5:00 p.m. Second Life Time (Pacific Time)
# "Libraries, Education, and Museums in Virtual Worlds: Glimpses of the Big Picture" Presented by Christi Confetti Higgins (Violet Portolo in SL), Doug McDavid (Doug Mandelbrot in SL), and Tom Peters (Maxito Ricardo in SL)
Location: Babbage Amphitheatre
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Violet, Doug, and Maxito will discuss various interesting aspects of the current situation and future directions for libraries, educational institutions, and museums in Second Life and other virtual worlds.
Doug will explore the idea that historic economic forces and global trends support the expectation that virtual world technology will increasingly emerge as a significant communication and collaboration platform, especially since the most important characteristic of virtual worlds is their ability to foster an immersive, social experience. Doug urges the conferees to approach the next few hours with the thought of how everything they see may or may not contribute to rich collaborative interactions with information (or information-rich collaborations) as we begin to witness the convergence of libraries, museums and educational experiences in virtual worlds.
Maxito will explore how information may be packaged, found, and used in virtual environments. He will ponder how libraries, educational institutions, and museums may morph as they continue to explore and develop their presences in virtual environments.
Violet will be discussing Sun Microsystems' experience and activities in Second Life from a communication and collaboration focus poing with employees, customers, partners and those interested in Sun.
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Eric's Notes:
Doug Mandelbrot stresses the use of virtual environments for rich interactions and collaboration between the public and organizations.
Violet Portola detailed Wonderland and The Open Virtual worlds project, both of which are OPEN SOURCE (!!!!) tools for virtual collaborations. You can bet I'll be looking into these tools, which allow you to host your own worlds and resources - a HUGE stumbling block for organizations that don't want to pony up their intellectual property to Linden Labs servers.
Maxito Ricardo makes some great remarks about parallels between SecondLife and the Web, and cautions us that Real World organizations often got flattened on the web, where organizations that were "born" on the web are the ones that thrived. (Google, Dell, Amazon, YouTube). at: NMC Conference Center (204, 30, 50)