Transcript: METANOMICS at ISTE 07/22/08

KEVIN JARRETT: Welcome, everyone, to ISTE Island. My name is KJ Hax. I am the speaker series chair here at ISTE in Second Life. I’ve been coordinating talks here in Second Life for, I don’t know, six, seven, eight months now, and we’re just thrilled to be able to have a weekly series of visitors from all over the Metaverse to come join us and tell us about their work in Second Life. And we’re especially pleased today to have with us Beyers Sellers, who in real life is Robert Bloomfield, at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and Fleep now here’s a name I can’t pronounce Tuque? How do you say that last name, please?

CHRIS COLLINS: That’s right. It’s Fleep Tuque. Yeah.

KEVIN JARRETT: Fleep Tuque, Chris Collins in Real Life, and from I want to say the University of Cincinnati. Is that right, Fleep?

CHRIS COLLINS: Yes, that’s correct.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. From the University of Cincinnati. I want to first, before we go any further, acknowledge Corinne Fleury, Christy Thomas in Real Life. Corinne is a very active member of ISTE in Second Life and runs our socials on Thursday nights, which are wonderful, if you haven’t been to those at 6:00 P.M., over by campfire ring usually. Christy reached out to Metanomics and Beyers and got the conversation started that led to him coming tonight. So we’re thrilled to be working with this group that has been doing such great work in Real Life promoting all forms of Virtual Worlds. For those of you that are not familiar with Metanomics, that URL is metanomics.net. Let me just throw that in, for those of you that have not seen that.

Tonight’s presentation is going to be a little bit different. I’m going to be asking some questions of our two panelists, on and about the issues involving Virtual Worlds in education, not necessarily Second Life. We would also like to get some questions from the audience, so if you wanted to, I guess, IM them to me, that would be ideal. I will try my best not to let my head explode and get the questions fielded to our speakers from me as well as from folks in the audience. Those of you who are not members of ISTE in Second Life, I would encourage you to join. We are the largest, I believe the largest, is that true, the largest education only organization in Second Life. New Media Consortium has more members, but they do more than just K 20 education. We have, what have we, over 3,100 members now in Second Life? I haven’t even checked. And, by joining our group in Second Life, you get invitations to all our events such as these, the socials and everything else that goes on. And, of course, it’s totally free. So please do consider joining ISTE in Second Life. We’d love to have you, and we’re very excited to be working on broadening the connections we’ve made in Second Life with folks outside of the education community.

For those that don’t know, Chris/Fleep is a commentator for Metanomics. Is that correct, Chris?

CHRIS COLLINS: Yes, the education correspondent, which is a great gig.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. So we asked Fleep to join us because she’s obviously got a wealth of information in her own right, specifically in the area of higher ed, which is somewhere that we are working hard to address. We want to get more content geared for our higher ed members, and so I was hoping that Fleep would be able to add some perspective there as well.

At this point, I do want to make one housekeeping announcement. You all are doing a fantastic job keeping your mikes muted, and thank you very much to RavenPhoenix Zenovka for coordinating the volunteer help, to keep everybody seated and under control. If someone has an open mike and they’re unable to mute it, we’ll apologize in advance for having to eject you. We’ll do it gently, we promise, but we want to make sure that the presentation is not interrupted and give you a chance to resolve your issue, at which point you can rejoin us.

So without further ado, I’d just like to give my speakers a chance to introduce themselves, and then we can get started. So, Fleep, why don’t you go first?

CHRIS COLLINS: Thank you. In Real Life, as he said, my name is Chris Collins, and I work in instructional and research computing at the University of Cincinnati, where I run our campus wide podcasting and Second Life projects. But I also coordinate the Second Life resources for the Ohio Learning Network, which is a consortium of 80 colleges and universities in Ohio. So I get to work with quite a few different institutions and see how different colleges and universities are using Second Life. And then I’m also this year co chairing the Second Life Education Community Conference, which I hope you will all attend because ISTE is cosponsoring that, the in world portion. So thank you.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. Go ahead, Beyers. Tell us about yourself and what you’ve started here in Metanomics.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi. I’m Rob Bloomfield in Real Life, a mild mannered accounting professor, but in Second Life somehow I ended up as the host of an interview show called Metanomics, which started back in September. And basically what I’ve been doing in world is interviewing executives, entrepreneurs, Virtual World developers, policymakers and a bunch of academics also, who are studying what’s going on in not just Second Life but in Virtual Worlds in general. This has been for me I mean let me just say I guess I don’t actually count as well, maybe I’m K 20, I guess that’s what you called it

KEVIN JARRETT: Yes, you are.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: because I actually teach we don’t have an undergraduate program here at the Johnson School, so it’s MBA students and, for me, mostly executives and Ph.D. students. So I actually got into Second Life originally for research, which maybe we’ll talk about a little later, but I know the focus of the day is teaching. So anyway I’m sure we’ll talk more about Metanomics as the hour goes by.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. Yes. And for those who are not familiar, I’m going to paste into the text chat their archives, which are just wonderful. They’re available in audio, text and also video coverage. Do you have all of your events filmed by SLCN? Is that how that works?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. We’ve had, I guess, 41 events since September, and every one of them is in our archives.

