Here are Professor Robert Bloomfield’s prepared remarks for his closing opinion piece for this week’s show:

As I mentioned before today’s interview with Stanford Professor Byron Reeves, today’s episode of Metanomics is dedicated to the Memory of Leslie Jarmon, who was instrumental in engineering the presence of the entire University of Texas system—all 15 campuses—into Second Life.

Leslie passed away just last week.

Every death is a personal tragedy for friends and family. But I knew Leslie only by her accomplishments, and her energy and enthusiasm in promoting the use of virtual worlds in the many facets of her university’s mission. Rather than trying to recount Leslie’s successes, I will simply direct you to the Metanomics archive from October 21st of this year, and let Leslie speak for herself.

But I do want to make one point, inspired by something I learned from my wife when she was studying geology. We tend to think of erosion as a slow, gradual process—that the grand canyon was carved by every the constant drips and trickles of the Colorado river. The Chinese classic text Tao Te Ching seems to reinforce that misconception, when it says:

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

It’s easy to read this passage as saying that water dissolves the hard and inflexible WHEN it is soft and yielding. In fact, geologists tell us the truth is rather different: the majority of erosion occurs during rare events, like raging floods, when water is anything but soft and yielding!

In this sense, innovation is much like erosion. Countless people try out new ideas every day, but it isn’t the constant drip and trickle that accomplishes something like bringing one of the world’s largest university systems into Second Life. No, that is accomplished by the raging flood of a Leslie Jarmon, who takes matters into her own hands, and through her energy, determination and good nature, carves a gully though which the rest of us can follow her.

So as we who knew Leslie only professionally remember and celebrate her, let’s remember this: It is within us to accomplish what she did. But we need to be the raging flood, not the trickle.

Join us next week when we take a look at lessons learned from the Worlds AIDS Day events that took place in Second Life on Monday. And remember, you can download about 90 episodes of Metanomics from itunes.