10:58 a.m., July 22, 2009----A new social network, UDSLED (University of Delaware Second Life EDucators), has been established on the social networking site, Ning. UDSLED is for everyone who has an interest in Second Life as an educational tool at UD and allows members to post comments, videos and photos.

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The UDSLED blog will contain all new information regarding Second Life at UD, including news, island updates, sims of the week, information about sim tours and new monthly meetings that will start in the autumn. UDSLED won't contain any Second Life getting started information, which is available at the UD Second Life Web site through an easy-to-locate tab in UDSLED.

According to Debbie Jeffers, IT-Client Support and Services, the UD Second Life Web site remains the campus portal for entering Second Life. She recommends that anyone at UD who wishes to begin exploring Second Life use this site to get started.

“We still have all the getting started files, tip sheets, links to great places to visit, and information about good educators' groups to join there,” Jeffers said. There are a number of links to the UDSLED site on the portal Web page. Once in Second Life, everyone is encouraged to join UDSLED on Ning.

Another advantage to using the Ning site is that you can subscribe to it through RSS, and the news will come to your reader or e-mail, so there's no need to check for updates every day. Members can post to the UDSLED blog, recommend sims, and share Second Life experiences and travel recommendations. You can sign up with an avatar or a real name and can add as much or as little personal information as you like.

Several UD educators use Second Life for in their teaching and are beginning to communicate through the new UDSLED site.

Alvina Quintana, associate professor of women's studies, maintains a presence both in Second Life and on UDSLED. Last semester, Quintana taught the women's studies capstone course which involved videotaping oral history interviews of Afro Latinas in the community. Twenty students, in groups of two, produced three-minute video documentaries drawn from their 60-90 minute video interviews.

According to Quintana, the six best documentaries were then featured in a Second Life student exhibit -- the first student exhibit on the UD island. The Second Life exhibit was presented to the public on May 28 in a program at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington. The audience included leaders from Delaware's Latino community as well as faculty, staff and students from UD.

Quintana said, “We've received great press on this exhibit and were featured in an article in Delaware's only bilingual online periodical El Tiempo Hispano. I'm proud to say that the site continues to be recognized by visits in Second Life. To date we have had over 400 visits, including 130 in the past week.”

This summer, Quintana has developed a blog on UDSLED to maintain direct contact with many of the Latino scholars, activists and other professionals who were identified through her work with the Governor's Advisory Council on Hispanic Affairs (GACHA). “We are happy to say that the 2009 capstone course in women's studies has helped us to move forward with President Harker's visions for the Path to Prominence and community outreach,” Quintana said.

Meredith Wesolowski, supplemental faculty in the School of Education and the Department of Biological Sciences, used Second Life in her online biology course for group discussion of various scenario-based problems and in educational technology classes to teach multimedia production. In spring 2007, Wesolowski used Second Life to bring a guest speaker, Leslie Conery, deputy CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, to her class of 80 students.

According to Wesolowski, the Ning UDSLED group will be helpful for networking and sharing ideas with other faculty. “3D environments are something developers and teachers are trying to get a handle on since they have so much potential but are also incredibly new. Talking with others about what has worked or not is very helpful,” Wesolowski said. “The Ning UDSLED site is pretty new, but it already has a lot of good reference links for faculty to use. It's also good to know there are many other UD people out there using SL in some way,” she added.