KEVIN JARRETT: That’s wonderful.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Let me just point out it’s not just the video, but it’s also we have transcripts there for people who don’t have the time for the video, and we also have the text chat there, which often is fascinating.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. So basically, from my understanding the history right, this started off very innocently with just a group of graduate students, correct? With an idea of coming into Second Life to explore and--tell us about how you got started.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, as I said, I got in here originally for research so my regular research focuses on financial market regulation, accounting regulation, and, of course, anyone who reads the business section in the newspapers, this is very hot stuff these days. That’s really the bread and butter of my job.

I came in to Second Life to study the financial markets in here. There are a bunch of them. There were a bunch of them last year, and there were scandals, and, of course, no regulation. So what I wanted to do was basically make it easier for myself to learn what was going on here. And the way I did that is I said, “Hey, I’ll bring in some students, and they can help me. We can study these businesses. Maybe write a couple case studies. Look at how the markets are functioning and so on.” And, of course, the best way to get students to know what’s going on is to have a bunch of guest speakers come in and talk about their stock exchange or their business or whatever, and so I started arranging a series of talks with guest speakers for my handful of students.

And what happened is the people that I knew who were the Second Life residents, who were here for whatever reason, they said, “Oh, can we come? Can we come? Can we see this?” And then I linked up with SLCN, and they said, “Well, we can film this and broadcast it to lots of people.” And so last, I guess it was, September 17th, I did my first show, which was basically me just doing kind of a standard grad school like presentation on what Metanomics is. And then I realized people were much more interested in the guest speakers, so it’s been guests ever since then.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. And, Chris, how did you get started in Second Life? Three years ago.

CHRIS COLLINS: Oh, I actually got a Beta invite. Yeah, well, actually, no, it was in 2003. I was playing World of Warcraft with a bunch of people I’ve been BBS ing with for years. And one of them sent me an invite to the Second Life Beta, and that avatar is no longer in existence because I foolishly passed up the lifetime member opportunity. I had a slow machine then. But I came back a few years ago, and I had that epiphany moment that this could be useful for distance learning, which is what I was supporting at UC at the time. And I found out about Metanomics, again, through another friend, the power of networks. And after seeing the first show, I was hooked.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. There was a great question that pinc asked a second ago about understanding how Second Life has to do with markets, and that’s huge. We could talk for an hour about that alone. But I want to ask one question of Robert, but before I do that, just a little bit about my background. I got into Second Life as an educator on a grant. I received $10,000 from Walden University to take a sabbatical of sorts. I teach online part time for them at their grad school of education. My day job is a K 4 technology teacher in elementary school in New Jersey. So what I did was spend six months or so immersed in Second Life 20 to 30 hours a week, and I got hooked up with ISTE. I met a lot of great people, so I was actually paid to experience Second Life, which is something not a lot of people get to say, which is quite delightful.

But before we get to comments about markets, we’ve been talking in preparation for today’s presentation and discussion about Beyer’s philosophy as far as Virtual Worlds, and the three words that come to mind that I’d like to ask him to speak to are: immersionist, augmentationist, and experimentalist. If you could tell us about those words, where they came from and what you mean by them, that would be terrific.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Sure. I’d be glad to talk about that. First, a caveat, which is that I did not come up with the terms immersionist and augmentationist, I think. Fleep was in Second Life when those terms started becoming a big deal. I sort of converted their meaning a little bit, to have research connotations for me because I’m thinking of the types of research people, who are interested in business and economics and policy, might be doing in Virtual Worlds.

Well, first, let me just say Metanomics I define as the study of business and policy in Virtual Worlds. And the first class of that type of research is immersionist, which is when you take the perspective of the residents who are pursuing their own economic interests. And so you can just look around this Sim and see that people built everything that we’re sitting on. People made the avatars, the skins, the hair, the clothing. They’re running businesses. They’re entrepreneurs. They need capital, and they need to do marketing. You don’t really need to think about the outside world that much to study the economy within a Virtual World, whether it’s Second Life or World of Warcraft or something like that.

Augmentationist research is where you take much more of an outside perspective, and you try to look at how Real World enterprises are using Virtual Worlds to pursue their strategic goals, whatever they are, and also thinking about how a Real World policymaker responds to that. So just to pick a couple examples very quickly, if you go through the Metanomics archives, I’m constantly interviewing--probably like every third show is a company like IBM or Cisco or a federal agency or a bunch of educators. You’re trying to do your Real World jobs. You’re trying to teach people. You network with other educators, and so this is really something that augments what you [AUDIO GLITCH].

And then the other side of this is--well, let’s just stick with education for a minute. I mean suppose you start teaching courses here in Second Life, and there are some groups like Rockliffe University that are trying to create their own freestanding institutions. How are they going to be accredited? So now we have Real World policymakers who are saying, “Wow, look at the stuff that’s going on in Virtual Worlds. We’d better think about how we’re going to deal with that.” The IRS certainly is thinking about that, with respect to everyone who’s making money in Virtual Worlds, whether it’s in dollars or Lindens.

