Good afternoon (or morning or evening ) and welcome to the open sessions of the first Vlearn event.

I am Margaret Corbit (aka queenbee) and I am your host here from the Cornell Theory Center.

We have about 25 people here at Cornell and we expect to be joined by another 25 or so participants from around the planet at any given time. In fact, we met this morning with folks from the TWLT15 conference going on right now at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

I want to start by acknowledging the team that made this workshop possible. Bonnie DeVarco at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Bruce Damer, who I will introduce in a moment, top the list as coplanners and coworkers.

The folks at Active Worlds come next with their generous support of time, servers, expertise, moral support, etc. Special thanks to Vice President for education, Lucrezia Borgia who is coordinating our inworld training sessions and providing technical support. .

Derek Rayburn of Seeray.com and Highertech.com is making our RealAudio broadcast possible. Thanks to the folks who built the worlds we will be using and visiting. Especially the students who have worked with me over the past year to crack the shell of this exciting environment.

Special thanks to Carol Chistofferson, Susan Martin, Susan Mehringer, Linda Callahan, and the rest of the staff at CTC for a wide range of support ranging from tech help to moral support and guidance.

Ok.

I want to introduce Bruce Damer to those of you who have not yet had the pleasure. Bruce is the head and founder of the Contact Consortium, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of virtual worlds on the Internet for building community and supporting education.

The Vlearn initiative is one of the special interest projects of CCON.

Bruce grew up in Canada and has traveled the world on behalf of technology. You can visit his many homepages (start at www.digitalspace.com) to review his credentials :>) These days, he has taken on the role of the Pied Piper of Virtual Worlds and A-life.

The people here at Cornell have spent their morning introducing themselves to the Active Worlds environment and some of its users. Now Bruce is going to take us a step further, playing the role of the requisite visionary.

He is going to share with us some of his plans for driving the technology and introduce us to A-life.

I now turn you over to the Digigardener, Bruce Damer.

Please note: at the end of each session we will stop and restart some of the archiving systems. There will be a bit of a delay when this happens. We hope it won't take any longer than it does to change microphones and switch laptops, etc. at a more conventional workshop.