All posts by Richard

Creating Second Life Content

At some point, the obvious question arises, how easy (or difficult) is it to create content in Second Life (SL). While your ability to answer that question will vary with the wind, if one truly wishes to explore the business potential of SL, it is a question that must be answered. Thus, here are a few tutorials /screencasts from the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (online masters degree resources):

View some of my other SL postings
———————————————————
Given recent comments, I suggest folks may wish to look at a prior posting. If has additional SL educational resources, including a free online class from Harvard.

The Search for the Perfect Engineering School

The search begins today; it's my son's search for the perfect engineering college, but he gave me permission to blog about the process from a parent's perspective. If you, my blog readers, respond positively, I'll make this a regular feature of eContent.

Here are the schools on the early target list:

And now my first comments … these schools were chosen for a variety of reasons. 

Post Update / Insert: see the final post from this series … Erik is about to graduate from college and has a great full time engineering job offer in hand!

  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) made the list because Erik learned via the Lego Mindstorms NXT Blog of their new robotics degree. It shows that smart schools get themselves listed on "non traditional web sites"
  • Carnegie Mellon already messed up with many of Minnesota's top engineering students. I know of many families who wanted to visit Carnegie Mellon this week (Spring break). Their admissions department told each family they only wanted to see admitted seniors during the entire month of April … high school juniors stay away. Given the distance to visit CMU (1,000 miles), using a vacation week is necessary. We had planned on visiting CMU this week. Not!
  • Michigan Tech … the perfect combination of Lake Superior, cross-country skiing, wilderness and engineering?? (not many girls, however).
  • Valparaiso … a nice sized Lutheran college with an engineering degree

Oh yes … Super 8 motels are clean, inexpensive, and have free wireless at all locations! Off to our morning appointment at Valpo!

The Search Continues – The Second Post in this Series!
.
Wpi

Tagging Inside the Firewall

My company is cool. In the last 24 hours we’ve brought online a pilot project which is one of the very first, if not the first, internal corporate social networking / tagging applications. By internal I mean the service and server are running inside our network domain, yet our employees will be able to tag both internal and external content. Although we are working with a company named ConnectBeam, you should also review other tagging solutions as complied by IT|Redux.

Okay, why is this cool? Well … this application is inside our firewall and will allow our engineers to perform knowledge discovery, research and sharing across the miles … even if they don’t know each other! ConnectBeam works in tandem with our internal Google search appliance. Over the next few weeks we will conduct our final tests before rolling out our application later this Spring. Here are two screenshots that review some basic concepts:

  1. Old style search
  2. New style search

Click upon any thumbnail to enlarge (some of my prior posts on this topic)
.Searchold
Searchnew_2

Cooking for Engineers

Way back in November of 2005, I first posted about "Cooking for Engineers". If you’re worried about baking the perfect Hot Cross Buns for Easter, then this is the site for you. You’ll find exact measurement details and photos that only an engineer could love!

Why the repeat post? Cooking for Engineers has hit the big time, and is on this month’s IEEE Spectrum Radio Show podcast. Michael Chu (the host engineer) gets over 200,000 site visits per month. While I’m worrying about knowledge management, Michael is providing an engineer’s analysis to cooking thermometers! I guess I’m blogging the wrong stuff!

Tagging Concepts Screencast / Tutorial

Back in mid February post, I briefly alluded to and linked a great Tagging Concepts Screencast / Tutorial. This morning, while reading an RSS feed from TechSmith’s blog, I was reminded of this tutorial. I decided that this screencast was so good, it should have its own post.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of tagging, and / or you’ve never been on the del.icio.us web site, you must watch this tutorial. What makes this tutorial superior is that the author explains and demonstrates concepts, not just software menus and commands. My extreme interest stems not from any love of the del.icio.us tagging service, but rather from how tagging applied by specific groups inside a corporate firewall will greatly enhance knowledge transfer and collaboration.

Tutortag