Yesterday (Saturday, March 8), I went to the ‘Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums Conference’ in SL. It was held at the beautiful ‘NMC Conference Center’ sim (owned by the New Media Consortium). You can see the full schedule on the conference website.

Now that a day has passed, some of the things that stand out for me are:

• The talk by Desideria Stockton and Eloise Pasteur, about how they got English Literature students to make Web-based videos and SL structures to interpret a poem by Maya Angelou. In the second half hour, they had us (the audience) record some poetry (audio), upload it, and make a trigger to play it in SL!
• JJ Drinkwater and Aldo Stern led a great discussion about how to build thriving learning communities in SL, based on their involvement with projects like Caledon and Renaissance Island.
• Doug Mandelbrot (from IBM) and Violet Portola (from Sun Microsystems) talked a bit about what their respective companies are doing in SL, and their views on the future. Note: Both IBM and Sun were sponsors, and have a lot going on in the virtual worlds space. Microsoft, on the other hand, was noticeable by their absence.
• In virtual worlds, where all the ‘content’ is digital, what’s the difference between libraries and museums?

I gave a presentation titled ‘An Overview of Science-Related Stuff in Second Life.’

Overall, I thought the conference was very well-run, with lots of information beforehand and plenty of help for people new to SL.

Update on May 19, 2009 by Troy McConaghy

This blog post used to include an embedded video of my presentaiton (slides plus audio). Unfortunately, the service hosting that video (JumpCut, a Yahoo! site) shut down, so now it’s gone.