Second Life - Second Chance?
Just been looking through my Google Alerts including one I have for Second Life.
This led me to an article about the growing number of colleges who have a presence in the Second Life metaverse. People sometimes ask me about the potential of Second Life and I think it has one but as with all things in life you don’t get something for nothing. I’m sure that if you put effort and resources into Second Life you can get some great educational returns.
If I were a university would I invest in a Second Life island? Yes.
Compared to overall marketing spend (brochures, corporate websites , adverts in the press and so) it costs nothing. The real cost is in being prepared to put something of educational value on your island. That’s the more difficult part. But if you do then there will be both educational and promotional benefits way beyond the actual financial cost.
But we have to remember that time on the Web, including the various metaverses (Second Life is not unique) is running at dog years.
If I were going to invest in Second Life with the hope of gaining promotional (marketing) benefits as well as exploit the pedagogic potential over the longer term I would do it within the next 3-6 months (it should have been done already) as, a bit like in the early days of the web when merely setting up a website might get you on the national news, as the window for doing virtually nothing but getting publicity anyway, will probably last 12-18 months. After that you’ll have to do something genuinely useful and innovative (even within Second Life) to get peer approval but probably without lots of free publicity as things will have moved on.
Institutions who are serious about exploiting metaverses (and universities certainly should be) should also think how they can develop resources that also have a local equivalent so that if Second Life goes belly up for any reason your carefully crafted artefacts and relationships can have a Second chance somewhere else. Certain things will be of course be lost where they are brought into being by the unique code of a particular service but prepare to salvage what you can.
This led me to an article about the growing number of colleges who have a presence in the Second Life metaverse. People sometimes ask me about the potential of Second Life and I think it has one but as with all things in life you don’t get something for nothing. I’m sure that if you put effort and resources into Second Life you can get some great educational returns.
If I were a university would I invest in a Second Life island? Yes.
Compared to overall marketing spend (brochures, corporate websites , adverts in the press and so) it costs nothing. The real cost is in being prepared to put something of educational value on your island. That’s the more difficult part. But if you do then there will be both educational and promotional benefits way beyond the actual financial cost.
But we have to remember that time on the Web, including the various metaverses (Second Life is not unique) is running at dog years.
If I were going to invest in Second Life with the hope of gaining promotional (marketing) benefits as well as exploit the pedagogic potential over the longer term I would do it within the next 3-6 months (it should have been done already) as, a bit like in the early days of the web when merely setting up a website might get you on the national news, as the window for doing virtually nothing but getting publicity anyway, will probably last 12-18 months. After that you’ll have to do something genuinely useful and innovative (even within Second Life) to get peer approval but probably without lots of free publicity as things will have moved on.
Institutions who are serious about exploiting metaverses (and universities certainly should be) should also think how they can develop resources that also have a local equivalent so that if Second Life goes belly up for any reason your carefully crafted artefacts and relationships can have a Second chance somewhere else. Certain things will be of course be lost where they are brought into being by the unique code of a particular service but prepare to salvage what you can.
posted by Phil at 3:05 AM
1 Comments:
Hi,
Are you responsible for the Nottingham Trent University sim that the NTU is funding in Second Life. I have visited there many times and the only activities I have seen are punk music clubs. This is alright of course but not really what I had expected from an NTU educational island. Unless of course its just a group of staff at the NTU who are using the NTU email address and billing info to get a sim in SL just for their own pleasure. Its all a bit dissapointing really, I was really looking forward to some great innovative courses in this fantastic new media.
Post a Comment
<< Home