WHY JOHNNY CAN'T REZ

Robert Bloomfield
Professor, Cornell University
Johnson Graduate School of Management

Keynote Speech Presented September 7, 2008
9 AM Eastern Standard Time
Second Life Education Community Conference (SLEDcc)
Tampa, Florida

Hello! Thanks so much for inviting me to speak today, although it does seem a tad early for a ‘closing keynote address,’ but I am just going to pretend I’m on European time, which would make it mid-afternoon.

I’d like to thank the people who helped put SLEDcc together, as well as all of the people who have helped Metanomics and Cornell’s Johnson School to have a presence here, including Hydra Shaftoe, Bevan Whitfield, Georgianna Blackburn, TJ Asp, Captain Blinker, and Esparanza Freese. I’d also like to thank JenzZa Misfit, who is heading up our inworld presence. And special thanks to Bjorlyn Loon. Bjorlyn is responsible for all of those materials that Grandville Printing’s GoDigital division provided for us, and also was a tremendous help in putting this speech together, and has just been an invaluable in every way since she joined Metanomics back in the Spring.

Given that you are here today, I am going to assume that we share a belief that virtual worlds are going to play a very important role in the future of education. I use the word ‘education’ quite generally, referring not only to primary, secondary and higher education; but also to workplace training and even the type of outreach that large companies and nonprofit organizations do for their customers or constituencies.

Over the last year, I have interviewed hundreds of people representing just about every use of virtual worlds. And I can tell you that the education community in Second Life is in a class of its own, with its enthusiasm, its willingness to experiment with the boundaries of what Second Life can do, and tremendous efforts at community building. As Pathfinder Linden said to me in a pre-show interview in July, businesses considering virtual world activities could learn a lot by studying the educators who have taken a leading role in Second Life.

I think we are approaching a critical point in the adoption of virtual worlds for education, and enterprise use in general. Most people who come into Second Life for professional reasons start by acting on their own. So all of this enthusiasm, experimentation and community-building is very much a grass-roots effort, usually with top administrators looking on, often with a puzzled look, sometimes with some kind words, but rarely with the support that educational projects need to succeed. And by support, I mean money. Money for hardware and software, for hiring staff and virtual assistants, for buying and building virtual products and services.

Over the next two years, I see large numbers of educators going to their deans, to their principals and superintendants; to their vice presidents of human resources or customer outreach. And they are going to be asking their enterprises for the money they need to get their students inworld, or as long-time Second Life residents say, to get them to rez. Right now, there aren’t many students in virtual worlds. So, to play on the title of Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 book ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read,’ I am calling this talk ‘Why Johnny Can’t Rez.’

Flesch argued that that Johnny has tremendous potential, but that he can’t read if teachers aren’t finding the right methods of reaching him. Well, I’m sure Philip Rosedale in his talk yesterday morning convinced you that virtual worlds have tremendous potential, just like young Johnny. And Barry Joseph in his keynote yesterday made it pretty clear that the responsibility falls on us to push virtual worlds past the tipping point, to widespread adoption. Well, the purpose of my talk is to sketch out how we can reach, not Johnny, but the people who hold the purse-strings, so that those of us with virtual world projects can get them funded, and help Johnny rez.

THE THREE QUESTIONS

I am going to organize this talk in the form of the three questions that we will need to answer when we ask someone for support:

1. How does this project help me accomplish my goals and the goals of our institution?
2. Why are virtual worlds the best way to accomplish those goals? And
3. What are the costs and risks of your project, and how are you going to manage them?

In this political season, let me remind you that business proposals, like campaign speeches, are a combination of substance and talking points. You need your answers to be correct, but they also need to sound convincing. So I will be emphasizing both how to design the substance of your project to make it something worth investing in, and also how to present that project to make the most persuasive case.

Let me also admit right up front that while I have put these ideas in my own words, which I hope you’ll find effective, I can’t really take too much credit for the ideas behind them—they mostly come from the countless people who have shared their thoughts with me over the last year, and many of those people are right here in this room. So I hope I can do your work justice.

