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As the discussion continues about using Second Life effectively for classes, I am reminded to post about a terrific tool I recently discovered that may be useful in your courses.

Many faculty are asking students to report on their experiences in Second Life, either by writing essays or blog posts, and it can be very tricky and time consuming to take a snapshot, save it to disk, re-size it and convert it to JPG, upload it to Flickr, and then create a blog post about whatever it was that you saw or experienced. If you also want to include a SLurl or link to the location, that’s another step that requires you to flip back into SL to copy and paste the SLurl, etc.

The BlogHUD does all of these steps for the user once it is setup and configured properly. I estimate it saves me maybe 20 to 30 minutes every time I use it, and it makes it very, very simple to keep a “travel log” of your Second Life journeys. I have contacted the creator to see if we might be able to get an educational discount, but have not yet heard back – at the moment the “Pro BlogHUD” costs $900L for each user, but I personally think it is well worth it.

To use the BlogHUD effectively as a travel log tool requires:

– Register for and create a free blog using a supported service – WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Friendster, LiveJournal blogs are all supported, I personally prefer WordPress – http://wordpress.com

– Register for and create a free Flickr account – http://flickr.com

– Pick up the BlogHUD in-world at:
secondlife://Nooribeom/181.57761/186.27246/23.40998/

– Follow the configuration instructions for the BlogHUD at http://bloghud.com/

The initial set up process is a little time consuming, but once you get it working, you can create a post on your blog with a photo snapshot and a SLurl link to the location in about 30 seconds (not including the time it takes to write the text, of course!) and in one single step.

In Second Life, you frame and take the snapshot – choose to send it as a postcard to pix@bloghud.com – and then enter the title and text of your post right within the postcard window in Second Life. Within a few moments, the post appears on your blog and the picture is neatly trimmed and added to your Flickr account for future use.

To see an example of a blog post created this way: http://fleeep.net/blog/?p=85

An instructor could set up a single blog and Flickr account for everyone in the course to use, or each student could set up their own site/account. The blog could also be linked from the CMS/LMS and might be a good tool to record student engagement/use.

We haven’t yet implemented this in a course at UC or in our faculty/staff learning community, but I intend to bring it up at our next meeting. I hope to try it out with our learning community first and if it’s successful for group use, then perhaps one of our faculty can try it in a course next quarter. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes..

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:23 am and is filed under BlogHUD, Education, Second Life, Web 2.0. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.