asking Condalesa Rice if McCain can win the presidential elections in the USA, and laughing when she says yes.
Now, sadly for everyone that laughed, they should be ashamed. Whoever you ask either question of, the answer should be yes. (I don't know what you're talking about is also a good response.) The question "Can George W. Bush win the presidency?" has the equally predictable answer of "No."
The question is "Can they?" In other words "Is it possible for this outcome to occur?" Yes. It doesn't matter that you're asking someone who has a vested interest in that particular outcome, they are telling the truth when they say yes. If you asked someone from another party (a tory, or a democrat) and they said "No" then they are being disingenuous because they are not answering the question they've been asked.
The question that many of the audience appeared to hear was "Will Gordon Brown win the next election?" (Or, for the US readers, "Will McCain become the next president?") Laughing at a partisan answer to that one is more reasonable. The range of reasonable answers include "I don't know" "I think so" "it seems likely" "It seems unlikely" and so on. It is a question that gives you room to speculate, introduce opinion, hedge your bets if you're not a politician.
My answer to both, by the by, is "I don't know." We don't yet know when there will be a general election in the UK, and lots of things could happen. Brown could lead us through a crisis well, he could die, he could do well enough to improve his poll ratings. With McCain, we don't yet know who his opponent will be. It's likely, I think, to be an Obama and Clinton double-ticket in some order, but it might not be. How am I supposed to speculate when I don't know who the opponent is?
Why does this matter? Well, I'm supporting a course in critical thinking and communication. One thing I've noticed is that the students don't necessarily ask the questions they mean, and then they're surprised at the answers that they get. Of course, being a teacher you get used to answering the question they asked and trying to answer the question you think they meant to ask. But, it's a place where you'd think, and expect, commenting on the questions you are asked should be allowed too.
Can you think critically if you don't ask the question you mean? It makes thinking critically about the answer you were given tricky surely, especially since you probably think you asked the question you meant to ask, not the question you actually did. Oops.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the timings - my RSS habit averages out to about 10 hours a week, more with commenting, rather than the 2 hours a week they indicate. Now I'm not writing for massively, active blogging takes less time than reading other people's blogs in most weeks. That said, I have a story about the Inferno to release, a few other bits and pieces to do, so I might be in for an increase once again.
However, even if the timings prove to be wrong for you, they do provide an interesting list of possible web 2.0 activities ranked by an approximate amount of time it will take. It might be well worth a look if you're in any position where you're applying for funding and wish to include web 2.0 in your new activities. Just how many things can you do? How much of your time do you need to buy out? How quickly can you really justify hiring a new person to work as your web 2.0 assistant?
Twitter was down again this early morning (my time, evening US time). I've given up on FaceBook and LinkedIn because whilst there might be some useful contacts and networking going on in there, most of it is "do you like the same films as me" and "You've just recruited 5 vampires" or (more socially useful) "You've just recruited X people to Y charity." Group emails, meetings in Second Life and the like are just more generally useful to me for the connections. How many different ways to track connections do we need?
Some of the tools, Voice Thread for example, have a rather specific role and do it more or less well (VT is good at what it does 99% of the way, and the rest of the things might be my browser). Shelfari too (although I have a big Library Thing presence and there's no way to import my library into Shelfari - 2,000+ books is a big load to switch) has a limited but useful role, and works well.
But FB, Twitter etc. you get, from some, stream of consciousness about what they're doing. Sometimes I care, but most of the people I care about like that don't twitter that way... Do we really need it? Are we actually socially ready for knowing everyone's every move?
Technologically, well look at the downtime that Twitter has! The problem? According to a report, most people on twitter have 10 or fewer friends. But, Second Life residents (and probably others) break this mould: I've got about 160 followers, and most of the other folks I know from Second Life have more! When I post a message, it gets relayed to all 160 of them. When the people I follow (which isn't quite an identical set, but similar) post something it comes to me. It might get texted. It does get IMed for me. It also gets written onto a webpage for me, and people using various readers and feeders scrape the site every minute or so. That's a LOT of load. In a quiet time I get a new tweet from somewhere every 5 minutes. More normally it's every 20-30 seconds. At busy times (CSI:NY hitting SL tonight for example) it might be 10's per second. That's still more load of course as it gets pushed, pulled, scraped etc. Twitter does a really good job, but I wouldn't like their bills, their server load and bandwidth must be crazy. As I add new people (I've had about a fortnight not feeling well and not being in twitter much. I logged in and created back links to the 8 people that had added me as a contact. Oh, and I have twitter searches for a few phrases so that WHOEVER twitters about them I get the messages (sometimes in interesting languages too when Neil Gaiman is one of the terms). That's 16 more cross connections to get right... push out and all the rest. Surely the question becomes how do they manage to keep downtime so low? Can the technology really cope, or are we pushing the limits week by week?