KNOW INSTITUTIONAL GOALS

Let’s jump right into the first question. How does this project help me accomplish the goals of my institution? Let’s assume that you have designed a project for virtual worlds that you think is the coolest thing ever. Great! But let me take on the role of my own Dean, Joe Thomas. Through years of strategic planning, Joe now leads a school that has a pretty clear set of objectives, which we call the 3 C’s:

• Curriculum
• Community
• Careers

We need teach the most important material in an outstanding way; we need to build strong communities among our students, faculty, staff and alumni; and we need to help our students get good jobs, and provide them the lifelong support they need to succeed once they get them.

So if I go to my dean and say ‘Hey, Joe, Second Life is the coolest thing ever, and I want to use it to do stuff,’ Joe is going to come back with: ‘Rob, I already have my goals, and investing in virtual worlds isn’t on the list. How will Second Life improve our curriculum? How will it help us build our community? How will it help our students get jobs?

The bottom line is that my Dean doesn’t give a hoot about virtual worlds, unless they somehow solve the problems that clutter his desk today. So make sure that you understand the goals of your dean, your principal, your boss, and frame your proposal entirely in terms of those goals.

How can you do that? Most institutions have publicly accessible mission statements, long-range strategic plans, and short-term objectives. Most school districts have established curricula, lesson plans and benchmarks. Find those documents and get to know their content, their context, and the organizational history that created them. Talk to the people who are going to make the decisions on funding, and find out what THEY want to do.

EFFECTIVENESS TRUMPS NOVELTY

There is so much variation in goals across institutions, I am not even going to try to summarize them. But I do want to emphasize one thing: most educators don’t place a tremendous amount of importance on being first. Sure, it’s in the mix. People who are first have a shot at fame and glory. But it is much more important to be effective, and it isn’t easy to be first and be effective. Keep in mind that the biggest failures in Second Life have been by those who have placed a high premium on being first. Now, if you are in marketing, or research, one of your goals may indeed include being first. Go for it. Recognize that it will be expensive, and that it might not work.

But for most of you, don’t focus on the novelty of virtual worlds, and the fact that you are on the cutting edge of technology. That is true, and it’s a plus. But what you really need to do is to focus on the signature advantages of virtual worlds—what is it that virtual worlds are particularly good at, relative to the competition? Or more to the point, what do virtual worlds allow us to do more effectively, or more cheaply, than a real-life classroom or some other online solution, such as a webinar or a collaborative software package like WebEx.

SIGNATURE ADVANTAGES: PRESENCE IN PLACE

I see three classes of signature advantages to virtual worlds, and Lynn Cullens and I had a little fun with alliteration, so here they are: Presence in Place, Constructive Cacophony and Creative Collaboration.

Presence in Place: Green and Global
We’ll start with Presence in Place, because this is what distinguishes virtual worlds from other online technologies. Unlike a conference call or a webinar or a netmeeting or a WebEx meeting, virtual worlds allow us to create a surprisingly real presence in a surprising real place. Any online technology is relatively green and global. No travel. A small carbon footprint. You can educate your students and colleagues by letting them hear from experts, wherever they live, and you can expose a larger audience to that experience, not just to the people you can lure into your classroom or inside a rented hotel ballroom.

Presence in Place: Nonverbal communication
But these notions of presence and place go well beyond these other technologies. For one thing, the extensive use of avatars allows for a breadth of non-verbal communication. When you go to a virtual-world event, your avatar is really there. By extension, you are actually there.

Being there allows you so many choices beyond a conference call. Choices of clothing, body language, personal space, physical—or, I should say visual—attractiveness. They convey even more information than they would in real life, because they are all choices. The technology is still very crude, but all of you know the close connections you have forged with others you met in Second Life, and this is one reason why.

