It's been painful not being in Berlin at the Educa conference this week. I was all geared up for the usual live video link, but was shocked to find that there was no stream. The only link I had was a healthy Twitter channel, but this just teased me and made me wish I was there even more. Judging from the tweets, Graham Hibbert was doing a sterling job, but I felt 'disempowered', as they used to say in the 80s. I was stuck in snowy Leeds wasting my efforts on local problems that haven't changed for 20 years and could be tackled by any number of people, when I should have been in Germany helping to shape the future of education. Well, in the absence of detailed information, that's what I imagined was happening. Even two intense blog posting sessions (Inventing the VSE concept and making sense of the entire Open Habitat project) didn't really make me feel any better.
However, this morning a tweet came through flagging up the live 'Sounds of the Bazaar' radio broadcast with Graham Attwell and Josie Fraser, and a link to a parallel chat room. Ah, this was just what I needed to cheer me up. I challenge anyone to feel negative when Graham A and Josie F are on the mic. The chatroom gave me an opportunity to talk some rubbish and tell a few bad jokes which, at the end of the day, was all I was really missing.
The parallel text chat room seemed to be some sort of instant freeby widget/gadget/mini-application type thing. Essentially, a load of random people clicked a link and signed in and suddenly we were all together in a spontaneously generated virtual text-space.
Now, there is no reason why that couldn't have been a multi-user virtual environment. Maybe Wonderland could be put to use to provide a simple on demand Java webstart 3D chat space, with open log-ins just like today. No sign-up hassles. Noobs welcome. An open 3D world just when you need it.
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