Originally created in October of 2005 as a resource for Educators, The Second Life Educators (SLED) community is growing strong and now contains over 4700+ members! Educators from around the world are using SLED to help newcomers, exchange resources, network, collaborate on projects, and share best practices.

In order to continue to serve the Educator community and to make the benefits of SLED more accessible, we are pleased to announce the creation of the SLED Blog. A doorway to the engaging dialogue on the SLED list, the blog will feature and highlight EDU-oriented events, tools, bright ideas, awesome groups and locations, expert opinions, pointers to tutorials and papers, and insider views on life in Teen Second Life.

To kick off the project, we’ve invited Second Life resident educator Intellagirl Tully - aka Sarah Robbins - to edit the SLED Blog. In first life, Sarah Robbins is an instructor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She teaches undergraduate English composition classes in Second Life, presents on Second Life at conferences, blogs prolifically, and co-authored the book Second Life for Dummies. Sarah will manage the blog and has invited several active members of the SLED community to contribute regularly to the SLED Blog.

Drop by the SLED Blog regularly to discover what’s happening in K-20 Education Using the Second Life(R) World.

We are currently experiencing network issues. Some residents may have log-in difficulties. We are aware of the problem and we are working to solve it. We will post updates frequently until the problem is solved.

Between 3pm and 3:15pm PST approximately we experienced some heavy loading on the asset servers which may have affected your ability to teleport, rez items or use search. The load has now eased and we expect normal performance to resume shortly. We will keep you updated if problems resume.

[11.24 am PST] We have resolved the network issues. Thanks again for your patience during the disruption.

[11.08 am PST] Network related issues are currently causing problems with teleporting, failures to rez, profiles loading. We are looking into these problems. We will keep you updated on progress here. Thanks!

[6:08 pm PST] Search functionality has been returned. We expect to see improvement in teleporting issues. Thank you for your patience today.

[4:45 pm PST] The regions are back up now. Search features are still disabled. We’ll be continuing to investigate performance problems and will keep you updated.
[3:56 pm PST] In an effort to improve the performance of teleports across the grid, we are going to rebalance our bandwidth to some simulators in our co-location facilities. This will entail taking 164 regions off line for 30 minutes and bringing them back up on a new circuit. We will start this process at 4:00 pm PST so we should be complete with this operation by about 4:30 pm PST.
[3:25 pm PST] Search functions are currently disabled while we work to reduce a spike in database load. Investigations into problems with teleporting continue. Thanks for your continued patience.
[1:17 pm PST] Our technicians are continuing their investigations– unfortunately we don’t have an ETA at this time. Thanks for your continued patience.

[11:09 am PST] We’re disabling Search for Places while we work on reducing the database load. Thanks for your patience. If you are experiencing difficulties with teleporting, try reducing your attachment load: remove a HUD, bling, or prim hair and try again. We’re working on returning full search functionality as soon as possible.

[3:35 pm PST] Our technicians identified an issue in network communications and have worked with our providers to route around the problem. You should begin to see an improvement in teleport and other asset related issues shortly.

[2:50 pm PST] We are investigating current issues with teleporting and assets-related operations. We don’t have an estimate at the moment on when the issues will be resolved. We’ll keep you informed with updates here. Thanks for your patience.

I thought I’d slip in my introduction before the new year begins and initiate the education category of the Linden Lab blog. I’m on the Community Development team and have been responding to the flood of requests from educational organizations to start projects on the Teen Grid of Second Life. Over the past year, a very energetic educator community has developed on the Main Grid. Pathfinder Linden set up the Second Life Educators List (SLED) in October, 2005. Today, the SLED list is an effective vehicle for 1200+ members to share knowledge gained working with undergraduate and graduate students in Second Life.

The Teen Grid is… (more…)

At this time we are planning on performing some necessary database and network maintenance work in the regular weekly slot of 7:00 AM PST to 12:00 PM PST on Wednesday, 8 November, 2006. Second Life will be unavailable during this period.

Also, we are planning to release Second Life 1.13 on Wednesday, 15 November 2006. The grid will be closed from 7:00 AM PST to 12:00 PM PST, and you will need to upgrade to the newest version to login afterwards. This release is currently up on the Beta Grid and contains many new and highly requested features. Please take a moment to download the Beta viewer and give us your feedback in advance of this planned release. The next scheduled downtime is planned for Wednesday, 29 November 2006. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding as we work to improve the Second Life experience for all.

We have been dealing with two separate network problems. The first has been resolved. On Sunday afternoon and evening (PST), there was an overload condition in one of the routers. This has been fixed. Second, we are sometimes seeing unreliable internet connectivity which is triggering similar problems. We are currently looking into it.

We are experiencing some external network issues resulting in several regions being temporarily unavailable or restarting. We are also observing issues with teleporting. Our network and grid teams are currently investigating.

Thanks for your patience, we’ll update the blog with further information as it becomes available.