As part of  the jokaydia Mini Unconference today, I will be launching our first community project for the year – the 2009 jokaydia Photocomp, which invites you to share your jokaydia images with us via Flickr or Koinup for inclusion in our annual community exhibition.

Visit the Islands of jokaydia and create a snapshot, upload and tag it, and you could win!

So how does it work?

The competition is all about about taking interesting, artistic, crazy and/or creative images using the camera tools in Second Life and sharing them via online photosharing spaces.

There’s only one catch – we’ve picked the location! Your images MUST be taken within the jokaydia Estate.

After the success of the 2008 Photocomp, I’m really excited that this is becoming an annual event, and I urge you to join in on the fun!

How to Enter?

1. Create a really interesting image using the Second Life camera tools – the only limitations are your creativity and sim boundaries! Your image must be taken somewhere within the Islands of jokaydia Estate in Second Life (SLurl).
2. Upload your photograph to submit it to the competition. This year we will be using Flickr and KoinUp for photo submissions
   • To submit via Flickr, upload and tag your image with and tag it with ‘jokaydiaphotocomp09‘. You also need to add your image to the jokaydia Photo Pool. You’ll find instructions on how to join the group and add your image here.
   • To submit via Koinup, upload your image and tag it with ‘jokaydiaphotocomp09‘. You also need to add your image to the Islands of jokaydia Group on Koinup. You’ll find instructions on how to join the group and add your image on Koinup here.
3. Wait with baited breath for the winners announcements at jokaydia’s May Day Festival.

I’ve been making some resources today, and thus was going through the amazing collection of images on the jokaydia Flickr Group. Wow we have done some crazy, fun, educational, networked, social and awesome stuff this year! I think for me the highlight was the Unconference, which showcased just how far we have all come as a community.

So I decided to make this Animoto as a quick way to record our exploits this year.. and provide us all with a handy resource which perhaps gives people a bit of insight into what we get up to! I hope you enjoy it!

Special thanks to all the contributors in our Flickr group – you are contributing to an important visual record of our work inworld!

Oh and did I say GO VOTE FOR US!? hehe!

On Friday I had an opportunity to participate in a number of virtual sessions of the Australasian Virtual Worlds Workshop held in Second Life. The sessions took place on the Islands of jokaydia and the beautiful Second Life campus of Swinburne University on Koala Island.

I managed to take lots of pictures and even some video. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture the audio. Below you will find two machinima pieces from the event and also a flickr stream of all the pictures from the jokaydian Fotopool.

Keynote address by Chris Collins, Director of Enterprise Business Systems of Linden Lab
(no audio):

(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

Some shots of the panel sessions after Chris’ keynote:

(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

… and here are all the tagged pictures from the event:

It’s Blue Day! And we’re just about ready for our celebrations at bar jokaydia!

Join us at Bar jokaydia (Slurl) from 6pm – 11pm AEST (Check your local time here!) to check out the links and information we’ve established there, or teleport over to the Online Therapy Institute (SLurl)! There will also be dancing and virtual silliness… so dress up in your favourite blue outfit and join us!

I’m also very excited to announce that the fabulous Dave Koi has shared a wonderful piece of virtual sculpture which you can visit at the event! Dave describes his sculpture  on his blog …

… I created this in early 2008 and it evolved out of a lingering sadness which started a couple years ago after a period of depression after burn-out from work and residual things from, well, life.

There seemed to be in me an unending need for release which only I can relate to a build up of tears -  yet unfulfiled. …

However apart from showing friends at various times it remained in my work space, not quite gestated. The perfect time to inspire me completing it at getting it out publicly was Blueday2008 – 10 October – World Mental Health Day. For reasons I hope are obvious. …

Read more on his blog! or visit him in SL!

Dave has also kindly made some Beyond Blue T-Shirts, which you can pick up for free @ Bar jokaydia (Slurl) tonight!

Jo has already written about the hugely successful April Festival on jokaydia which took place last weekend, but I’d like to add a few words about the Newbie Session that she asked me to help out with. It was very inspiring to be with a group of visitors who are keen to start exploring the educational potential of Second Life. One of the most important things that I learned during that session was not to take Second Life for granted. Interacting with those who are new to Second Life reminded me how inspired I was when I first created my avatar and started exploring some of the educational spaces inworld. It was like discovering a new frontier – it was a time to reflect on what I’d accomplished as an educator in the physical and online world, and to also think about the possibilities that await in the virtual environment of Second Life. In other words, it was a time to push my own thinking about education.

As I reflect on that Newbie Session last week, I am reminded of the wide-eyed enthusiasm of our guests and the importance of that almost child-like sense of wonder and exploration that we all experience when we first discover Second Life.

One thing that helps me keep that sense of wonder alive and makes me feel like a perpetual SL newbie is my passion for inworld photography and machinima. If you’re interested in my work, feel free to visit the home of my March Studios at blip.tv or my growing collection of Second Life landscape photography.

Finally, here’s a video to celebrate last week’s festival and, specifically, the magical Newbie Session balloon ride that reminded me of why I love Second Life: As our first Educator-in-Residence continues to demonstrate, it’s a place where the only limit is our creativity (… and the number of prims at our disposal :-) ):

For a full-screen version, click here.