And then finally “experimentalist.” That’s the third term, and I guess this one is not something that was talked about a lot in Virtual Worlds before. But experimentalist research in Metanomics is basically viewing the Virtual World as a laboratory in which we can conduct research. And so if you look at work that, say, Ted Castronova has done, and a number of others who are starting to do this, you can just say, “Let’s conduct experiments inside Virtual Worlds.” You know, if someone gives me enough money, and I am trying pretty hard to make this happen, I’m actually going to be able to create Virtual Worlds that are designed specifically for research so that you can just imagine having two worlds that are identical except for one feature, and you look at how behavior differs across them. So it’s an extremely powerful tool. And let me just mention, there are guys from the Federal Reserve Bank of the U.S., who are constantly popping in to Second Life, and they are very interested in this type of opportunity.

KEVIN JARRETT: Right. So you witnessed, obviously, the Wild West, if you well, early days of Second Life, where there was the gambling and certainly the unregulated banking, which still exists. Are there still banks operating in Second Life, or have they all been pretty much eradicated?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: In January, Linden Lab passed a policy that said if you were going to engage in a certain class of banking services, you needed to provide evidence that you had Real World regulatory oversight. What that did is, it pretty promptly wiped out almost a hundred tiny banks of people who, frankly, were just role playing. But we’re still a dozen banks or so that were very serious about this and trying to make money, and so what happened with them is, they identified ways that they could modify their operations and get around what were actually fairly narrow regulations. And this is one of the things that the Fed has been studying, and they actually wrote a report on this.

KEVIN JARRETT: Chris, I’d like to ask you a question. And your work in Virtual Worlds, obviously, the press has had a field day with the lack of regulation and, of course, all the let’s just say non educational content that’s in Second Life. How has that affected your exploration of Virtual Worlds from a higher ed perspective?

CHRIS COLLINS: Well, I think that certainly there’s been quite a bit of negativity in the press. There was a good conversation on the SLED archives recently about how, even when an article seems to have a very positive slant about how the Virtual World technology is being used, they always mention the sex and gambling and the sort of seamy side. But, frankly, I’ve found it’s changing probably in the last six months or so, but a year ago, for the most part, when I gave a presentation or talked about Second Life for Virtual Worlds, I wasn’t really dealing with the negativity because most people, frankly, had never heard of it, and that’s still largely true. For the most part, the audiences that you’re speaking with, they don’t really know anything about Virtual Worlds so they don’t have a negative connotation about the gambling or inappropriate activities, those sorts of things.

The biggest obstacle really is that it looks like a video game, and they can’t take that seriously. So I figure that’s changing somewhat. In the last few months, it seems that Second Life has really reached that [AUDIO GLITCH] share, market share. And people have at least heard of it and maybe know something about the negativity, but I’m hopeful that the press that covers these sorts of things will eventually--you know, sex sells, and putting something like that in the story maybe helps get it past their editors. I don’t know. But I think, as the positive uses continue, that it will become less of an issue.

KEVIN JARRETT: Well, it’s funny that you mention that because I just was at a conference with educators, and we were discussing Second Life. This was with K 12 educators in New Jersey. And what I tell the folks that I deal with is, it really is no different than the internet. When I’m working with students on the internet, in my school, I am present. It is a directed activity. They’re using resources that I have identified, and they’re in a walled garden. They’re behind filters and firewalls, and, by and large, I don’t have any problems.

Now when little Johnny or Sally goes home, and they go off to their PC in their room, I’m not there. There is no lesson. There is no filter. And, in a matter of seconds, they can obviously be anywhere they wish to be on the internet. It’s very much the same in Second Life when people say, “Well, how can this be a serious environment for learning?” I said, “Well, first thing you just need to do is spend some time with Peggy Sheehy at Ramapo Islands and see what her district is doing with their six Sims. But when a student can be in a legitimate Second Life classroom experience, as they are doing in Suffern, and then go home and log into an ALT account on the main grid, posing as a 26 year old adult and availing themselves of some of the seedy parts of Second Life, it really is no different than the internet. So my response to the parents is, your responsibility is to be involved with what this child is doing involving technology, whether it’s Second Life or traditional World Wide Web.

CHRIS COLLINS: And I think it probably differs too, the experience for someone working with middle school and high school students versus those of us who are in higher education. On the adult grid, there’s much more seedy content to be found, but, frankly, I think the experience for students has been they’re mildly entertained, they’re amused by some of the goofy stuff that they find in world. But when we’re in class and on our island and doing a session, it’s not an issue at all. So I think though that the K 12 environment, kids coming onto the main grid after class, that sort of thing is something that I personally haven’t dealt with, and I’m sure that would be a difficult issue to address for parents.

