Technically Random

The latest in the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About … ” series.

7 Things You Should Know About Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters
of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,” and a thriving
economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases,
individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only
for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities
for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators
easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different
strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach
can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

I have an account in SL and spent way too much time trying to make my avatar look even remotely like me (although for some people, maybe that’s not the goal). I haven’t explored very much but I do know there is a Second Life Library Project. Right now my first life is leaving me barely enough time for sleep and a small guilty dosage of bad television.

A couple of related articles came across my RSS reader within a few days of each other.

Virtual Worlds Poised to Become Valuable Work Tools from ReadWriteWeb talks about a new report from Forrester on the use of virtual worlds in the workplace.  I’m not going to repeat the whole post, but it does talk about the ways some big organizations are using virtual worlds, like Second Life, to bring employees together to meet and collaborate.

Prediction Markets at Google: A Guest Post appeared on the NYT Freakonomics Blog a few days later and it discusses some research done at Google on predictors of success in their internal prediction market.  One of the biggest predictors of success, it turns out, is physical location of the individual’s workspace.  Participation on the same cross-departmental project did not have any effect on trading behavior, though participation on similar email lists did yield similar trading behavior.  One of the comments to this post describes how the work spaces at Linden Lab (creator of Second Life) have been arranged so that people do not share office space with others working on the same team or project.  Team and project work happens in virtual office space in Second Life.

These two posts got me thinking about information flow and idea generation in our organization.  We are spread across 700 acres on the Seattle campus and 70+ miles up and down the Puget Sound corridor.  Where’s the water cooler?  We have some intentional sharing gatherings like the Final Friday Information Literacy Group meetings but how can we have those hallway meetings when our hallways are in different buildings?  The articles above show that the physical arrangement of staff and the smart use of technology can go a long way to enhancing communication in the organization.