Hello all and apologies for being absent for so long – I have been travelling all over the place in the last few weeks. I got back from Boston last week where I was at the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference. Boston is an absolutely beautiful city, I’d never been before, but it was incredibly sunny every single day and I’ve never seen so many parks in such a small area.
The conference was good too, met lots of new Nature colleagues and took part in a session called “Second Life and beyond: should Publishers care about virtual worlds?”. The panel consisted of me, Linden Lab’s education and healthcare expert John Lester and Ben Sawyer from Digital Mill. Unsurprisingly, our conclusion was “yes”. Perhaps more surprisingly, lots of people came up to me afterwards to say they were really interested in what we were doing and were thinking of doing similar things themselves. I’ve done similar talks many times but this one really felt like the first time the audience reaction had moved from “how cool! Now for those of us with real jobs…” to “how cool! How can we use this?”.
For one answer to that question, I point you in the direction of an interesting article in the current issue of EMBO Reports.
Scientific discourse 2.0. Will your next poster session be in Second Life
The ability to modify online worlds and to create customized objects and virtual rooms could have a positive impact on the presentation of data and information. Traditional poster sessions, for example, only present research findings in a static format with the investigator standing next to the poster to answer questions. Similar poster presentations within virtual worlds such as Second Life® could not only effectively simulate the spacing, timing and methods of presentation sessions, but also allow the expansion and modification of the conference space as needed. In addition, users would be able to add information to and edit their posters based on other participants’ questions and feedback, and interact with other avatars in a similar manner to real life. Poster presenters would not even have to be online for the whole event in order to answer queries because they could use a mobile phone as an effective bridge between the virtual and real worlds (Kelly, 2007). Furthermore, entire sessions could be saved and the virtual space preserved for future perusal by attendees and those who were absent.
It’s a long (and not entirely accurate) article, but has some interesting thoughts on holding posters sessions and conference add-ons in virtual worlds. Little snippet above, but the whole article is recommended.
My favourite talk so far in the SN lecture series has been How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science but from some subtle comments by the presenters it seems that Second Life (and the people who use SL) are still considered a bit unconventional (to put it politely). I think that as Sl’s image slowly improves, thanks to people like you Jo presenting good uses of SL at conferences, we will see even more special talks and whole conferences in SL.
-Hiro
Yes, I think it’s fair to say not all our speakers have been entirely convinced of the merits of Second Life before they arrive! Still, I know that several have kept their avatars and gone back into SL of their own accord later on, so we are changing the world a bit, albeit very, very slowly…
I think you’re right about the conferences, talking directly to people about it is definitely the best way of getting them interested. Maybe one day I’ll take myself and my laptop down to Imperial and sit in the canteen buying coffee for anyone who’ll come over and play with my molecule rezzer!