Reported on CNET

Look out, Facebook users: Here comes voice chat.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the social network’s tens of millions of users will begin to be able to have high-quality voice conversations, even as its third-party developers are able to start including voice in their applications.

The new technology is not being offered by Facebook itself, however. Instead, it’s from Vivox, a Boston-based company that provides the integrated voice service for virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online, and which already has more than 15 million users worldwide.

The service, which is currently in closed beta, will allow Facebook users to have high-fidelity conversations with anyone on their friends list. Each user, however, will have to download Vivox’s plug-in. But once installed, the service works almost seamlessly with Facebook, and is intended for everything from one-to-one chat to large group discussions.

Visitor Information Notecard

Website: http://cypris.ning.com/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyprischat/
Group: Cypris Chat
Island: Cypris Village

WELCOME!

We’re all so happy you could join us here on Cypris Village island. Here is some information to help you enjoy our community.

What is this place?
Practice Times
The sim is FULL!
English Village
Getting Around
Become a tutor or chat host
Rules

——————–
What is this place?
——————–
Cypris Village is home to the Cypris Chat group; a small international non-profit community for English language learning. The purpose of our group is to provide a virtual social networking and meeting place for people looking to SPEAK English rather than study it. We hope this community will foster friendships far and wide while at the same time providing a fun and safe environment for English language learning.

—————-
Practice Times
—————-
Click here for Pratice Times notecard

Practice Times sometimes attract more than 20 avatars to the isalnd. Unfortunately, a group this large becomes too difficult to manage during a Practice Time. For this reason we limit the avatars who are able to attend.

1 tutor or chat host
7 non-speakers
12 learners
———–
20 seats

Sorry. No reservations. Please do not IM asking for a seat. We will not reply. It is first come first served only. Tutors, hosts and officers may always attend because they are able to set their home to Cypris Village. Cypris Villagers may set their home to English Village.

Everyone is welcome to use English Village for Practice Times also. We may be moving some classes to English Village in the future.

——————–
The sim is FULL!
——————–
We’re sorry. Sometimes there will be over 20 avatars on Cypris Village island. Please try English Village. We cannot increase the limit of avatars on Cypris Village. Our tutors can only help a maximum of 12 learners, and also more than 20 avatars causes too much lag on the sim. You’ll simply have to wait or come back at another time. We hope you can understand our commitment to providing a quality learning experience.

—————–
English Village
—————–
This is our second home. We will hold events here for up to 40 avatars. You are welcome to set this as your home by joining the EV Cypris group. This region is not monitored by Cypris. Please contact
Fire Centaur if you have any questions.

—————–
Getting Around
—————-
Teleporter Maps are set up around the island. See the following map.

Holodeck
Role Playing

Choose a role play situation from the box. Then rez a scene from the Holodeck.

To rez a scene:
Touch the colored circle
Choose SCENES
Choose a scene and wait
To remove the scene type “clear” in local chat

Sandbox
Practice creating objects here. Try to build the examples. Take a photo and send it to will1918@flickr.com. All objects will be returned after you leave the sim.

Chat Ring
We meet here for Practice Times. Join a lesson or discussion, or start your own Chat Time. Use the notecards in the Practice Notecards box to start. See the calendar in the center of the island or the schedule board on the East side of the clubhouse.

Tutor Island
All regular tutors receive a 64 sqm office and 20 prims. Set this as your home, invite learners to a private chat. Each parcel is seperate and owned by the tutor.

———————————
Become a Tutor or chat Host
———————————-

Would you like to help the group? We are always looking for nice people to volunteer a little time to help make the group a nicer place. Here are a few things you can do to help:

Be a Chat Host (non-native or native speaker). Volunteer a couple hours to be available to practice speaking English. That’s it. Others will join you for a conversation. No need to prepare anything. If you are there, we’ll advertise and bring you people to practice with.

Host a Discusion Time (native speaker). The tutor is available to offer help for two hours. After answering questions for 30 minutes, the tutor forms a theme or topic for further discussion or study. This is not a planned lesson but does have a central theme in order to practice or learn something new.

Host a Lesson Time (native speaker). These are planned lessons that usually follow a two hour schedule; 1 hour of chat and study, 30 minutes of activity, and 30 minutes or more of group travel in SL. These Times are mainly for real life teachers or tutors wishing to learn how to teach in SL.

Anyone can be available for to Host a chat and schedule a time on the schedule board hanging from the clubhouse in the middle of the sim. Just click on the board and choose “Schedule Time” from the drop-down menu. If you make a mistake, just IM Professor Merryman. The board will send a reminder IM 60 minutes before your scheduled time. Also, the scheduled time will delete itself 24 hours later so if you wish to continue the next week you will need to schedule it again.

———
Rules
———

We strive to provide a low lag, “grief” free island. We are constantly monitoring sim performance and patroling for avatars who may not suit our community.

Cypris Patrol follows the three strikes rule. We will eject and possibly ban avatars for the following:
*If we have three complaints about an avatar causing trouble.
*If an avatar is asked three times by an officer to stop doing something which is considered by others to be bothersome.
*Any actions deemed as griefing according to the Second Life wiki. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Grief and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer

Be respectful of cultures. Arguing of religion, politics, sex, war, or otherwise controversial topics may be considered disrespectful and grounds for being ejected or possibly banned from the community.

