City of Pods

This has been a productive week with setting up Drexel Island on Second Life. We have settled on a pod tree structure to house departments and faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences. Eloise helped with the pods and Beth and I selected most of the content. The chemistry pod has a list of recent student awards, some images of our equipment and a 3D Bunsen burner and molecule.



The faculty pods are arranged like leaves hovering above the departmental base pods. There are plenty of spaces that we'll populate as we get more faculty involved. For my pod, I have my picture, a link to my organic chemistry class wiki, my research wiki and an example of a quiz obelisk. Other pods have desks. I think that this would be a nice arrangement for virtual open houses where prospective students could visit a few professors from each department in their pods.

The library is now also set up with this pod city framework, organized by guides to literature and databases. There are teleports connecting the chemistry department pod (slurl) to the chemistry resource pod (slurl) in the library section. I think that this type of navigation is important to leverage our resources and make the island as useful as possible to students and faculty.

I ran a Second Life workshop on Friday for CoAS and assisted more faculty from English and Math to set up their avatars. Already we have had participation from Enrollment Management, Drexel E-Learning and the iSchool in the main building. It looks like Nursing is next...

Here is a presentation that I used this week with some representative screenshots: