FYI: Smarttech demo of Edusim this morning - and observations

This morning I had a conference call with 12 Smarttech sales reps.
(http://smarttech.com makers of the Smartboard interactive whiteboards)
, as I mentioned before, they will be demoing this prototype on their boards at
Educause next week (If your there & want to drop by their booth & say hi the
main contact will be Lise Mills).  The presentation started with a little
background on Croquet (and discussed the Croquet Consortium, shared the web
site etc.) & Greenbush (http://www.greenbush.org) then consisted of the sharing
of my desktop (through BridgIt) and walking them through the process of
navigating, adding images, importing in models, creating text, creating Tea
Painter objects, etc. They were VERY enthused and had many questions & comments
(consisting mainly of classroom lessons/activities, & creating them, how Edusim
enhances their existing board software and "extends" the classroom).  The
concept of linking SMARTboards was also a central part of the conversation
(classes collaborating together through their boards).

The Edusim concept seems to be taking off from a grass roots level and seems to
have significant potential to extend a classroom into a 3D collaborative
virtual space many in the k-12 education community have not considered.  This
also could develop into good news for the Croquet & Squeak development
communities as many of their comments revolved around packages that would/could
allow boards to leverage the already (2D) created content (and bringing it into
the 3D virtual space), So there seems to be a business development track as
well.  

In closing anything you can contribute to the Edusim project would be hugely
appreciated (Giving me the "novice" croquet developers title would be a huge
over-statement - so I can use all the help I can get!)... and as always a huge
appreciation to the Croquet development community (and the 6 original key
architects -
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/About_the_Technology#Original_Architects)
- Ill keep the community updated.

Cheers & here's to inventing the future !

Rich
http://edusim3D.com

Rich, I'm working on creating tutorials and how-to documents on my blog: http://xaverse.blogspot.com/

You may want to subscribe to the RSS there, as more advanced tutorials are going to be getting released "soon." I'm trying to balance dissertation, job, teaching, design, development, and everything else in-between, in addition to writing these tutorials. So I'm just kind of fitting them in when I can, and there is no real release timeline.

Cheers,

-Matt