Presence in Place: Deep Touch
You can pitch this pretty well to a marketing department, too. In a Metanomics event last month, Microsoft’s Zain Nablousi pointed out that virtual worlds are unusual in that they allow us to touch people deeply at a very low cost relative to other media. A web advertisement touches a lot of people very lightly—it warrants maybe a glance. Face-to-face meeting is the deepest touch of all. Virtual worlds do pretty well in a cost-benefit analysis.

Presence in Place: Shared Experience
Virtual worlds also allow people who are in the same place at the same time share an experience. By shared experience, I don’t just mean ‘hey, I saw Star Wars too!’ I mean ‘wasn’t it great when we saw Star Wars.’ The difference is being there at together, at the same time.

A long time ago, some Cornell professors conducted an experiment. In a control group, two students met in a neutral setting. In the treatment group, they met in a rather frightening setting—the middle of a suspension bridge that sways in the wind 200 feet over one of the campus gorges. The researchers found that the couples who met on the bridge, because of the intensity of the shared experience, felt much closer to one another.

As educators, our goal is to create the same intense shared experience that can bond people to one another, and to the subject matter at hand.

Presence in Place: Meaning in Places
Now, I don’t expect educators to be holding class on swaying suspension bridges. Instead, we’ll rely on places that draw meaning from their history. Let me use the Johnson School again as an example.

Remember that one of the ‘C’s at the Johnson School is ‘community.’ Building community is relatively easy for our residential MBA students, who spend all day in Sage Hall. Every Thursday at 4:30 we make sure there are no classes or other events, and we have a ‘Sage Social’, with free food and drink for all of our students, staff and faculty. That’s easy, because people are right there already.

But it is much harder to maintain this community with our executives who are getting their MBAs either by meeting in NYC every other weekend , or meeting in small boardrooms around the US and Canada and videoconferencing. And what about the alumni who leave the nest for jobs all over the US and beyond.

Well, we already plenty of activities that give these students emotional attachments to Ithaca, to the Cornell campus, and to our building, Sage Hall. So while any old place can allow people to connect with one another, bringing them into a virtual Sage Hall adds a whole new dimension to that connection.

As one more example, The Center On Congress at Indiana University have proposed teaching students about the workings of the US Congress by creating a virtual congress. Their plan, last I heard, was to create the actual Capital building, with deliberations and testimony taking place in the rooms that would actually be used in real life. They even propose creating a row of bars and restaurants on a virtual K-street, where the legislators get wined and dined by lobbyists. The halls of congress and lobbying bars of K-street are places with meaning that speaks directly to many of us--especially during election season.

Presence in Place: Creating History
We can create our own history and meaning for a virtual space. Here is a picture of the arena at Muse Isle, one of the oldest venues for live events in Second Life. Philip Rosedale spoke there a couple of years ago. It has been a steady location for Metanomics throughout much of this year. I don’t know how many live concerts there are every week. Oh, and about 8,000 couples have gone there to buy the Rendezvous Couples animator, which lets them hold hands, give piggy back rides, and do other everyday PG activities that help us bond. You all have your own favorite places, and this is one of mine, because its history has a very personal meaning to me. And I suspect it has meaning to many of those 8,000 couples as well.

Finally, having a presence in a place allows for what virtual worlds expert Christian Renaud calls ‘serendipity—the possibility that someone might just happen to be present in the same place I am.

I know about the virtual congress through serendipity—coming back from the Virtual Worlds Expo last fall, I just happened to sit next to John Burwell, who was preparing a bid on that job on behalf of his virtual world development company, Forterra. I can’t tell you how many people I have met, and forged a connection with, simply because we were both attending the same event in Second Life.

That won’t happen in a webinar.

SIGNATURE ADVANTAGES: CONSTRUCTIVE CACOPHONY

Once we have people in a place, we want them them to communicate. And boy, in virtual worlds, do they communicate. Public text chat. Private instant messages. Notices. Audio recordings. Video recordings. Public voice chat. Private voice chat. Gestures. Sound effects. Animation. Titles over our avatars heads. JenzZa Misfit often gets my attention by doing back flips or, once, actually spraying me with a fire extinguisher.