KEVIN JARRETT: Beyers, I have a question for you. One of the sessions I enjoyed listening to today in preparation for tonight’s talk was about Serious Games and the interview you had there talking about the gentleman’s name escapes me at the moment some of the things that have been developed in Virtual Worlds, not necessarily Second Life, for example, training people how to treat trauma injuries in the battlefield, first responders and also teaching folks how to maintain and run an oil rig using a virtual environment. What are some of the more interesting examples of educational applications you’ve come across?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So first of all, that was David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute that’s based in Coventry University in the UK.

Let me again just talk about my specific area which is business and more specifically financial markets. There actually is a very rich tradition of using games to teach economics, finance and related topics because you can actually have people trade in a financial market. You set up securities, and you have people buy and sell and lose money, and it really brings it home. And it works very well. Here I’m not talking about Virtual Worlds at all. This is a long tradition in the economics, finance and markets fields. One reason it’s a long tradition is that we have good theory to describe these games. So economists use game theory that they’ve invented to try to figure out what’s going to happen and so on. Well, let me just say I am here in Second Life because the Serious Games I have been running in my laboratory for the last 15 or so years for my research, I just can’t get enough complexity. I can’t get enough people interacting in an economic situation in a laboratory that only has 20 computers. So I’m here, in part, because I’m thinking I can reach hundreds or maybe even thousands of people to interact in Serious Games in serious economic sites. So I guess that’s a little of what I am about, that I am thinking about.

Let me just mention in that talk on Serious Games oh no, actually, this was another group, this was another Metanomics session with Robert Gehorsam who’s president of Forterra. Forterra uses OLIVE, which is also the Virtual World platform that the Serious Games Institute has chosen. And they have this fascinating setup where they’re working with a group of academics in the University of Maryland, to study how to manage traffic flow on I 95 corridor that goes all the way up from Florida to Maine. And so they actually will get out there with hundreds of people and a lot of simulated cars in traffic, and they will create an accident and then have the responders go there and try to figure out how quickly they can get traffic back up again. So yeah, that’s Forterra which uses the OLIVE platform. Forterra and OLIVE are closely related. Anyway, I hope that isn’t too long an answer to that question.

KEVIN JARRETT: No, absolutely not. Fleep, do you have anything else that you’ve come across in your travels that you think is an exemplary use of Virtual Worlds for educational purposes?

CHRIS COLLINS: Well, I think I’ve seen so many wonderful things. There are a couple of different sort of categories of uses that I think are really phenomenal. Certainly the simulations as Beyers was discussing, not just in financial markets and traffic things, but anything that’s using Second Life to sort of role play different activities. I know that the Ivy Tech in Indiana has been doing, for example, having their students come in and do a lab role play simulation in Second Life before they go into the actual lab in Real Life and do the same experiment. I think this is a chemistry course. And, for example, they’ve discovered that they’re saving on supplies because students make fewer mistakes, and so it’s saving their budget on chemical supplies. That’s a good innovative piece of this platform.

Anything too that really draws in distance learning students. We see lots of DL programs starting to use Second Life to hold office hours and meetings and class times. I think the research, when it comes, will bear out that students feel more connected, not just to the course and to their cohort, but also to the institution. I’m hoping that we’re going to see greater retention in Distance Learning programs through using Virtual World technology, like this, where you get that sense of co presence. So those are some really interesting things.

I’ve also seen some great things like oh, I forgot the fellow’s name. I blogged about it on SLED. He’s doing some really fantastic stuff with molecules, teaching chemistry where you say the molecule name, and the atom builds in front of you, and then you can see how molecules dock together. So things that sort of help students visualize complex processes in ways that just doesn’t work as well on a flat 2D model. I think those are some really good uses of this technology, and I’m sure we’ll discover more as we all sort of become more familiar with it and as our students become more familiar with it. I think we’re often limited with what we can do when we have a class of newbies. I think, as this kind of technology becomes more prevalent and students are more experienced with it, we’ll probably see more useful things. I’ll find the link for that molecule builder.

KEVIN JARRETT: Okay. Thanks, Chris. Beyers, did you say Forterra was the name of that environment that the Serious Games folks are using?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. Forterra is a company that makes closed Worlds sort of to spec. So if you want a specific type of world created with game content and a lot of simulation content. So for example, when they work with emergency technicians. They do a lot with the State Department. Rumor is that they have top secret Worlds with soldiers battling through the streets of a simulated Iraq, and, if they got shot in the arm, actually a medical simulation kicks in, and a timer goes off. And here’s how long you have to get that guy out of there and so on and so forth. So Forterra is a company that uses the OLIVE Virtual World platform, integrates it with other software to make a World to your specs. But it’s not like Second Life. You can’t just log in, no matter who you are. You have to be [CROSSTALK]

