King's Corner

Draxtor Despres has produced a detailed video about how architects and architectural students from all over the world are collaborating using Second Life, and how SL even enables them to communicate more clearly and meaningfully with client. I noted the participation of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. If you’re not familiar with them, they have mad cred.

As Draxtor notes in the description:

Four leading architects from the US, New Zealand and Egypt discussed what [Pres.} Obama promised in his Cairo speech: an online network, facilitating collaboration across geographic and cultural boundaries.

The event featured was sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. That’s some serious support, however you look at it.

The Second Life College Fair is going on this weekend. (More information about the College Fair in general here.) There are a lot of speakers (full list), but three have particularly caught my eye, and I wanted to share what little I know at this point in hopes that it might serve someone else.

• Claudia Linden of Linden Lab will speak at 5 p.m. SLT (8 p.m. Eastern time), topic not announced yet, but Claudia is the liaison for much of higher ed in SL.
• At 6:30 p.m. SLT (9:30 p.m. Eastern), P Charles Livermore of St. John’s University in New York will address “WHY SECOND LIFE???” I particularly like the triple question marks; I suspect he will be getting really practical.
• If you can get yourself up on Sunday morning and don’t have church conflicts, I think you’ll benefit from hearing Dr. Anthony Curtis, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (just over the hill!) speak about “Educational Uses of SL.” It’s at 7 a.m. SLT (10 a.m. Eastern).

All speakers should be findable at this SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/International%20Schools%202/101/156/55.

Here is a great, practical post about using virtual space effectively for learning. I’m taking a chance putting it out there–now I’m going to have to try to apply it.

Comes a report backed up by data (from Linden Lab, of course, but no indication it is anything but correct) that gives a glowing picture of health for Second Life. In some circles, the drop-off in press coverage was equated with the pending demise, but it seems that SL continues to develop just fine. What I would read into some of the figures: yes, plenty of people try SL, get discouraged by the learning curve, and drop out within days. Enough persist, however, to continue solid growth, and that remnant may be enough to fuel the growth of the general metaverse (including canonical SL along with the various Open Simulators that are, basically, open source versions AND other virtual worlds).

A couple of highlights:

“Land in Second Life has grown roughly 18 percent from Q1 of 2009 and approximately 75 percent since Q1 of 2008.” The 75 percent figure is particularly interesting. There is always some bit of SL land that is not owned by residents, but it’s a very small percentage, so that sort of huge increase indicates a vast increase in actual user involvement.

“The inworld economy, says Linden Lab reps, grew 94 percent year-over-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009. Now at nearly USD$50 million each month in user-to-user transactions, the Second Life economy is on an annual run rate of more than a half billion US dollars.” At a time when the rest of the world is struggling just to get even again, that’s pretty healthy no matter how you look at it. And, again, it indicates some genuine involvement, even if it is only a small percentage of the people who go in to give SL a try.

That also means that if Linden Lab manages to increase the retention rate by just a few percentage points, the growth of SL could double or triple.

Aliza Sherman notes the cycle of Second Life hype, followed by SL bashing, followed by more hype, followed by declarations that SL is dead. Not so, she says, in “Second Life Is Social Media.” It’s not about education, but it is about the nature of the medium, and much of it has implications for education and other activities in SL, including the downsides. Take a look.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday featured Michael Demers, a geography professor at New Mexico State University, talking about how he uses Second Life to help his students learn more effectively. You can listen to the segment online.

Of course, so far I haven’t been able to get it to play myself. [sigh] Your luck may be better.

Update: I managed to get it to play. Worth listening to!