Journal of The Association of Information Systems

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Team Collaboration in Virtual Worlds

The special issue provides a global forum for presenting authoritative references, academically rigorous research and case studies in both theoretical and applied research. Its purpose is to discuss the effective management in virtual universities. Specifically, it intends to disseminate research and studies in the situation where university management has to cope with traditional academic work and the virtual university type of approach."

On the 20th November 2009, the National Workshop on Teaching in Immersive Worlds will be hosted by the School of Computing & Intelligent Systems in the Great Hall of the University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Derry, Northern Ireland (registration from 8.30, start at 9.30).

Second Life – Setup Costs (November-02-2009)

Purchase of ‘Full Region’ Land

Premier island product, Full regions provide the highest level of performance. They allow up to 15,000 prims and as many as 100 avatars at a time.

Set Up Fee: USD $ 1,000.00
Monthly Maintenance: USD $ 295.00

Total 1 year: $ 4540 - Approx 3,061.49 EURO Total 2 year: $ 8080 - Approx 5,448.70 EURO

Purchase of Membership

Membership plan: (Required for land ownership): Premium – Annual: $ 87.48

Total costs of membership and land ownership within Second Life

Total 1 year: $ 4267.48 - Approx 2,878.96 EURO

Total 2 year: $ 8167.48 - Approx 5,510.00 EURO

This initial cost plan excludes any micro funding which may/may not be needed for content purchase within the virtual world.

• 15 billions minutes of voice have been delivered in Second Life. That's equal to 28,539 years.
• Linden Labs is lauching AvaLine, a service which allows people to make calls from a landline to a user in Second Life, and vice versa..
• Those interested in health related activites in the virtual enviornment should check out this site with results from a survey on the very topic.
• On June 10th, 2009 approx. 40 students at Bryant & Stratton College will graduate from their on-line degree program via second Life

I highly enjoyed "What would google do" by Jeff Jarvis, with some highly interesting views on media, retail, public institutions, manufacturing etc. Really worth a read!

However, As I read the line "In these miles, airlines, created a virtual currency with greater reach and value than the fake currencies of Second Life or Facebook" (p. 184) I found myself closing my eyes and exhaling... simply put, I do believe that such airline virtual currencies would have greater reach in the physical world but there was absolutely no need to describe the currencies of Second Life or any other virtual community as fake. Bad form and poor choice of words in my opinion. Still, love the overall book though! Go Jeff :-) WWDO!



Anyone wanting to read an intereting take on this subject matter see: Making Real Money in Virtual Worlds: MMORPGs and Emerging Business Opportunities, Challenges and Ethical Implications in Metaverses by Papagiannidis, S; Bourlakis, M; Li, F,

I am of mixed opinion on the whole "steep learning curve" issue with virtual worlds such as Second Life. Talking with a student in Second Life that was taking part in a class project, he seemed to disagree with the issue. Obviously it all depends on ones comfort level with a technology but I think people can easily and quickly learn how to participate in virtual worlds especially with the large community behind the education of Newbies such as the NCI group. The real learning curve is simply creating artifacts (textures, scripting etc) which not everyone wants to do.

I came across a interesting post by Geoff Duncan titled "Second Life looks to Offer Enterprises Their Own Virtual Worlds". Fantastic, about time! Ever since I migrated over from ActiveWorlds to Second Life (very late in doing so) the first thing that struck me was that residents could not have their own virtual world. While this is not exactly the same thing, in Aw anyone could buy a world, this article talks about worlds for enterprises but I'm surprised it has taken so long for them to provide this service. Granted there are Islands and enterprises can freely place restrictions on their lands but I always found owning your own virtual world empowering and highly secure and I'm sure organisations will feel the same.

When Robert Frederick built the ActiveWorlds facebook application in 2007 I really thought the marriage of social networks and virtual worlds would start to come about, that perhaps facebook users would interact in each others with a mini -meaningful- virtual world or even virtual home attached to their profile. The said application has 208 monthly active users at present... I think that successful integration is a long time away.

I am hopeful that more enterprises will take on board their own virtual world, be it Second Life, Wonderland, ActiveWorlds etc for their own internal business. And I am hopeful that social networks and virtual worlds will integrate more and more, to what extent I am not sure but I think the next few years of development will be very interesting.

UPDATE: Check out rikomatic's blog post on SmallWorlds, a flash based virtual world which can easily be embedded on your social networking profiles such as Facebook or myspace. SmallWorlds "is a free online 3D virtual world where you can meet friends, play games, do missions, listen to music, watch videos and so much more. Decorate your apartment, buy clothes, or adopt a pet!"(Facebook application description) currently with 24,973 monthly active users!