KEVIN JARRETT: And that’s sort of the point I wanted to get to. As K 20 educators, we’re constantly faced with people saying, “Why do I need to learn Second Life? What’s the advantage of getting into it?” We can tell them about the affordances and the rest of it, but when I heard someone explain it the other day I thought was really appropriate is that it’s really the fastest, most widely available prototyping environment that’s out there for doing the kinds of things that we can do on a global scale very easily. Certainly on the main grid and, to a lesser extent, on the team grid. But I was just wondering if you had any thoughts for the educators in the audience, are there technologies you mentioned OLIVE, and there’s certainly some others that have come up in your past shows that we need to keep an eye on. For example, Google Lively or any others that are on the horizon that you think educators should watch out for.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: There are a lot of Worlds coming out, and it’s going to be very interesting to see whether they can deliver what they promise. A couple that I would keep an eye on are one is Multiverse. The two things that I think are of a lot of interested to educators are one, their plan is that you could use their platform pretty quickly to pull together a truly free World. So we’re not talking about something like “life is not quite 3D.” So that’s one. And the other feature that’s interesting about that is that they’re saying they’re going to be able to get huge numbers of people in a single area. Corey Bridges is the founder and CEO of Multiverse, and I’ve been talking with them, about when they’re ready, we’re going to do a Metanomics show in Multiverse and basically have one place where everyone who wants to see the show can be. If we have a thousand people, five thousand people, they can all be in one huge theater. So that has obvious implications for educators.

One of the many other Worlds worth keeping an eye on is Metaplace. This is Raph Koster’s vision, and this is more of a 2 1/2D World, but it’s going to be very, very web integrated so that basically everything that you look at in the World is actually a URL, so it’s not an object. It’s a link to something that is somewhere, and so I think that’s going to be a very interesting model and good for quick and easy what do you call it content development.

Let me just mention, I see people mentioning OpenSim. I guess I expect to learn a lot more about OpenSim in a couple of weeks. August 4th we’re going to have Zero Linden, of the Architectural Working Group, and Zha Ewry of IBM, who’s working on OpenSim. They still have a long way to go before they have something functional, but what it is going to mean for me, and there are probably people who know a lot more about this than I do, but, for me, when I think of education and OpenSim, the most important feature here is that OpenSim means you have your own server, with your own data on it. And, that means that you have the privacy that actually Cornell University would require under New York state law in order to, for example, have a discussion about grades with the student. My understanding is that right now for me to discuss grades with a student in Second Life would be against New York state law because it’s not sufficiently secure. But OpenSim would be.

CHRIS COLLINS: I’d like to jump in there and mention one other--

KEVIN JARRETT: Yeah. Go ahead.

CHRIS COLLINS: I certainly agree with all of those. I think, first about OpenSim, I think that sort of opens up the debate about educational grids that are separate from a main grid or a large World, and there’s two sides or maybe many sides of that debate. I personally feel like one of the benefits of Second Life and the reason why I think Second Life is such a fantastic World for education for adults, the college crowd in particular, is that you have the full culture of Second Life, all of the wild variety of activities here that make it an interesting place not just to teach in but also to study. And I think OpenSim, unless there is that portability between Worlds, it’s sort of like the teen grid; it closes you off in your own little world, which, for discussing grades, is a great thing. But for sort of becoming part of a global community, which I think part of Second Life does, that isn’t an opportunity.

And another Virtual World platform that I think is worth mentioning, and it’s still in a very early stage is Sun’s Wonderland. They recently held an opening, and they actually have an educator only grid that I believe New Media Consortium and University of Oregon and a few other schools are already participating in, and I believe that’s an Open Source project. So that may be something if schools are interested in developing their own Virtual Worlds, with the resources to do that, I think Sun’s Wonderland might be like I said, I think they’re still in an early Alpha phase, but I think that’s something to keep an eye out for.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. We have a couple of questions from the audience that I’d like to flip. One is from my friend Irah, who comes to us from the Azores. It’s very early in the morning there, if I get my time zones correctly. She’s interested in knowing about the possibility I’m going to paraphrase her question. One of the ideas that she’s presenting to a Portuguese institute is for MBA students to come to Second Life and use it as a laboratory to test business ideas. I guess the business idea definition would be worth fleshing out. What is your opinion about using Second Life as a business simulator?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Is that for me?

KEVIN JARRETT: Yeah. Either of you, but sure, go ahead.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. I actually talked with a number of people about what we were calling the MBA Second Life Entrepreneurship Challenge. And the idea is fairly straightforward. You take MBA students from a variety of different MBA programs, and they form teams, and you give them some seed money, and you tell them to create a business. They have to come up with a business plan, and they have to show proof of concept and maybe make money or maybe would be an issue that you’d have other people the contest would be won by having other people value the business and see how much it’s worth at the end of the year. I think ultimately that is feasible. I didn’t do that because, as everyone here probably knows, no matter how long you’ve been in Second Life, it is not the easiest interface. It is not the most consistent platform. And to get people in here and make it actually work and have it be successful for MBA students who have extremely high standards for what they expect out of a course, I didn’t think we could pull that off at the level of quality and perfection that would be needed. Maybe next year.

KEVIN JARRETT: Chris. Did you want to say something, Chris? Because I have a follow up to that.