This cacophony can be overwhelming. But think about this talk I am giving right now. Like so many conferences, one person has the floor, and the rest of you are sitting there silently. Some of you are actually listening, I hope. But I know that a lot of you are giving me only some of your attention. You might simply be distracted, thinking about your own talk, or the flight back. Or you might still be thinking about something I said 5 minutes ago. You might have a question you are dying to ask.

All of those possibilities are wrapped in exactly the same package—total silence, except for the sound of my voice.

I have no idea what you are thinking, you have no way to ask your questions, of me or of one another, without interrupting the flow of the talk.

Virtual world conferences are totally different, which you can see by my own event series, Metanomics.

Constructive Cacophony (Image)
If you don’t know already, Metanomics is an odd blend of a guest lecture series, an international conference and a television show. We meet every week to hear from the people on the front lines of the metaverse, whether they are educators, virtual world developers, marketers, industry analysts or even government officials. Like any conference, we still privilege a few people with the floor. They get to talk out loud. But everyone else is using a variety of text chat channels. People can ask questions of any speaker or another member of the audience, at any time, simply by typing into the local chat channel. Or people can comment on what was just said, or what was just typed.

Metanomics staff fills the chat channel with a running stream of supplementary material: web links, quotations, and other facts—kind of like the ticker that crawls across the bottom of a cable news show, but with clickable links that will take you to web pages, pdfs, or even SLurls to transport you to another place in a virtual world. So it’s a cacophony, and while you might not be paying attention to me and my guests, you are probably a lot less likely to be thinking about your travel plans, and much more likely to be engaged with the material at hand, which is far more important.

Conferences are only one type of educational setting, which typically use a handful of speakers and a large number of listeners. In small group settings, everyone can share the floor. In many classrooms, we have intense communication within lots of small groups, and limited communication between groups. Each of these models require different ways of organizing the various channels virtual worlds give us. But we can do it.

We are only beginning to understand how to create more cacophony, and make it more constructive. How about 3-D modeling? I think we are only beginning to see the possibilities of constructive cacophony, and hopefully some of you here will push this frontier further.

SIGNATURE ADVANTAGES: CREATIVE COLLABORATION

At risk of oversimplifying, the ability of virtual worlds to give us a presence in a place is what makes virtual worlds better for many educational projects than other internet applications. And constructive cacophony has the potential to make virtual worlds better than real life. When we put the two of these together, we get something new: the power of creative collaboration.

Creative Collaboration: Architecture
Take a group of people, put them in the same place, and give them incredibly rich channels of communication. Then add in the ability for users to create their own content. You get the third signature feature of virtual worlds: creative collaboration.

Jon Brouchoud’s Wikitecture project is an excellent example, with people coming together to create buildings using a model similar to what is used to create Wikipedia.

Creative Collaboration: Art
OR maybe you get a community dedicated to extending DC Spensley’s hyper-formalist art into second life.

But when we talk about creation, we need to look beyond virtual items that seem tangible. We can also create the intangible.

Creative Collaboration: Narrative
Consider Peggy Sheehy’s work on The Storykeeper’s Garden, in which students actually create and become part of a story, and can capture their efforts in the form of machinima.

And while we are on the topic of machinima, this week at the Virtual Worlds Expo in LA, I learned that James Cameron, who directed Titanic and a bunch of other incredibly successful movies, is making a new movie, Avatar. What is even better is that all of the live-action shots are filmed by first creating an entirely virtual environment, which he films with a virtual camera until he gets it right, so he doesn’t have to go incredibly over budget. Anyone remember Waterworld?

And then I come here, and see that the machinima community is up to amazing things. So we are only touching the surface on that form of creation too.

Oh, and SLCN, which broadcasts Metanomics, Cybergrrl Oh’s Real Biz, the Giant Snail Races, Slascar and Sail On, just totally rocks.