This film is a ghost story shot in Spanish. If you don't speak Spanish and won't read sub-titles, don't bother. Assuming you can do one of those, and you like ghost stories, go see the movie, it's great.
Like all ghost stories it's a bit hard to tell without spoilers. If you're planning to go and see it and don't like spoilers, go, watch it and come back. I will try not to give too much away though...
Laura is an orphan who gets taken away and adopted. 30 years or so later she moves back into the former orphanage, intending to open it as a home for special needs children. She moves back with her son and husband, who is a doctor and all seems fine.
Then weird shit starts happening, of a bumps-in-the-night nature, but it's all explained away. On the day they have an open day for the new residence, the son vanishes and is never seen again. The husband goes to the police, remains rational, and so on. Laura becomes increasingly convinced the house is haunted, brings in a medium, and eventually by rather unlikely, or paranormal, means finds Simón (the son). She stays with him and his new friends. Poor hubby returns at the end to lay flowers on their joint graves.
What I like about this film is that it's got both stories working well. Is Laura insane with grief at the end and seeing things, or has she pierced the veil and gone to a different world with Simón? The film doesn't make it clear, and as a consequence lets you ponder for yourself, or believe both if you'd rather. The elements that lead up to the climax are well spaced through the story. One or two are pretty obvious the first time you see them. Many of the others are far from obvious, but they have well worked flash-backs that make them clear if you weren't paying attention at the time.
Will I buy it on DVD? No. It's a great story, but I know the story now and whilst it might watch once more to see the clues in situ, like oh so many of this type of movie, it doesn't have rewatch value, not for me at least. Still, it really is great, and it is well worth seeing that once.
The Spiderwick Chronicles is a kiddies fairy story set in a modern world context, well mostly. Eighty years ago Arthur Spiderwick chronicled all the fairies around his part of the world, including their weaknesses. The big bad ogre, if he gets the book, will kill all the fairies, then all the humans. Spiderwick takes action to protect the book and for 80 years, apart from his poor daughter who grows old in the sanatorium, all is well.
Then Spiderwick's great niece moves into the house after a divorce, with her three kids. One is incredibly angry at it all, and finds the book, reads it despite the warnings, takes it out of the house and the protective circle. Figuratively speaking all hell breaks loose, as goblins, redcaps and the ogre try to get the book and kill the other faeries.
The plot is relatively simple, although there are some nice touches and little bits that are revealed with incomprehension and later integrated into the story nicely - I can imagine that being great in the books for when the kiddies want to hear the story again! and they work in the film pretty well. What also works incredibly well is the cgi. The faeries look great, all of them. The troll, of which we see far too little, is amazing. The ogre in some of his shapes is excellent (in others he just looks like a person). The red cap as a pirate goblin works very nicely, and the transformation between brownie and boggart is great.
There aren't really howling plot holes, although it's lovely to see the house (which gets pretty well wrecked inside and out during the climactic scene) is perfectly fixed on the outside whilst showing scars on the inside still...
There is also an incredibly memorable scene that, just looking at it, looks like an advert for the tomato marketing board. Within the context of the film, it is tomatoes, but it's nicely mixed with exploded goblin bodies... yuck!
A friend recently sent me a link to an article about a well known American historical figure. This man was, apparently, "asexual" and didn't engage in intercourse until his mid-30's when he was married. A slightly closer examination of his personal history (no real digging though) reveals he shared, for a number of years, a bed with a male friend, and even after his marriage, when his wife was away he would sleep with a male friend. Does that sound like a virgin or a gay man to you?
Now, this was at a time when two men (or more rarely two women) would, in extremis, share a bed for warmth, space etc. But, you are mainly talking the poor, or travelers on a very cold night, not two relatively wealthy lawyer types, nor the president of the USA and a captain of his bodyguard. The historical figure is, if you don't know the personal lives of their presidents that well, Lincoln. The article is by Gannett and Percy, 2006 citation below.
Of course anyone with half a brain realises that, although gay activity went "underground" for a long time in the West - How many gay figures in European history can you think of between Alexander of Macedon and, say, Quentin Crisp?
This shouldn't be a surprise: they were, in their time, regarded as abominations, criminals, insane or similar. Being openly gay wasn't a good option. Nowadays, in some countries it's not necessarily a great option, but in the UK it is certainly no longer a disaster. In the US it is not supposed to be a bad thing, although the establishment's reaction to the idea that Lincoln might have been gay rather lends the lie to that. In Russia, the situation is rather different - it is still a major disgrace.
