This was a joint Real Life (in London) and Second Life symposium organised by the Eduserve Foundation to examine the use of SL as a teaching and learning tool.
Speakers at the event included Stephen Downes, Gilly Salmon, Hamish McLeod, Jim Purbrick, Joanna Scott and Roo Reynolds. All presentations from the live venue were steamed into 3 virtual venues in SL. To get an idea of how it looked in SL have a look at this collage of photos posted by Anyaka.
The SL event was plague by a slightly late start (when some people were getting restless and acting like a bunch of ungrateful students) and an upside down and inverted main screen until after lunch (see above). This made it interesting as you had to stand on your head and cross your eyes in order to see the speaker and the presentation.
What they said
Jim Purbrick (Linden Labs)
Jim gave the opening keynote , emphasising the wide range of areas that SL has been by: artists, performers, businesses, researchers, charities, casinos (he wasn’t keen on those), as well as an ever increasing number of educational institutions. He talked about the skills an individual can learn within SL, including building, scripting, audio, animation, marketing, economics and event planning.
Roo Reynolds IBM
Roo works for a team which facilitates the use of Virtual Worlds within IBM. He emphasised that the Web is now a social space. It is an attitude not a technology
IBM are experimenting with SL for social meetings and there are about 3000 employees now meeting up in varying places. It allows employees from around the world to meet up as an alternative to conference calls and email. Talked about a sense of community and now have between 30-40 islands - an IBM continent!
Have been experimenting with shops of the future. They sell items already present in SL rather than creating their own. 3D shopping is the future!
They have 3 auditoria each holding 200 people. They use them for lectures and for their IBM alumni to meet up.
Hamish MacLeod (Edinburgh University)
Hamish described “Holyrood Park“, a virtual campus for Edinburgh. He showed how scripting a skydiving experience in SL was an excellent way to learn programming.
Joanna Scott (Nature)
Joanna described some of the projects being undertaken in Nature’s Second Nature sim. These included the M4 molecule maker which builds in-world models of chemical structures.
Gilly Salmon (Leicester University)
Gilly described the SEAL project, Second Environment Advanced Learning, which aims to explore alternative ways of teaching and learning within the SL environment.
Stephen Downes (National Research Council Canada)
Presentation
Stephen, calling himself “technosceptic”, challenged the audience by asking why we allow virtual events to resemble real life, when we should be using VR to do things differently. He asked why so much attention was being paid to this stuff, where are the crowds, where is wikipedia in SL, where is OpenSource? Imagine if we had done the Internet that way, i.e. one company hosting all the Net. It taps into conservatism , helps people feel comfortable with the technology so they don’t have to do anything different. He said that VR should be exactly what SL isn’t - “distributed hardware and ownership, open source, not proprietary, non-commercial, diverse and democratic”. He was the only speaker to question the value of virtual environments such as SL, stating that it really hadn’t moved on from a MUD. This is so not Web 2.0 - Web 2.0 changes and empowers! Compare with MySpasce where they can really put their own content online and don’t need to simulate it. I can YouTube it or MySpace it.
SL should be distributed so we all own it, the hardware and the software. It should be shared so we can make it better, should be non-commercial at least for education, or a non-commercial alternative. Governance should be diverse and democratic.
I thought this was a good event. It allowed me to take part in an international conference from the comfort of my own study. I learned a lot, not only from the speakers, but also from the other delegates (both the real and virtual). My own knowledge of SL was extended - I now now how to get streamed video. I also got a free virtual tee shirt which fitted perfectly - how often can you say that of a tee shirt from a real conference!
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