Creative Collaboration: Identity
People can also create their own identities in Second Life, whether through characters in books, real-life historic figures, or entities from their own imaginations. This is Pathfinder Linden showing his avatar, and an obvious wealth of imagination.

Creative Collaboration: Games
And what about creating games and simulations? Barry Joseph of GlobalKids talked yesterday about living la Vida Ludic... the gaming life, taken from an old book by an author whose name I can never remember how to pronounce.

If you have seen the movie A Beautiful Mind, you know that John Nash won the nobel prize for developing a theory of games that has become central to economic theory. Since then, academics have been applying game theory to just about every human interaction, from business to marriage. Games and simulations can be embedded in a virtual world in a very natural way, to teach just about anything. And as Barry pointed out yesterday, most virtual worlds are in fact platforms for games as much as anything.

The hype surrounding the release of Spore today shows just how much promise there is for us to create compelling and educational content in this new medium.

I am sure there are signature advantages of virtual worlds other than the three I have mentioned: constructive cacophony, presence in place and creative collaboration. But I will let others add to the list, and summarize where we are.

We have talked about focusing our project on meeting the goals of our institution, and we have laid out the signature advantages of virtual worlds, so we can explain how our project is particularly effective in meeting those goals.

So now we move on to the third and final question:

WHAT ARE THE COSTS, AND THE RISKS, AND HOW ARE YOU MINIMIZING THEM?

What are the costs and risks of your project and how are you minimizing them? Cost and risk are going to be particularly important as you make your case, because it’s very unlikely that your virtual world project is going to be critical to the mission of your institution. Instead, it is probably going to be viewed as an alternative way of doing something you already do, and in most cases, it is already being done adequately. So when we apply a cost-benefit analysis to your project, we are going to need to see that virtual worlds let us accomplish our existing goals more cheaply, or more effectively, or both.
Well, this is not the place to whip out an itemized budget, and I know nothing about budgeting in school districts—which seems a lot more frightening to me than a suspension bridge. Instead, I want to emphasize two dimensions of costs: how they are spread across different parties, and how the costs are spread over time and activity.

INCIDENCE OF COST

Costs incurred in virtual world projects—and costs saved—are borne by many people. Economists refer to this as the incidence of cost. I’d like to illustrate this issue with my own experience of pulling together a budget proposal for conferences in Second Life. Obviously, I think SL is great for conferences, and I figured since Metanomics has run about 50 of them already, I was in a reasonably good position to pull this off. But when it came time to budget, it quickly became apparent that the organizer of the conference wouldn’t save a whole lot of money relative to a traditional conference.

Why Not? Well, the organizer of a typical conference pays for only a few things. First comes a room or two, which is often free for universities or other large institutions who can use their own venues. Some audio-visual resources, which again may well be free. And in my field, conference organizers usually cover the cost of meals and coffee. And they don’t typically create an archive of the conference—which of course is a natural thing to do for a web-based conference, even though it costs yet a little more.

Where are the savings? Eliminating airfare, hotel stays, and the hassles and delays of travel is all great—for the attendees. But eliminating all of that doesn’t do much for the conference organizers, who usually cover only the costs of a handful of VIPs.

Virtual world conferences also impose costs on conference speakers and participants as well. The type of conference I was proposing would entail bringing a bunch of new people into Second Life—people who are not necessarily all that tech-savvy, and definitely wouldn’t know much about virtual worlds, or even own their own headset. So our budget needed to include labor expenses to provide 1-on-1 personal support to get these people in-world and set up. So here we are, saving our attendees a bunch of money, but then having to cough up our own funds to make them comfortable enough to show up.

What does this mean to our projects and proposals? First it means that we need to make our case to everyone who is going to bear costs. In my example, organizers, speakers, and participants. We also need to consider creative methods to spread the cost savings around, so that everyone benefits enough to make the virtual conference financially attractive. For example, charge people a fee to attend the conference, and make the case that they are saving far more than that in travel expenses. However, don’t forget that for most participants their institution pays for travel, but the costs of learning a new technology falls right on them.