But, for the moment, let's live in the cultural bubble or bubbles I do live in. The UK and Second Life® are both cultures in which being gay is pretty much accepted. Should we go back through history and retro-actively out the demonstrably gay characters, or probably gay characters that populate it? (Outing lesbian characters will be much harder, because the recorded role of women in history is that much more limited of course, but in this instance I'm using gay to include lesbian and bisexual. I know that's poor practice, but in the context of history it's going to be a huge majority of gay men we're talking about and I'm NOT writing an academic essay, it's a blog posting.)
I have to say I'm torn… you see, I don't like the OutRage! outing campaign. If people choose to open or closed about their sexuality, I think that's their business BUT it has worked to a lesser or greater extent to change attitudes in the UK. It has certainly been a factor in the changes, as have groups like Stonewall. Having 2,000 years of history with NO gay, lesbian or bisexual figures in it is odd. Demonstrating to young gay people that there are historical icons they can respect and aspire to emulate is a good thing.
Where does the balance point lie? I'm not sure. But, to return to the article - apparently people are trying to teach that being gay means you'll never succeed in politics. What utter tosh. If people are really stupid enough to try and teach that the lack of openly gay political leaders at times when they would have been incarcerated for their crimes/illness (of the time) means that there were never any gay leaders, they really need to open their eyes and take a class in logic and critical thinking. Maybe, against all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, we do need to out at least some of them. The pain we cause the blinkered hypocrites might just be outweighed by the reduction in suffering of those that rise to public office, and maybe guide the world to a happier future too, don't you think?
Gannett, L. and Percy, W.A. (2006) The Gay and Lesbian Review 18-22
So, I eventually got the time, money and need sorted out to buy myself an iPhone. It arrived at some ungodly hour this morning. As you can see from the photo (which is pretty much life size btw) I've been touching the screen a lot.
In fact, odd though it may sound for a smooth touch-screen object, as well as being visually very appealing, it's incredibly tactile. It fits nicely in the hand and feels incredibly comfortable both ways around. It took about a minute to get used to the controls - pinching in and out to zoom is just intuitive, and works wonderfully - I could bring up my work webpages and have a tiny image, but could easily zoom in and read them comfortably. Similarly zooming in on pictures, news pages and the like was easy, as is "flicking" them to move around.
Setting alarms, searching on YouTube, and so on - it fits that Apple "It just works" ethos.
I thought I might struggle to type, I have rather big hands, but actually I'm already typing quickly and easily, text messages, URLs, search terms, you name it.
Well worth the money - and actually very much the same cost as the direct replacement for my previous phone, but this one is far nicer to use! And now, when the adverts come on TV, I feel smug
Given the trailers I went to this with really, really low expectations. In fact when the doorbell rang and the message "Come see the mammoths" floated up the stairs" I nearly said "NO!"
But, I have to say I'm glad I didn't. There are still a lot of things wrong with this movie. They should have given up pretending it's a legend from Earth's pre-history and just gone for "It's a big fantasy movie" because every time they played the pre-history card I wanted to shout abuse at the screen until I managed to flip back to "It's a fantasy movie" mode and enjoy the romp.
How quickly do mammoths die of heat stroke? In a desert doing heavy weight-pulling work? Just which mountain range (Rack and Pinion I think, certainly South Island New Zealand) do you walk from to an African desert in 10,000 BC? Via giant flightless birds (Rheas, Moas, not sure - they did have them in NZ though, as well as South America). Oh, and where did Maize originate? How many navigable rivers are there through deserts? Have you run out after the Nile? Apparently the Nile was so bendy 12,000 years ago you could hike, get lost, and STILL get to the head of the river quickly. Now, if you take out the mammoths and heat stroke, it would work on a fantasy map. Wouldn't it?
The story itself isn't hard on the brain cells, and is pretty standard fantasy fare. Boy that no-one at home really likes falls in love with girl. Girl gets kidnapped by slavers. Boy sets out to rescue her, finds he has great destiny, leads the united tribes to overthrow evil empire, gets the girl, goes home, lives happily ever after. There are a couple of twists - with a slightly different ending I could have felt quite sorry for the chief slaver, but they tipped him over into petty and evil quite efficiently, rather than evil and undone through misplaced and doomed love. There is a father, absent but significant, and an older guide. Both can appear in fantasy sagas, but they were nicely done in this one, particularly the mentor character.
This is a romp in the tradition of The Mummy, National Treasure, Indiana Jones etc. You know what the story is going to be. It doesn't disappoint, and if you enjoy going along for the ride (or sweaty, muscly, scantily clad men - doesn't do much for me but does for one of my companions) then you'll doubtless love it.
Voice thread is a tool that lets you (with a bit of playing) upload pictures and comment on them. You can see a thread that Desi and I are involved in, to document creating an American Culture class.
