Today’s Post on FIT @ SL Blog

Here is my post from the http://fitsl.wordpress.com/ summerizing my Presentation at FIT last Friday 11/30/07 and today 12/04/07 along with Beth Harris, Shenlei Winkler, and Nyla Kazakoff. Here is a link to some Flickr images from SL. Hopefully Beth or Shenlei will add some RL images.

FITat SL POST: ELaine Polvinen:
Teaching Fashion in a Virtual Environment 

Left to right: Shenlei, Elaine and Nyla in SL
Elaine is wearing one of Nyla’s fashions

Buffalo State Fashion Student Exhibit SURL 

Beth spoke about her first experiences in SL and that she too was questioning the value that a virtual world could provide to educators. She spoke about how excited she felt when she arranged to meet up with a RL friend that she had not seen in a long time in SL. The emotional connection she experienced meeting that person in SL was totally new to her and far more connected then she thought could be possible in a virtual world. She has been researching the teaching possibilities every since.

Nyla [House of Nyla] spoke about how her virtual SL development is extending her RL designer brand on an international level and Shenlei Winkler [FRI] spoke about her research with the speed and cost effectiveness of product development in a virtual world. Shenlei is a RL fashion design product developer on a mass market level.  She stated that the entire fashion product development process is currently undergoing rapid transformation over to virtual development. Development in a virtual world will enable fashion product developers to instantly “connect virtually” to work on design, develop and prototype a new product in a fraction of the time it take in the RL. Here is an article titled, ” Will your SL wardrobe soon be coming to a closet near you?” by Scarlett Qi that was posted today about her work in the SLNN Business News.

Nyla and Shenlei will be posting their summary on the FIT @ SL soon.

Beth and Shenlei were there in person and Nyla and I were in Second Life. This was a real experience for me especially since I was in the middle of a SUNY Project LIVE presentation at Monroe Community College last Friday and I left to participate virtually in the presentation at FIT. Talk about multi-tasking! At the same time my BSC students were watching audio/videos that I made to cover our weekly class scheduled at the same time. Whew! Technology is wonderful ….when it all works.

When it doesn’t you must always have a plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.