Rather than simply making conferences cheaper, you also need to make them better. There are two ways to do this. First, you can take some of the conference fees, and instead of just transferring them to the organizer, to make the conference cheaper, you can transfer it to speakers in the form of honoraria, so that you can get more prominent names.

There is another way to make the conference better, and that is to use the low travel costs to get speakers and participants that are geographically more separated, or for whatever reason unable to travel. For example, a very hot issue in accounting right now is the internationalization of accounting standards. For half a century now, accounting standards in the US have been set by the FASB, a US organization. Just last week the SEC announced a deadline for transferring that duty to the IASB. So if we are going to have a conference on this issue, which I absolutely want to do, we are going to need speakers—and participants—from around the world. Suddenly, a virtual conference seems a whole lot more attractive.

UP-FRONT AND INCREMENTAL COSTS

The second point to understand about the costs of virtual world projects is that many of those costs are incurred upfront on a one-time basis, while the costs of continuing the project can be relatively low. Building a venue can be very expensive, but then you can use it over and over. Each new person you bring inworld imposes a cost on both you and them, and probably others as well. Keep in mind that these aren’t just the costs for hardware and time spent—there is also the social awkwardness, which can be very costly for professionals. But once a participant is effectively in-world, incremental costs for more events are pretty low.

So try to focus on events with ‘legs,’ so that you can take advantage of the upfront costs over and over, without incurring too much additional cost. Don’t just plan a single conference, plan a series. Work together with others, maybe even with people from other organizations, to reuse any content you create.

I think we can look at the International Society for Technology in Education as a good example of value. ISTE’s in-world presence complements and enhances the organization’s existing goals. Once they get people inworld, ISTE offers residents two structured events each week—a talk on Tuesday and a social activity on Thursday. ISTE members have a good reason to come into Second Life, and to stay, knowing that they will be putting that initial investment to good use. And my understanding is that ISTE allows other people to use their venue from time to time, which further levers the cost of its initial creation.

RISK

Now let’s move from ‘cost’ to ‘risk’—the unknowns that might cause us problems. There are three good causes for concern on this front. You have better be honest about these, and have some solutions.

First, Second Life is not perfectly reliable. You never know when you will lose sound, or having a rolling restart, or simply have your sim crash in the middle of a keynote address. (Let’s hope this doesn’t have to be an ironic self-referential remark).

Second, open worlds, especially Second Life, have a reputation for behavior that is not appropriate for the classroom or the workplace. You know what I mean, so I won’t belabor the point, other than to say that administrators are likely to be very concerned about this issue.

Finally, and more generally, virtual world activities pose risks to our reputations. The Johnson School is serious about business, and an animated environment is intrinsically not serious—at least given the current state of graphics.

SOLUTIONS

We need to manage not only the substance of these risks, but people’s perception of the risks as well. How do we do this?

Starting with substance, people who work in Second Life know that there are a number of straightforward solutions to these concerns. Manage the risk of unreliability by building in a lot of redundancy. For Metanomics, we enter each event planning to use in-world voice for our speakers; if that doesn’t work, we are set up for skype; if that doesn’t work, we have phone numbers everyone can call into. Manage the risk of inappropriate encounters by running events on private islands, and restricting entry. Make the event seem more serious by creating serious-looking venues, and insisting on a dress code, and having a clear policy for behaviors, which might include limiting frivolous animations.

If the cartoon-like environment is a real problem, look for worlds with a different ‘look and feel.’ If you are concerned about inappropriate interactions with others in Second Life, consider an invitation-only world like you can get with Forterra. If reliability is an absolute must…well, we can complain about Second Life’s reliability, but I really wonder if there are other worlds out there that are significantly more reliable.

As we talk about reducing perceived risk, I have three key suggestions. First, with apologies to any Lindens in the audience, don’t mention Second Life before you need to. After all, names conjure up lots of impressions, and those impressions may be distorted or simply irrelevant. When I interviewed Kathy Schrock, administrator of technology for Nauset Public Schools, she talked about how she got state funding for her Second Life activities, but what she proposed was using “a synchronous online professional development environment.” As she said, “I didn’t think the State could handle ‘Second Life.’ If you can make your case using generic language like that, why get more specific?