Best Practices in Education Conference: 27 - 29 March 2009

The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference was held in the virtual world of Second Life 27 - 29 March 2009. See treet.tv's selection of videos from the conference.




My favourite is the discussion with Tom Boellstorff (RL) - Tom Bukowski (SL) on virtual learning: practices and possibilitites. For those unaware of Tom Boellstroff, he is the author of "coming of Age in Second Life", an ethnographic account of Second Life which I found to be a pleasent and accurate description of life within a virtual world. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about Second Life!

Over the past few months I have been reviewing literature on virtual worlds, their place in the web of on-line communities, how they have evolved and what is happening within them today - most specifically focusing on Second Life. Why Second Life? Well many reviews of virtual worlds tend to use Second Life as a key example, with hype and criticism on the value of virtual worlds focusing on Second Life – a space where content is created, people collaborate and groups of communities form and grow by the interests of users (residents).

I cannot help but ignore the ever-growing criticism of virtual worlds, the numerous organisations that have experimented and left e.g. Google lively, as well as my day to day encounters with people still hung up on the question “why would anyone spend money for a pair of virtual shoes in a game?”. My simple answer to this is that if you are still using the world game in describing virtual world environments such as Second Life then you need to stand back and really see what is happening in there.

Virtual Worlds are not the be all and end all. Will all distributed businesses replace teleconferencing etc with virtual worlds? Will masses of users flock away from amazon.com to go wander around a virtual shop to do some last minute Christmas shopping? in both cases... hardly. For many, virtual worlds have yet to prove their value, having glimpsed and simply moved away with their own quick conclusions that these spaces provide little value especially in their current state. They may be right. But looking beyond what virtual worlds can do for the inner workings of a business (such as the virtual meeting via avatars that we have all heard about), we must acknowledge the current way various people learn and where they learn.

Are next generation of users, current professionals and many others using and learning in them? Are they providing some with severe disabilities with a highly interactive social outlet? Indeed they are. Of course virtual worlds are nothing new, before ever reaching university I had spent many hours as a teenager in Activeworlds (think pre-secondlife) where I built virtual buildings, made on-line connections with people, learned a basic in-world scripting language allowing for a (then) highly interactive experience. I have often grounded by basic understanding of many things from coding, on-line collaborating, text chat (lol’s, lmao, brb, afk etc), editing photos in Photoshop to create a picture to simply place in a virtual environment, etc by associating them with things I learnt growing up during times socialising on-line in a virtual world. Yes that’s right, I logged on and interacted in a virtual world growing up, It didn’t consume my life, I just liked the idea of chatting and ‘building’ with other people on-line. Similarly, today when users build in Second Life they use and sometimes create their own scripts and textures and mashups, which receive feedback and criticisms. They learn. I am a firm believer that this manner of learning in which many younger users are becoming more and more accustomed to can and should be harnessed more effectively. Having students learn new skills in a social context still ends up with the result of students learning. And yes it is a social context, spend some time in a virtual world, treat it as a world not a game. In a game things jump put out at you, entertain you, keep your attention. I am talking about a virtual world and in much the same way as in the physical world you must search for things that interest you. It’s all there, just look. So if you are a lecturer, why not bring a class into a virtual world – a shared learning environment? See the many universities working in Second Life for example California State University, Los Angeles whereby the class of students developed their own shared creations.

Virtual Worlds have the ability to provide a shared, social, semantic space within ones own home. Those confined by whatever means to their home have the ability to reach out and interact with a large community of people from around the world that may share their day to day struggles. I am not suggesting that it is the only way, or that it is the best way, I am simply acknowledging the social values that it may bring to many more people in the future as it has already begun to do so in the last few years.

Think Second Life for those with severe multiple sclerosis (see Alice Krueger in Second Life). Think Second Life for visually impaired users. Some great work and discussion in this area has already begun and is growing, e.g. Stephen Vickers research project on Rapid Gaze Based Interaction Techniques with on-line virtual environments for motor-impaired users and voanews video on disabled users in Second Life. I would recommend anyone interested in this health/medical application for virtual worlds to learn about the Health Info Island project in Second Life funded by the Greater Midwest Region of the National Network/National Library of Medicine. Of course these virtual environments provide a place for distributed learning with in-world projects focusing on public health. See this clip on Second Life + Public health. Finally, the journal of Virtual Worlds is soon to release papers focusing on Health and Virtual Worlds.

I would be greatly interested in hearing others opinions on this topic.