• Get friendly feedback, tips, and suggestions about your works-in-progress!
• Be inspired by seeing what other people are making!
• Teach or attend workshops to hone your skills or broaden your horizons!
• Challenge yourself and make the best content of your Second Life!
• Meet interesting and creative new friends!

More information and fewer sentences ending in exclamation marks, after the fold!

This is an idea I’ve had in my head for a while, in various forms. I first thought of a long-term series of building classes, meeting with the same students week after week, like a RL course. Another idea was a mentorship program: taking young newblets under my wing, teaching and challenging them to guide their learning, the Mr. Miyagi to their Daniel. Another was an apprenticeship program, like the artisan guilds of yore. But each of those was missing something: the teaching was just going one way, from teacher to student, master to apprentice. I wanted something where everybody would grow and learn, even me!

From past experience, I knew several things:

• Creativity stagnates in isolation.
• Seeing what other people create often gives me inspiration to create my own things.
• Working and interacting with someone else helps me see things from a different perspective.
• Teaching or explaining something to someone else helps me solidify my own understanding of it.
• Knowing that other people will see my work helps to keep me from slacking off.
• Historically, communities of artists interacting and working in proximity have yielded fantastic results.

Thus, the idea of a community of SL content creators, working side-by-side and interacting with each other. But it sounds so serious when I phrase it that way, so I prefer to call it a play-group: just a bunch of creative people meeting regularly to play around and have a good time!

There was just one problem: me sitting alone on my mushroom and poking at a torus doesn’t count as a community. I’d have to get other people involved. But who?

Well… you, maybe, if you’ve read this far and you are (or have interest in being) a content creator of some type: building, scripting, fashion, texturing, animating, etc.

But the thing is, this is supposed to be a small, close-knit community. I’m talking 5 or 10 people, tops. I’m not looking to form a huge mass of people who don’t get along together. That means I’m going to be somewhat selective about membership, to keep the size manageable and ensure peaceful co-existence. It may fill up fast if a lot of people are interested, so please contact me (Jacek Antonelli) in-world or leave a comment if you’d like to participate!

[The researchers are] stepping over the barrier between the “teacher on one side, students on the other”, and all working together collaboratively — and very informally. The teacher becomes a “mentor” — a friend — not a “remote authority”. And this leads to better results for the students: they learn more, they ask more questions, they work harder.

Also:

And since teacher will have to type a lot… they will be better prepared, hand out notecards and presentations, and the students will have access to all notes — instantly. A chat transcript can be posted and archived.

Hah, well, I did type a lot while teaching, true. But better prepared I was not: never once did I hand out a notecard before class covering all the material I would teach! At the end of class, I would paste the chat transcript into a notecard and hand it out to any interested students, but the fact is that there was no pre-prepared notecard—not even for my own reference!

My teaching style was highly informal, and involved quite a bit of improvisation. Some would call it disorganized; more diplomatic people might call it flexible. I had a general flow of the topics I would cover (especially after the first month of teaching the same topic weekly), but I wasn’t a robot copying and pasting text from a notecard without regard for my student’s questions or interests. Because nothing I said was pre-planned, I had the freedom to make playful jokes, to refer to things that students had said, to tie their questions into the lecture, to elaborate on topics that students didn’t understand or wanted to know more about.

Instead of a lecturer reciting from the script in front of an audience, I was just a person who wanted to share what I knew with the students. Somehow, despite the apparent lack of preparation, the feedback from my students did not suffer. Maybe they were just taking pity on poor old disorganized Jacek!

On a text-based classroom, shy students will speak up, be participative, and will behave absolutely normally.

This is also true for shy teachers! I’m not sure I could stand to speak in front of 20+ people I didn’t know in RL, but in SL it’s much more comfortable.

You can add my name to the list of people who don’t plan on using voice to teach (or do much of anything else, actually). That is assuming that Linux users even get the choice: voice has been conspicuously missing from the Linux beta viewers.

So what’s the topic this week? Aesthetic Lighting!

Come learn the dos and don’ts of using Second Life’s local lighting feature to enhance the atmosphere of your builds!

That sounds pretty friggin’ awesome to me! I’m especially looking forward to the opportunity to show people how to make glowing objects that don’t blind everyone in the room! (Yes, that’s right, I’m teaching a class on how to be a little subtle, ‘kay?)

Come learn how to make pretty lights and avoid being a nuisance to society on Saturday March 10 from 6-7PM PST at NCI International! It’s free!

I’ve been battling my cable modem for the past week and a half. It was getting into the habit of dropping my connection upwards of 80 times per day, so I’ve had to beat it into submission. It’s still a bit flakey, but not as bad as before.