The second way to lower the perceived risk of your project is to let your decision-makers become familiar with the virtual environment. People shy away from the unfamiliar. Give people comfort by showing them successes that others have had, and also by letting them experience the environment themselves in low-hassle, low-risk settings. Who wants to go first over the suspension bridge?

An easy way to do this is to find a good event and invite the people who you are trying to join you. Naturally, I would suggest taking them to a Metanomics show on a Monday at noon SLT. But there is something going on literally every day of the week, and I am sure other people in this room have their own suggestions.

Here is a sample schedule of things that are happening throughout most weeks:
• Monday: Metanomics at Noon
• Tuesday: ISTE Weekly Talks, Literature and Writing Discussion
• Wednesday: NCI’s New Builder Show and Tell, Primtionary
• Thursday: ISTE Social, Primtionary
• Friday: NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow
• Saturday: Giant Snail Races, Political and Current Events Open Forum
• Sunday: SLCN.TV’s Meet an Author and Sail On, NCI’s Intro to Second Life Skills

Finally, I strongly recommend trying to pull off a small project that is likely to provide a short-term win for some constituency at your organization. I had the chance to interview Philip Rosedale yesterday, and he talked about his strategy of making ‘small bets.’ Not wagering huge amounts of capital to tackle one big problem, but a small amount that would be helpful if it worked, and not break the bank if it didn’t.

That sounds like pretty good advice to me. At Cornell, its hard to keep connected with alumni that move to the west coast. So, as I work to get the Johnson School to make a major investment in virtual worlds, one of my first steps is to work with alumni relations to create just a couple of small events with west coast alumni, where they can hear a short talk from a faculty member, chat with the alumni relations staff—and, of course, one another. This is all pretty low-cost, and assuming it works, I will have a group of supporters in the school who can tell my Dean “hey, it worked for us!”

Or course, we know that virtual worlds are not entirely reliable. Whatever event you choose, make sure to manage expectations. Be certain that the people you invite know that virtual worlds are not perfectly reliable. Let’s face it, as we sit here in a room in Florida during hurricane season, I can say that real life is unreliable too!

And finally, you need to be flexible and adaptable, and build that adaptability into your project. Can it expand and shrink as circumstances change? Are there ways to integrate new technologies? Do you have the resources to keep up with changing hardware requirements. I guarantee, no matter how carefully thought out your plan may be, virtual worlds change rapidly. And while those changes are all for the better, they are still a source of risk that we need to manage.

CLOSING

Well, I have yammered on for almost an hour, and the only thing I am sure of is that in a year, I am going to look back and say ‘boy, did I have a lot to learn.’ As all of the energy, experimentation and community building we have seen in the educational community of Second Life gets focused into proposals for specific projects that require substantial financial support, I think we can make this thing tip.

That will keep many of you intensely busy. But when you find the time, please, keep in touch. Not just with me, but with this community. If you have a specific project in the works, let people know. If they are getting funded, let us know why. If they aren’t….well, let others learn from your experience.

I know that many of you will continue to use Second Life for networking and professional development, but won’t be pursuing any specific projects that need funding. You, too, have an important role to play. Keep people informed and in the loop. Introduce new people to the community. Learn how to make the case for virtual worlds in education, to your colleagues in real-life, and to the newbie in Second Life who may have come in just to see what the fuss is about, or maybe is coming in to do some independent research before agreeing to fund someone else’s proposal.

And finally, be sure to attend today’s working group meeting that will be focusing on providing input to Linden Lab. I think Second Life is a truly path-breaking product, and we simply couldn’t do all of this without them. But I’m not sure how they are supposed to make virtual worlds better for education without us, so let’s do all we can to help.

Thanks for listening, and good luck with whatever you have carved out as your mission in the metaverse.