Virtual Fashion Technology

I want to let anyone reading this blog know what a wonderful, enriching, educational, and creative experience my week at the NMC 2007 Symposium on Creativity, August 12-18th, 2007 has been. I only regret not being able to spend more time there. I was quite stressed in the beginning because this was all still somewhat new to me and I wanted to do my very best for the NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life.  The entire staff as well as the participants was exceptional with their openness and willingness to assist, facilitate and help everything to go as smooth as possible. Meeting and connecting with so many others that believed in sharing, learning together, and everyone helping each other to move forward towards their individual goals was a total joy.  

I participated in a booth display at the Learning Exposition in the NMC Conference Center. My display was titled: Innovative Pedagogical Techniques for Fashion Education in Second Life.” I also presented an hour in-world session titled, ”Expeditious Fashion Basics with a Creative Twist.”   This 60 minute session expeditiously introduced and provided materials and information to participants for developing (and organizing) an inventory of basic fashion outfits.  The session included several basic fashion suits, shoes, ties, wigs, and flexi skirts for m/f avatars (w/all permissions opened) that could be modified during the session.  The session also included several large original texture collections that participants were free to use to expand and modify their current clothing folders. The original texture collections included with the session are compliments of Fashion and Fiber Design students.  The entire session had a link to a web-site with video tutorials.  

Here is a link to some images I snapped during my week at the Symposium.  If you look over the images I posted on Flickr, you will notice the virtual images of DanCoyote’s  ZeroG SkyDancer Performance. It was an indescribable experience for me to be able to view this virtual live performance from any one point of an xyz 360 degree angle as it was actually happening! It was aesthetically and technically stimulating to the senses. After experiencing a full virtual week’s participation at the NMC Symposium I can definitely agree with many others that the real value of second life is building many types of learning communities. The networking possibilities are spectacular and unlimited. The primary focus should not merely be replicating things from the real world but making contacts, building new learning communities, exploring and experimenting with the potential of this new virtual world where anything “is” quite possible.The closing session was excellent, it included an amazing  video titled “Watch the World’s),”that perfectly exemplifies all the unlimited exciting creative possibilities a virtual world can provide for networking, education and creative expression, a keynote address by Larry Johnson (aka: Larry Pixel) on “Why Creativity Matters” and a Virtual Panel Session from participants located all over the globe titled,” Reflections on Creativity in Second Life.”
Here is a link to the week’s events at the NMC Symposium on Creativity:
Here are some audio/video links from the Symposium
Please tell anyone there interested in Second Life to have their organization join the NMC in  RL as well as joining the NMC Guest group in SL to visit this amazing collaborative educational complex in SL.Many colleges appear to have a primary educational island sim and several attached specialized learning sims for different generalized areas of study. Hopefully we are starting to create a base foundation for that with the initial establishment of the Buffalo State Island. We still have to surmount the hardware/security issues but we work very hard to accommodate anyone on campus that wants to research and explore the possibilities in SL.