CHRIS COLLINS: Well, I think that’s a very good point, and I don’t know that an MBA contest like that would be feasible because you’re working in such a compressed time. But we have seen business classes come in and do that on a much smaller scale. Students, they give them a T shirt template for a marketing course, setting up a store with one sort of marketing design and another store with a different marketing design and comparing which sells better. So I think some smaller, maybe prefabbed or very scaffolded experiments along those lines are feasible in a Virtual World and are good uses of the platform because you get the real time feedback that a class, with all the theory and reading in the world can’t give you. You know, seeing the customers comes in and how they walk through the store, the virtual store, I think, is a valuable exercise.

KEVIN JARRETT: Yeah. I would just like to expand on that and say we hear a lot in the K 12 world about 21st Century skills, and it seems to me that Second Life is an ideal environment where those skills offer collaboration and various forms of literacy, teamwork, certainly technology--would all be very naturally leveraged and expressed. With the current push towards 21st Century skills in K 12 education, I would think that has to auger well for the use of Virtual Worlds. What do you guys think about that?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Fleep?

CHRIS COLLINS: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I guess I should say maybe it’s not obvious. I say often, and I hope that I’m not the only one that thinks this, that Second Life and Virtual Worlds in general--I heard a talk by Richard Bartle at the Virtual Policy 2008 in London today that was streamed into Second Life, where he was talking about how role playing in Virtual Worlds gives us the opportunity to sort of be our better selves, and I think that the barriers to sort of an intimacy are lower here so you can walk up to a stranger with a little less trepidation and start working on something together. And that really helps expand, I think, your Real World skills in teamwork, in collaborative projects, all of those sorts of things I think that there’s direct transfer. And, again, I’m hoping that research will bear that out so we can take hard data to our administrators and say, See. Look, this is not all virtual. There is transferability in the skills that we learn here.”

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Ditto.

KEVIN JARRETT: All right. I have a question here actually from Shamblesguru, who is a friend of mine. I think we sort of talked a little bit about Lively at the beginning. He basically wonders whether or not Lively is a lead up to a virtual 3D environment that is web based for PCs. What are your thoughts on Lively, and where do you see that going?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I don’t mind starting this one. Fleep, you can jump in. I guess I have a couple thoughts. One is that right now I don’t think Lively has the tools to compete with Second Life for the education market, as Fleep just laid it out, because there’s just so much more you can do here. On the other hand, it has one thing that Second Life doesn’t have, and that is, it’s a very light client. It’s just your web browser. Everyone can use it. It doesn’t require much bandwidth. And so I think that gives them a tremendous leg up because, especially when I talk with people who and actually Fleep and I were talking a little about this last month that there are some projects in the state of Ohio that are working with underprivileged youth, and you have to make sure that they have access to good computers. And poor schools don’t necessarily have the computers and the resources to handle Second Life.

Margaret Corbet, who’s an academic here at Cornell, is a big fan of Active Worlds, which is a much lighter client, much easier for most computers, and so it’s good for underprivileged schools. Again, it can’t do quite as much as Second Life. It has its other problems.

I think that the hope is here that Lively is going to I think we’re going to see two things. One is that Worlds like Lively and Metaplace are going to upgrade more and more so that they can do more and provide more for educators. At the same time, we are seeing not just Linden Lab itself but Linden Lab users bringing Second Life down to a level where a lot more people with low end computers can run it. I’d like to mention Dusan Writer, who is a Canadian, who’s not an educator at all; he’s a Real Life marketing guy. But he’s just run a contest where people are coming up with viewers. He has, I think, four or five finalists, and he’s going to give them I can’t remember thousands of dollars to win this contest on making a viewer. And some of them are quite light and easy to use. And so I think that’s going to be potentially really valuable for educators maybe more than anyone else.

KEVIN JARRETT: All right. Super. I have a question actually. It’s an outgrowth of a previous you want to jump in, Chris?

CHRIS COLLINS: Yeah, can I jump in and just say quickly, I think, two quick thoughts about Lively. First, I think it helps raise the profile of 3D on the internet in a way that’s very positive. I certainly agree with Beyers’ take that it isn’t all that in terms of how educators might want to use a Virtual World platform. But the other thing too is, it’s been described as a Virtual World, and I think I would have to disagree with that definition. I know this is a huge debate in the academic community about what is a Virtual World, but I think a 3D chat room does not really compare to the complexity of the kind of environment that we see in Second Life. There’s no economy.

KEVIN JARRETT: Exactly.

CHRIS COLLINS: There’s no real contiguous virtual land space. So I think that, as we see the technology of things like Second Life become more accessible and easier to run and those sorts of things, we’re going to have a transitionary period where there’s going to be lots of these 2.5D and very lightweight 3D chat rooms. The end effect, I think, is that it at least raises the profile of 3D internet broadly across the board. More people will be paying attention, and I think that’s a good thing, both for Second Life and for educators who are interested in this field.

