So yesterday I had a quick conference call with Pandora, Bron and Sapphy, who are all having fun down at the ACEC 2010 conference down in Melbourne this week. They were asking about how we could pull virtual participants into Bron’s Virtual Worlds Unconference session which she’s facilitating today at the real life venue (see details below!).
The big challenge was to find a way for virtual and face to face participants to participate in the discussion without neccessarily all being logged into Second Life. And so began the jokaydia Chat Bridge mission! ;)
Chat Bridge tools have been around in Second Life for awhile now. We used Chase Marellan’s great chat bridge service for the Edublog Awards in 2008 with great success, and we’ve also experimented with SLOODLE’s web-intercom tools which are handy if your working with a class group. But neither of these fit the bill for this event as we have no budget to pay for a service, or time to enrol everyone at the face to face event in a moodle chat!
So after a bit of searching around I found Quickfox.net’s IRC Chat bridge tools which allow you to connect local chatters in Second Life with participants in an IRC Channel. You can get the tools inworld here (SLurl) and there’s info about the service here.
This is great – and its free too… woot! But your basic IRC channel is a bit of a stretch for newer user who perhaps havent ever used those types of tools before.
So the next step was finding the tools to embed the IRC chat in an easy to use web page on the jokaydia site… and Mibbit.com is the solution. They provide a simple to use widget that lets me embed my chat on my blog page easily. Its free if you are happy to put up with their ads and there’s even a Mibbit Plugin for WordPress which makes it super easy to setup!
I’ve setup our Chat Bridge area in EduSquare @ jokaydia in SL (SLurl), as that’s one of the spaces we’ve tended to use regularly for demos and discussions. All residents of jokaydia will be able to pop out the tools via the Rezzer button I’ve setup on the wall – so feel free to drop in and try it out!
You can access the Web-based chat room via the new Chat Bridge page which is here.
ACEC 2010 Visits jokaydia!
So back to Bron, Pandora and Sapphire at ACEC! Now that we have our chat bridge setup, its time to test it! And we’ll be doing just that during Bron’s session today. Details are below … all welcome to attend!
Event Details:
- Unconference session at the ACEC 2010 event happening in Melbourne, Australia. Click here session for details!
- Facilitator: Bronwyn Stuckey
- Time: Thursday, 8 April 2010 13:30 – 15:00, Melbourne Time!
- SL Time: 8:30pm SLT, 7 April! Check your local time here!
- Locations: Conversation Pit at the ACEC venue in real life,EduSquare @ jokaydia in SL (SLurl) and here in our web-based chat below!
Special thanks to slammed, Stephan and Bron for helping me test the chat bridge tools! Next job is getting to work in jokaydiaGRID too! ;)
Jo Kay aka jokay Wollongong is a freelance digital designer and facilitator working in virtual worlds and educational technology. She helps educators and organisations to use new and innovative technologies for learning. Jo is the owner and facilitator of the Islands of jokaydia Project – a space for a vibrant community of educators to explore the use of virtual worlds in education. 
We worked really hard to build online bridges at the conference. Off the top of my head I know of 5 workshops that were conducted by remote presenters with eluminate / Skype / Moodle / SecondLife, others were shared to varying degrees with streaming audio and video webcasts depending on the presenter. Dozens invited participation by tools ranging from Chatsy to Twitter.
Your screenshots above are surprisingly similar to the huge windows in our conference venue. Bron has done a fantastic job to build this chat bridge and explore what we can do with these emerging technologies, bravo to all who participated and helped!
Thanks Roland. The chat bridge has been a great addition to our suite of mixed reality event tools on the Islands of jokaydia, and I’m now working with the Reaction Grid team to bridge it even further – connecting jokaydiaGRID (our opensource platform), the Islands of jokaydia in Second Life and a web-based chat.
We’re also looking to mix this with some livestreaming tools which will allow us to push the live event into our virtual meeting spaces.
Its a massive communication puzzle, but as evidenced by the participation we saw in Bron’s session – well worth it! ;)