Might there be a Second Life aspect of our conference? Some of us have very limited travel resources and would be interested in participating as fully as possible using a location in Second Live. Here is an example of a recursive nesting of real and virtual events. This is a recording of Rebecca Nesson teaching a class both in a classroom at Harvard and in Second Life on Berkman Island. The students in the real classroom see the avatars in SL while the "student avatars" see the real classroom. Could we do something like this for our conference?
http://www.robertcat.net/RebeccaSpeaking/RebeccaSpeaking.html
Comments (3)
Stu Shulman said
at 4:02 pm on Jun 22, 2008
I see no reason not explore it. Please use this page on the wiki to develop the idea and identify the practical implications for the conference organizing effort.
Bruce Neubauer said
at 4:29 pm on Jun 22, 2008
There could be a registration fee that would be required to participate either in real life (IRL) or virtually via Second Life. That would serve to support the financial needs of the meeting while giving folks with limited travel budgets a less costly way to participate.
If the anticipation is that the conference will be well-attended, then having its counterpart in Second Life would probably not compromise the quality of the "real life" interactions at the conference and might even increase the total number of registration fees received.
Setting up the kind of recursive live classroom Rebecca had would probably be costly and a lot of work. We could get permission to use Berkman Island, i think. The challenge would be the setup required to do QuickTime streaming in real time.
The potential values of "blended conferences" are high enough for us to consider taking a step in that direction. I recall vaguely that Al Gore spoke somewhere as a holographic projection in real time.
An island in Second Life will only support about 30 or so avatars at one time. Maybe we should be thinking in terms of a SL panel rather than trying to "blend" the entire conference.
This is all speculation. It is lightening here and i need to shut down the machine for a while. :-)
Bruce Neubauer said
at 5:39 pm on Jun 22, 2008
How about this? We could have one or two panels in Second Life with the understanding that those who present on those panels must prepare and upload their presentations to YouTube. I don't think it is possible to stream from YouTube into SL because SL requires QuickTime and YouTube is Flash. Panel members could present via YouTube outside of SL and then discuss inside SL. The problem is that people attending the meeting are not likely to have access to SL while at the meeting. Most of the communcation within SL is still texting. If the SL display was projected onto a screen for a panel session i think the people viewing it at the conference would find the texting to be too slow. Maybe this is a rabbit that I am trying to chase too early in the evolution of Web 2.0. Having a stand-alone panel in SL and letting registered persons discuss papers "there" based on presentations previously uploaded to YouTube could work.
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