Unfortunately, this fiasco managed to prevent me from logging in to Second Life to teach my classes on Thursday and Friday—the first sessions of my new classes! Augh! I weep! My apologies to everyone who tried to attend—I can only assure you that only a situation of the most dire variety could keep me from my students! I have never missed teaching a class before—I know how frustrating it is when you show up for a class and wait around for half an hour with no sign of the instructor!

Because I can’t be certain that my connection will be reliable, I have cancelled my Saturday class for this week. (I weep more!)

I hope to be teaching again next week from March 8-10.

In fact, I’ve been teaching an Advanced Building class every week at NCI since September! And now I have exciting news: I’m offering 2 more classes per week, both on building-related topics! Come get yer extra learnin’, they’re all free to attend! Class descriptions after the fold!

Advanced Building: Power Tools Thursday from 6PM-7PM PST at NCI International!

Build faster and more easily with two very useful but often overlooked building tools!

• Align prims quickly and accurately with the Create Copy tool! Explore its options and uses, plus discover its shortcomings and how to work around them! Any architect worth their salt should know how to use this tool!
• Achieve more control (and convenience!) when moving and rotate prims with Ruler Modes. Learn what Ruler Modes do, and how and when to use each mode… including the elusive Reference Mode!

Advanced Building: Prim T&A Friday from 5PM-7PM PST at Usability Island!

Explore prim types and attributes to create shapes you never knew were possible in Second Life!

• What are all the prim types, and how are they related to each other?
• What attributes do prims have, and what do they do?
• When and where is each attribute useful, and what limitations do they have?

Advanced Building: Topic of the Week Saturday from 6PM-7PM PST at NCI International!

A one-hour building lecture/workshop with a different topic each week! Check Jacek Antonelli’s profile for this week’s topic. You may also request a topic via IM. Topics will be chosen no less than 3 days prior to the event.

I’m ‘specially pumped about my TotW class! I’ve got so much stuff to teach, and now I can teach new stuff every week! Yay!

Everybody should come at get some learnin’ in their brains about prim attributes! I offer my knowledges to you for free!

And then you should stick around after the class, because at 4:30PM is the überfun Building Shelter contest, hosted by our favorite commodity, Coal Nelson! With the power of prim attributes unleashed, you can be sure that there will be some cool builds today!

P.S. I’m going to try to think up a Not-A-Meme challenge for folks today. Stay tuned!

Apparently, this both upset and surprised a number of instructors! To them, this is the latest in a series of moves by Linden Lab to destroy everything we used to love about Second Life.

Me? I don’t really care. I have never requested any subsidy payments for my teaching. I don’t want hand-outs, and I’m not teaching as a favor to Linden Lab, so they can keep their money.

I take tips from students. At the end of (almost) every class, I mention that I do take tips, and that a contribution of any size is a good way to tell me that you appreciated the class—but that the class is free, and tips are entirely optional. I get paid iff my students think what I have taught them is worth paying me for.

On only one occasion have I received more in tips than I would have received as a subsidy payment; usually I receive about half. But I know I earned it.

There are two factors which, one might argue, make my situation unusual among instructors (and thus render my opinion on this matter entirely invalid).

1. I do not teach in SL as my means of survival. (I teach because I enjoy it, and to make a bit of spending money.)
2. The material I teach is not geared towards newbies, but instead Residents who have been in-world for a while and wish to improve their skills for personal or commercial benefit. (Oldbies and professional builders are apparently more likely to have money on hand with which to tip someone who teaches them techniques to improve their building efficiency.)

“Of course you don’t mind,” writes an imaginary instructor. “You don’t need the money, and besides, the way you teach is more profitable! I, on the other hand, have to teach a hundred newbies to put on their own pants just to make enough money to buy a pre-owned can of chicken broth!”

Yes, it’s true: instructors who have been surviving on hand-outs from Linden Lab in return for teaching newbies the utter basics are getting the shaft. Tough break for you? My only advice is to adapt your business model. Find a business to sponsor your class. Start charging for admission. Teach something that people with money will pay you to teach.

Linden Lab is, in some ways, giving themselves and every Resident on the Grid the long-term shaft, too. Hordes of the unwashed masses are already trampling everything; now they will be unwashed, uneducated masses! Terrible, disgusting plebians whose purest motive in SL is to figure out how to attach a giant penis to their own forehead and find the nearest free sex community.

Boy, the Grid is going to /dev/null in a handbasket, I tell ya. It’s enough to make me yearn for ye dayes of olde when a prim was a just a prim, grass textures were greener and never had to rez, and every Resident descended onto Help Island from the immaculate Skybox of knowledge and dedication.

Those were the days.