Written yesterday. I’m at the New School, doing an all-day webcast for the India China Institute’s big conference, which brings to mind Ross’s recent post about educational webcasts and archiving. The New School Online is a great initiative and it gets the job done, though I wish they’d chosen open source technologies instead of Real and the need for a CMS grows as each event gets added to the hand-coded archives. I’ve yet to learn how much traffic they actually get, but I figure it’s small yet growing. As each month (not year) goes by, more and more activities — economic and cultural — make use of telecollaborative tech like streaming video meetings, wikis and such. One of our selling points to parents for Kids Connect is that their children will have a leg up in the small, loosely organized, distributed businesses of tomorrow* by playing and experimenting with video performance and virtual (Second Life) collaboration. I’m going to get a prototype working environment set up in Second Life as soon as possible. I’m looking forward to Ross and other educators asking hard questions and shredding my assumptions so our workshops in SL can be truly valuable, not just buzzword inclusion.

Speaking of truly valuable places in Second Life, check out _blacklibrary, a cultural center slash micro-publisher. They host fiction, non-fiction, games, graphic novels, and art including sculpture. They’re going to distribute my comic.

* And no, that’s not THE LAND OF THE FUTURE with food pills and shiny jumpsuits — it’s…well, 10 minutes from now.