Over on Ener Hax’ blog there are some very interesting news regarding Kitely – a 3D Virtual World “on demand” service;
- Kitely now has a very favorable billing system in place
- Kitely will soon open up to both email and Twitter logins – so far it has been restricted to Facebook users
- Kitely is working on LDAP integration
My first Kitely “world” – Mariis’ Meta – on March 28th, 2011 – accessed via the SL viewer.
Accessing Kitely via the SL viewer, there was something very familiar to this new “world”. I’m placing world in double quotes because it’s not a world in the common (SL) sense, the “worlds” are not connected in the way we know from SL, but function more as separate grids, where you have to access other “worlds” via the Kitely website (but I think they’re working on a teleport system too). On the other hand, there was something very strange (at least to me) about this new “world”; I had to use my RL name for my avatar because of the required Facebook login. Back in the spring of 2011, I was already fed up with Facebook, and I eventually decided to leave Facebook in August, 2011. I still thought the idea of being able to access VW-settings in an easy, affordable, and “on demand” way, was quite brilliant, so I’m very happy to see the recent news on the upcoming changes. One of the trends, we’ve seen in the growing field of VWs, is that they’re becoming “situational”. And because less sometimes is more, I think Kitely really represents a very interesting option in the field.
As an educator the upcoming LDAP integration also sounds very interesting because it would enable an easy way of adding larger groups of students. I have to admit that I haven’t been following the development of Kitely closely, so I’m not sure exactly how they plan to go about the future changes, but the Kitely founders seem impressingly willing to listen to their users, and there is also some indication that they are working on other education-related features.
So far, my educational use of VWs has been restricted to my adult, distance ed students because I run longer courses with this kind of students that I do with my younger on-campus students. However, with Kitely I see possibilities of introducing the concept of VWs in a much easier way, so I’ll be back in Kitely to explore and have more fun as soon as they implement the new changes :-)
/Mariis
Mariis' digitale refleksioner 
wow, nice world you have! so how was performance for you?
i have yet to try it because i was kicked out of facebook (evidently my avatar holds no value!)
thanks for mentioning LDAP, i saw others mention it but not as an educational advantage. i’ll need to look into that because it sounds as if i could even use MOODLE to administer accounts
Yes, I was quite nice, and I remember performance as bing very smooth :-)
But I didn’t stay for long because of the Facebook requirement, I wanted to wait spending time until they changed that … and since I left Facebook, I don’t think “my” world exists any longer.
Yes, at Aalborg Uni we also use Moodle, so I see great possibilities here – it really is quite exiting!
thank you, this sounds very good from an ed point of view =)