Bits of the process are, to be honest, in need of work - signing up new collaborators is far from obvious. The ability to upload more than one picture at a time would be awesome, and photobucket and flickr both manage it...
But, the ability to add comments and play them back, draw on the pictures to go alongside the comments, and so forth is great. Whilst inviting new people is a bit fiddly, adding comments once they're there is dead easy. I can also see this being great for documenting and sharing a holiday with your friends, whilst sparing them "Here's the 3 DVDs I made from our pictures" moments, and, of course, being something verging on Web 2.0 you can do it from just about anywhere. And, of course, not all projects gain from this: "This is Eloise coding happily. This is Eloise beating her head against a nasty bit of code. This is Eloise writing comments. This is Eloise bug-hunting. What do you mean the pictures have hardly changed?" for example.
But for things that change visibly, it could well look great.
UPDATE: because it's embedded as an object, I can update the thread directly from my blog and have it reflect on the original. That's a nice touch.
I'd heard really bad things about this movie, and so went with fairly low expectations. It exceeded them comfortably - although my regular cinema-going companions will disagree, I'd say it was better than Rambo.
The premise is contained within the trailer: someone tries to assassinate the President of the USA whilst he's in Spain, but the person they shoot is a double. There is more, but that's the starting point at least. The story, rather than being told in a linear fashion is told repeatedly over the same period of time from multiple points of view. Eventually the story unwinds, and in suitably heroic plot-device fashion there is a convergence of the story-lines, there are a number of stories resolved (most of them actually), the good guys win, the bad guys (even those peripherally grey rather than clearly really bad) end up dead.
There's meant to be a twist, but of the three of us, one got it, two of us were rather suspicious from early on in the movie. It made the fact that they didn't show us a pertinent piece of information (despite the fact when it was revealed we weren't surprised) annoying rather than suspense-building. There's an annoying lack of motive for the plotters. Several ideas are put up, but there's no resolution, no clarity, no explanation.
A rather technical one: I find it hard to believe that the President of the US would schedule an important media event for noon Spanish time. That's between 3am and 6am US Time. Surely it would run at 5pm or later Spanish time - 8am to 11am or later US time, so the great masses that matter to his election chances are awake and can watch on TV, or over the net?
And finally, I'm not sure how big the US Secret Service is, but a fair size you'd think. WTF can't they find, for duty on the streets in Spain, spanish speaking agents?
Despite these things, there are many good points. The attitude of the European (and possibly North African) members of the team behind the plot to the Americans is spot on. There are nice side comments about the media telling us what they want us to know rather than the whole story and a few things like that. The closing line is wonderful, after the movie, and speaks rather strongly to the fact that both the politicians and the media lie to us all the time. The story relies on plot-devices which pretty much translate as luck for the good guys, but it works. Oh, except for the totally indestructible Renault, which is more hilarious than bad.
I've decided on a wiki solution. It might not be perfect, but it's usable, and the great news is it's changeable relatively easily.
What I've done at the moment is create a free EPED wiki on wikispaces.com and I will import the wiki to the EPED website as needed via iframes. There will be a general link to the front page, and links out from pages where I wish to encourage discussion to their specific wiki pages.
I will be exploring ccTiddly as a possible alternative, since it is free all the way, without adverts.
I've also started using campfire, initially courtesy of the writing I do for massively.com where they made a big campfire for us all. Campfire is an online chat room. There is a free, albeit small, scheme (no more than 4 members) chat room, as well as various larger ones which you pay for.
I am also exploring their basecamp system for project management online. Again there is a free, limited plan, and larger, paid plans and I'm on the free one. The free one gets all the features, but limited numbers. One project (that's OK, it's all my work), two write boards (that's a limit at the moment), but you also get to do lists, to set milestones (which can be synced with iCal automatically), and you can message and even link to a campfire chat room. You can share with others, clients or colleagues, or both and even RSS the overview page so you get notified of changes promptly.
I'll be looking at using this with Desi to see how easy it is to co-operate this way, but the parts I've used so far are all easy enough, and seem to work well.
This, for example, is a British domestic gas meter. The kind of thing I have in a cupboard in the corner to meter how much gas my hot water boiler and central heating use (not so much central heating in mid-May in a heat wave it has to be said). 
This allowed us an unprecedented level of choice in the design process. Not entirely by chance Desi and I were also asked to sit on panel for an American Gothic Literature class and answer questions, both about the literature and the creation of builds to support learning it in Second Life™ earlier this week. This has led me to ponder the process a bit, and so to blog about it!
So, I eventually got the time, money and need sorted out to buy myself an iPhone. It arrived at some ungodly hour this morning. As you can see from the photo (which is pretty much life size btw) I've been touching the screen a lot.