KEVIN JARRETT: Yeah, I know that my experience with Google and how they do business and what I’ve observed over the years is that right now Lively is a classic model how they approach something. What I’m envisioning is what’s going to happen when sometime from now Lively is merged with Google Earth and you have sketch up quality building tools all merged into a single application. Then I think you’re talking about something that really has the potential to compete with Second Life. I agree right now it’s little more than a 3D chat room.
Quick question for the both of you. I did a Google search on the phrase “pullout” and then “Second Life” because I know that there have been a number of organizations that have come in, made a big splash and left: AOL, Pontiac. I can see Mercedes, American Apparel and several others have come in to Second Life and then left. What are your thoughts on what these corporations are experiencing? Why is it you think they’re coming in with outlandish expectations? What are your thoughts on companies that have come in, made a splash and left?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I guess I’ll take that first. What’s the expression, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up wait, wait. Fleep, help me out here. What’s this expression I’m thinking of, “If you don’t know where you’re going”?

CHRIS COLLINS: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to go nowhere”?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, or something. So anyway. Someone will type it in. The beauty of backchat. Someone knows what I mean. These companies come in, and they really don’t understand the space. They don’t quite know what it is they’re going to do. My guess is most of the people here listening to us now came in thinking, “Wow! This seems neat. I’m sure there is a way that we can do something; who knows what it is.” And I think that when people’s budgets come through faster than their plans, then this is exactly what you get is, you get people who don’t read the landscape appropriately, and so they do things that make no sense. I think if you’ll look at the companies that have left, you could really see and a lot of people were saying, “Why are they doing this? What are they expecting to get out of it? There’s no way that this can work.” So I think there have been a lot of unsurprising failures in Second Life. And, in particular, I think that those have been concentrated in the companies that are trying to push their brand specifically. So the ones that you mentioned, they’re trying to extend their brand in a traditional way in a nontraditional medium in which it really doesn’t work.

If you look at the companies that are being successful, they’re quieter successes because it’s not a brand oriented success. So if I can just give a plug to some of my sponsors, some examples of companies that are doing very well. I think Kelly Services is one. They’re in the human resources and staffing. And Fleep mentioned earlier the use of Virtual Worlds for retention in executive education. Well, they had a plan on the use of Virtual Worlds for retention of workers who maybe are working from home, who don’t have close connections to either Kelly, which is the one that arranges the jobs for them, and the client that they’re working for. So Virtual Worlds are very effective for them in helping that type of retention. Now they haven’t been beating their chests, saying, “Look how amazing we are,” because, for them, it’s not pushing a brand. It is trying to do something well and do what they’re doing better. I think that those are the success stories, and they’re happening. They’re just not as splashy as the brand failures because the brands make a big deal out of it when they come in, and I just don’t think that’s a good fit.

KEVIN JARRETT: Chris?

CHRIS COLLINS: I don’t think I have anything to add to that really, except that, as a resident of Second Life, a long term resident, I was a resident before I worked here, I would say there is a real failure to understand that Second Life is something of a World. And, unless you’re providing a service for this World rather than one for the Real World, particularly in the early days, I think the residents of Second Life expected, “What are you doing for me? What are you giving me?” A virtual T shirt. American Apparel’s store, I remember going there. Or Reebok’s first store, I remember going in, and I just didn’t see--it was like a wasteland and very urban feeling, which went with their brand identity, but, as a resident, it felt very dreary. The experience was depressing. So I think that, yes, the boundary between the real and virtual is blurring, but I think the resident culture of Second Life, the people who are here and likely to go and interact with a brand or a company have different expectations than maybe a casual web browser might have.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. Fabulous. Okay. We are just about out of time. It’s 9:57, and we do like to try to keep to the hour schedule out of respect for the folks that have come here planning to spend an hour. Any other questions from the audience that we can throw up real quick? And you all can follow the chat there.

[AUDIENCE: USES VOICE/NOISE]

KEVIN JARRETT: No. Text only, please. And that’s why.

CHRIS COLLINS: I did want to say, maybe while we’re waiting for some questions to roll in, regarding the Metanomics show in particular. As an educator, I don’t have Rob’s background with finance. I’m coming from a different perspective, but I’m always encouraging educators to come to the shows. They’re at noon Second Life time on Mondays. And the reason why I think Metanomics is really a great show for educators to watch is because it’s given me such a different perspective, to sort of see what other sectors of Second Life are doing. It’s very easy to get sort of buried in your work and finding yourself only going to education related things in Second Life, and you don’t even know what’s happening in the big, broad Second Life World out there. And Metanomics has really given me sort of a different perspective and an overview of everything from great products that educators could use, that businesses are coming up with, to uses for the platform that--the sort of corporate side experiments with before the academics.

