Virtual midwives meeting this Sunday

Sarah and I are very excited and looking forward to welcoming you all to Koru Island meeting place in second life this Sunday.
Follow this link for world times for the meeting



Hopefully everyone who is interested in this has now downloaded second life onto their computer and has created an avatar for themselves. Email me at cardacs@gmail.com with your avatar name and I will then be able to connect with you in second life and transport you to the meeting.




I will be online at least one hour before the meeting preparing and will log anyone that comes on over the weekend into my friends list then. I will be away from home until Sunday afternoon so will not be able to do it before then.

Just in case there are technical difficulties with second life, an alternative online contact option is through Skype. These are contact details for Sarah and myself through Skype


Skype name
Carolyn - carolynmcintosh
Sarah - sarah.m.stewart

See you on Koru Island Sunday 2nd March 9pm NZ time.

Second life midwives meeting

Our midwives and midwifery educators meeting on Koru Island in Second life is this Sunday. We will be meeting in a New Zealand bush setting, with New Zealand bird song in the background. We have a large screen available for a brief introductory presentation before we discuss your ideas and questions about Second Life.

Sunday 2nd of March
United Kingdom -- 0800hrs
Perth WA -- 1700hrs
Brisbane -- 1800hrs
Sydney -- 1900hrs
New Zealand -- 2100hrs
Second life time -- 2400 hrs 0000 hrs or (12 midnight)

Here is a link to world times for the meeting.




It is not too late to register with second life. Create an avatar to enable you to participate in this international collaborative meeting of midwives and midwifery educators in Second life. There is information and 'how to' videos on my blog which will help you to do so at this link Let me know your Avatar name and I will add you to my friends list in second life. I will then be able to teleport you to the meeting place when you log on.

I have been busy working with my mentor Clare Atkins (Arwenna Stardust) in second life arranging this meeting. My friend and colleague Sarah Stewart (Petal Stransky) has also been supporting me and will help me to facilitate this meeting. I am also expecting one or two of my colleagues from Otago polytechnic to help with technical difficulties or to help answer your questions about meeting and learning in this environment.

Looking forward to seeing you on Koru Island :)

More fun at Leicester in the UK with my friend Aastra in secondlife

Here are some more amazing photos from Leicester Media Zoo


This are Aastra and me on the blimp




Here we are in the surround cinema. Not sure where this is though. Let me know if anyone recognises it.

Exploring second life for education

I have been looking at Second life in preparation for a meeting of midwives. I have been struggling to find good places to go to. When I search in second life I only seem to come up with some very 'dodgy' sites, not the sort of places i really want to hang around in.

I finally did a web search for slurl (which is second life urls) and found a really good wiki with lots of interesting places to explore. I also went to Leicester Universities Media Zoo. Which was very interesting.

This is a slide share of my experience

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Second life in education

Here is another perspective on Second life in education. To stimulate your interest for our midwifery meeting on the 2nd of March. This is a slideshare presentation from Jokay and was posted a year ago.

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Midwives on the move in America

Image: Camilo 30 seconds old. From Natashalatrasha's photos at Flickr.com


There have been some positive happenings in America on the issues of midwifery and childbirth. Long overdue one has to say. Midwives and women have been lobbying strongly for changes in legislation to legalise the practice of midwifery across the United States. I have been observing this on the periphery. I have some idea about what has been happening and have been aware of the movement that has been actively lobbying local and national government in the States in recent weeks. This has been termed the big push for midwives .
This movement seems to have been inspired by a movie produced and directed by Ricky Lake and Abby Epstein called The business of being born. This movie seems to have caused quite a stir in the States and midwives and women have been building on this and working hard to make sure that the midwifery option of care is at last available to women.



I received an email today from Steff Hedenkamp of a press release with the following text
(Jefferson City, Mo.) – Midwives advocates across Missouri and the nation today celebrated the passage of Senator John Loudon’s (R, Chesterfield) midwifery licensure bill, SB 1021, from the Missouri Senate Committee on Pensions, General Laws and Veteran’s Affairs. The long-anticipated legislation would decriminalize the practice of midwifery in Missouri and establish a board to license and regulate Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs).

So congratulations to all who have worked so hard to achieve this, it is quite momentous.

I do know that not everyone is 100% behind these changes. Sage Femme, a well known American midwifery blogger has reservations about midwives being required to be licensed and believes there should be a voluntary option to this. I am unsure how this would work but I am not totally familiar with the American situation and therefore not at all qualified to comment on this.

Challenges of technology

Image from Liam Higgins of flickr

I am feeling very challenged by technology :(
I have what should be a 'super duper' laptop. An HP Pavilion dv6000. Lots of RAM lots of Memory wireless internet etc. I have had it for one year now. It crashed on me completely a few weeks after I had bought it and I lost all my data. After it was reset it worked OK for a while but is always flicking on and off the net and occasional crashes but restarts itself. I took it back to the shop several times but it usually behaves itself while it is there so they say there is nothing they can see that is wrong with it. Finally got sick of it and took it to the computer repair people to check it out and tell me if it is OK. This comes at a cost of $50 for each half hour spent, unless it is a hardware problem which is under warranty.

So they checked it out and thought it might be because I had partially removed Norton anti virus (I use Avast which is good and is free). He completed the removal of this and charged me $164.00. OK, so I bring it home and it is worse than ever, keeps having error messages and crashes to blue screen. I phone the computer repair people who tell me the laptop now needs to have everything deleted from it, back to original factory settings, this will cost between $100-200 for them to do. I took the machine back to Dick Smith where I bought it and they put it back to factory settings without charging me (just as well I just might have hit someone). Back home again, now I have to set everything back up again, all my software, plugins etc, this has taken me virtually all morning this morning.

And what happens now??? Well!!! the computer will not maintain a wireless connection. I have to have it plugged into a cable to be on the internet. Dear reader if you have read this far you will perhaps understand my frustration!! I have called the repair man back and he says "AH!! it is probably a faulty wireless card". He does not have equipment to check this, so this check was not done I suppose in his original assessment. This apparently can be fixed under warranty.

I have no faith in this machine. I want it to be replaced and get another one. It cost me whole lot of money which I cannot really afford. But this is not going to happen. So I am going to tell everyone, do not buy an HP pavilion dv6000.

We have another laptop at home. It did not come with wireless but I bought a pcmc card for it. It is not nearly so powerful or 'super duper' but it seems to work OK. It does lose wireless connection occasionally but not nearly as much as this machine. It cost about 1/3 of the price of this machine and is the one my husband uses.

My advice to anyone reading this would be, do not buy a 'super duper' high powered machine thinking it will be, faster, better, more powerful. Go for the cheap and cheerful. It will probably work just as well and you will not be so frustrated having spent a heap of money on a pile of junk that no one will help you with.