We try to be as open and friendly as possible but require these rules in order to strike a balance between cultures. Thank you for understanding this difficult undertaking.

If you have any further questions please feel free to contact Professor Merryman, Mystie Slade or stop by Cypris to find out more.

See you at Cypris!

Greetings, SLED community.

Linden Lab has received no indications from the Australian government
that it plans to block Second Life and will keep our community apprised
of any developments on that front. In the meantime, we want to assure
Australian Residents that Second Life remains accessible and functioning
in your region.

Australia has and will continue to be an important market for Linden
Lab, and we?re committed to providing the best possible Second Life
experience for the users in that market. Some of the most exciting uses
of Second Life have come out of Australia, a diverse community of
Residents that includes major universities, K12 schools (in Teen Second
Life), large enterprises and many thousands of consumers, who spend
hundreds of thousands of hours inworld each month.

Regards,

Claudia

I’m dumbfounded. The same kind of thinking happens in Japan also, where one person in 1 million is murdered by fork and the whole country is forced to use spoons for the rest of their lives. It’s to protect the good of the people…huh?

Logics guys. Come on. Oh right…that taxi driver in Thailand who killed those people while reenacting a video game scene. It’s ok to ban video games because they kill, but not alcohol and tobacco. hmm. Um..maybe if video game are proven to be bigger killers than the marijuana trade we can legalize marijuana.

I digress. How did you come to this decision?

Well, here is a video. And here is an article the refutes it.

A sovereign nation should, at times, be held accountable for their convictions. If there is an overwhelming vote to ban online gaming,  IN THE HOME, then shouldn’t it be the voters themselves who should prevent underage children from accessing these games rather than leaning on the government to father these rules for them?

A possible solution could be that OUTSIDE OF the home we could have limited access to adult related sites in places like schools and government facilities. Internet cafes and the like should be required to administer age verification protocols,  and businesses should be asked to follow some sort of filtering.

Banning Second Life without understanding the benefits it provides to so many is simply naive. Do your research Australia. Take a look at Cypris Village, our co-op not-for-profit virtual language learning community, and tell me if you think your decision is becoming of a first world nation.

I recently tried this out in my class. I am teaching a first year writing class in the computer lab. Because they are first year students, they don’t quite have the confidence to step up and ask a question in front of their classmates, especially in English. So I thought this would be a great environment for using backchannel chat. I found a great site called Today’s Meeting that has a very simple interface for hosting backhannel chat. I simply opened a room and told all of the students to join and if they have any questions or comments to just type them in the box and send. I also tried to tell them that they can type messages to their friends or anything they would like … but keep it clean.

The first thing I had them do with this new tool was to send me a link to their blogs. I was using EditGrid but they don’t seem to have the app linked to Facebook anymore. So I thought it might be easy to do it this way. They all posted their blog links. But then I had to figure out how to extract those links and make a nice list so that I would only have to click down a list. Here’s what I did:

1. Copied and Pasted the entire text of the chat into a word document. I’m sure you can see a lot of uses with just doing that…like building dialogues by setting up different groups in different chat windows. So fun!
2. Here comes the tricky part: Then press Alt + F9. This reveals the background code.
3. Open the Find box. Edit>Find
4. Type ^19 HYPERLINK and put a check in the box next to “Highlight all items in this document”
5. Then copy and paste the selected text into another document
6. Press Alt + F9 and VOILA! A list of your students blogs.

After we did the link posting, I went on with the teaching portion of the class. No questions posted. The when it came to doing the activity in class, and I was running around answering questions, I told them to post their questions in the chat and I would answer them. I had to run up to my computer to see who asked a question but it soon got interesting when a couple students started answering questions in chat for me. Wow. I think we’re on to something.

NOTE: This feature will NOT be free in the future.

Here is a quote from the Second Life Blog describing the new technology:

Voice has been an integral part of Second Life experience since it launched in 2007. Today, over 50% of Residents use voice everyday, 97% of Second Life regions are voice enabled and Residents are now consuming voice at a rate of over 1 Billion minutes per month making Second Life one of the largest VoIP providers in the world.

Because we know how using voice can transform Second Life for different users of the world, we’re developing new voice products to suit the needs of our wide audience. From voice fonts to SMS text messaging out to client-side session recording, Second Life Voice is evolving to meet the needs of both consumers and enterprise.

Today, we’re excited to introduce AvaLine, a new service which enables Residents to receive voice calls inworld from an outside number. This marks the first time a Resident will be able to communicate with a non-Second Life user within Second Life. The service goes into a limited Beta trial today and will launch as a full offering in Q3.

In addition, SLim – Second Life’s one-to-one text and voice application enabling Residents to interact with other Second Life Residents without having the viewer open - relaunches at the same time with a new look and functionality.

Get your AvaLine and SLim now.

Check the Knowledge Base for more information.

Take a look at this chart from a 2006 study conducted by the Ministry of Education. It shows that in 2005, over 85% of secondary teachers responded saying they could teach classes using computers. But only 67% of upper secondary teachers said they could do the same. Why the difference? And would this trend mean that it is even worse in universities? I would have to say, “Yes”. A large percentage of the teachers I know don’t use a computer to prepare for their classes much less even think of using them to teach with. I even know a few who only recently began using a computer.  Old habits or old age I guess.