And maybe even larger than that, over time, over the 41 episodes, I’ve started to think about the bigger picture of how what our jobs are as educators preparing students for this new century and how industry is going to look at what educators are putting out there so what kind of students are we churning out for them. When you think about the thought that business is already planning for it. IBM and these companies are already planning for a time in the future when our physical workspaces are full augmented by digital workspaces. How does that change what we’re teaching in college or in K 20? What different skill sets do students need? What different kinds of technologies do we need to expose them to? I think Metanomics has really helped me see how these pieces of the puzzle sort of fit together in a larger whole. So I really think it’s a great resource for folks. That’s how I justified it to my boss, that I really needed to be there. It’s just like a meeting. It’s something that I need to do for my field, so I think it’s a great show, and I can’t say enough great things about Beyers’ work, interviewing really terrific guests that give us a good overview of what’s happening in Virtual Worlds today.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Wow! I was going to close with a plug for my show, but I guess I don’t have to now. That was very flattering. One thing I would like to mention about Metanomics, the event itself. In going back to this issue of what is successful and what businesses and what enterprises are doing that works, one of the things I think the most important thing that we can provide within Virtual Worlds is dynamic content, not static content. It’s not the build, it’s what you’re doing. It’s the events and the activities, and that was pretty much where I went. That was my direction at the very beginning. So actually I only recently bought land. You can see, actually, if you look at the graphic that’s JenzZa Misfit’s Muse Isle where I have most of my live shows. We have a symbiotic relationship. It’s her land; she manages it. We just do the event and get the people and provide, hopefully, the type of content that Fleep is so flatteringly saying nice things about.

It’s taken a long time for me, but just now I have taken the plunge and bought a Metanomics island, and actually we’re going to have a version of Sage Hall, my office building at Cornell on Metanomics. And, Bjorlyn, I think maybe, yeah, it looks like a picture is rezzing of that now. So I think for everyone, for all of us, we really need to be thinking about providing engaging and constructive dynamic content, events, networking, events like this one right now, before we go ahead and make Sage Hall, our own Sage Halls in Second Life.

KEVIN JARRETT: Awesome. Other questions from the audience? Anybody before we officially end and send these folks on their way? We could probably go on for another hour, easily. So much fun talking to you guys.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You know it’s funny, you put academics in a room, they like to talk. If I could just give an announcement of what’s coming up because it’s actually very ISTE related. On Monday, this coming Monday, at noon Second Life Time, on Muse Isle, we’re going to have Kathy Schrock, Peggy Sheehy, Maggie Marat, and I believe you mentioned her earlier in the show, KJ.

KEVIN JARRETT: Yeah.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And also Pathfinder Linden. All right. So it’s for the different audience. It’s for an audience primarily of people with enterprises, business focus, not necessarily educators, and we’ll be addressing a lot of the issues that are not only of interest to you but are of interest to them as they see what educators are doing and try to figure out for themselves. They’re running a for profit business. Or I see Kevni Koolhoven, from Learning Tree, is here. I think that’s something he’d be fascinated with.

KEVIN JARRETT: Excellent. Thank you for that. It’s going to be fascinating to see the folks that we see every day it seems mixing in the interactive, or in the Metanomics space then.

Movies has a question that he wants to ask, but before I do that, I just want to point out that the transcript for tonight’s event will be posted on the Metanomics website and also archived probably on Thursday morning. Thank you, Corrine, for that. Movie’s question, which I think will be the last one is that, and I’m not sure I’m getting this quite exactly right. Look, he’s running away. “We have Real World businesses in Second Life. We have consumers in Second Life. So why not run a contest and then work around the roadblocks like a real business would have to in Real Life?” In other words, use it as a simulation for an actual contest transaction or a business transaction. How realistic could you actually get something to work in Second Life, I guess is what he’s asking.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I guess my take is, business is business, and doing business in China is very different from doing business in Nigeria, which is very different from doing business in South America or the UK or the U.S. Doing it in Second Life is, it’s also different. You have your own hurdles. It’s all real. I don’t know what he means to say that there’s a business that’s not real, as long as there’s something truly of value involved. Now there is a question of whether the types of hurdles and challenges that you face in Second Life are generalizable to other settings, and so you could actually take away what you learned here to China or Manhattan or whatever. But I think my impression, having studied in world businesses, there are differences, but, frankly, they’re not that big. You still have to do your marketing. You still have to make your customers happy. You still have to have a value proposition that makes your customers give you money and come back and give you money again, and so on and so forth. I think it’s a natural direction to go. It’s just a lot of work, and I don’t think we’re quite there yet, to be able to pull this off at the level that I know my students would be demanding.

KEVIN JARRETT: Oh, okay. So that’s the hesitancy on your part is that it’s not at the level that would be up to their expectation.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Baby steps is my plan.

KEVIN JARRETT: Okay. Got it. Excellent. Okay. Any other question before we bid our guests goodnight? Okay. That being the case, everybody, if you would, please, give me a round of applause for our wonderful folks here today, Beyers Sellers and Fleep Tuque. And do appreciate both

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And I’ll hang around a bit. If anyone wants to talk afterwards.

KEVIN JARRETT: Exactly.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Let me encourage you to join the Metanomics Group as well to get our notices.

CHRIS COLLINS: Thanks very much, KJ. This was terrific.

KEVIN JARRETT: Yes, it was wonderful. Thank you all for coming again. We are going to be hanging around here for a little while. Those of you who do need to move on. Actually, if we could probably step off the stage, that would probably be best because people will be falling into the Sim crossing spots. But it was great fun, and you all made this super easy. Thank you, Bjorlyn, for the slides that you were putting up from time to time. And, everybody else, you guys were amazing.

Document: cor1025.doc
Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com
Second Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer