You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2007.
By now, we’ve all heard that gamers are not just kids. Here’s another study by The Entertainment Software Association of Canada that suggests that almost half of our adults are gamers and the average age of gamers is 39. Most are computer game players rather than console gamers (XBox, etc).
I’m catching up on blog reading and finding all the neat stuff I missed. In case you missed this, here’s another one that Stephen’s Lighthouse pointed to - this time on the work IBM is doing to create a universal avatar. This avatar would ideally be able to work in any virtual world (and possibly game). Another thing that struck me was that over $1 billion has been invested in virtual worlds in the last year.
Innovation and change - this has been a central idea at our libraries for over a year now. We’ve seen a lot of both and I think we’ve moved in a lot of good directions. Stephen’s Lighthouse pointed to a neat post on innovation and change which lists 33 things to consider. The one that stuck me the most was to change buy-in to join-in. I think this makes a lot of sense. To me, buy-in suggests varying levels of commitment. You can buy-in to an idea that you don’t completely believe in. Join-in suggests a higher level of commitment. By joining in, you are actually taking part in the change or innovation. It suggests an exchange of ideas, participation, and active community. I think innovation and change might be less scary to some if they just joined in.
I’ve been asked by a few people for the report I wrote up about McMaster’s SL Virtual Reference Pilot. It’s now online here. It doesn’t really delve into service models and such as it probably should. I hope to do some in-depth research on virtual reference in SL and virtual worlds in an upcoming research leave, so I’ll share when it’s done.
Back from the WNY/O ACRL Conference: No Chalk Dust: Teaching and Learning in an Online Environment.
The keynote speaker was Harry E. Pence - aka John2 Kepler. It turns out that this ended up being another case of SL meets RL, as I’ve chatted with him in SL. I’m still not used to meeting SL people in RL, but it was a nice encounter nonetheless. His talk changed a bit from the conference program - he concentrated on innovation in libraries and innovation with little support. I felt rather lucky, as my library has been quite supportive of my foray into virtual worlds but it is often not the case. These are just a few of the points I took from his session.
- He stressed selling the sizzle, not the steak - most people don’t understand SL right away, we need to stress how SL can support the mission and goals of the university overall.
- Innovation requires success from 3 levels - self, the department and the university. It is rare to have the skill set to be successful in all 3 levels, so noted that it is important to have a champion from the department and/or administration.
- SL attracts risk takers, those willing to try without support
- Innovators burn out without support
- Fear often stands in the way of innovation and this fear of change can be more destructive than change itself.
The second session was a panel discussing some of the experiences and challenges of using SL in an academic institution.
The final session shared a class on Designed Play. They’ve been doing some interesting activities. The class involves students noting cool sites-of-the-day, reading responses, creating an sl avatar, 3 in-class projects (product, derive, sl retail space), a personal blog and a final project. Unfortunately, I was too busy watching the videos to take very good notes for this session.
My slides will be linked here soon.
The conference was a nice small conference - great for meeting people and sharing ideas. It was great going home after the conference feeling refreshed rather than tired from the constant flow of information that happens after a multi-day conference. I’d recommend the conference to others in the area.
Wish I had a bus like this one! Moncton is offering wireless on their buses! While the bus may be one of the few places where you can escape work, there are advantages to having wireless on a long ride. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before others follow suit.
I’m not sure if I’ve mention this or not, but we have decided to continue our SL virtual reference pilot project into the fall. In 3 months, with 80 hours of service and without much marketing, we answered over 120 SL and real life (RL) related questions from SL residents, McMaster affiliates (alumni, incoming students and existing students) and librarians. We hope to market the service more this term, recruit more volunteers and have already increased our hours of service to 8 a week. If you have any questions about the pilot, please feel free to contact me. I’m off to the WNY/O ACRL conference tomorrow to talk about reference in a virtual world and our pilot and will try to remember to post my slide, in case you’re interested.
Thanks to fellow SL archivist Christi Janus for his kind review of our pilot on his blog!
Radiohead decided to release their album online - without a price. They gave fans the option to pay what they wanted! My guess is that many will still give something to have the album. Wouldn’t it be nice if database providers would do the same? Again, I’d be willing to pay something, just not the crazy prices many are asking for.
There has been a lot of speculation in recent months about the possibility of Google creating a virtual world. Second Life has opened the door to user created content in a 3D virtual world. Google could be an amazing solution to the myriad of problems SL has. The 3D modeling capabilities that Google has already created would be an amazing boon to the creation of virtual worlds. The blogging world has already noted that Google is working on something new with the help of the Arizona State University. Google has also recently purchased the social networking platform Zingku. Could these be steps to a social virtual world or will it end in a Google social networking site. I would love to see what Google could do with a 3D virtual world and can only hope that they will be moving in that direction soon. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Here’s a neat story. Libraries in Nova Scotia have teamed up with phone companies to provide children’s stories. I think this is a great idea, especially since many children don’t live close to a public library. Children call a toll-free number to hear pre-recorded stories. The project’s aim is to help install a love of literacy, and I think story telling, to children.
