Transcript for NMC Campus Seriously Engaging

Seriously Engaging

The Story of the NMC Campus in Second Life

[♫ soothing music ♫]

The new media consortium is an international not-for-profit organization

of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations,

and other learning-focused bodies,

dedicated to pushing the edge of new media and new technology.

For several years, the NMC has been at the forefront of using the two-dimensional Web

as a space for convening people around new ideas and knowledge sharing.

The rich, interactive, three-dimensional NMC campus,

is located in the virtual world of Second Life.

The campus extends the NMC experience into 3-D virtual space,

providing a space for insightful interaction, collaboration,

learning, and experimentation, while encouraging the exploration of the potential of virtual environments.

It is a place intended to inspire creative ideas,

and stimulate thoughtful discourse, related to the potential of such spaces.

It has been designed to be playful, yet serious, at the same time.

The campus itself encourages exploration and interaction,

and most visitors will find something new on every visit.

Like the World Wide Web before, Second Life is a platform that allows users to share

their ideas and creations with others around the world.

But Second Life extends the internet into a three-dimensional world,

where visitors can interact in realtime, in a shared virtual space.

Seventy-five percent of users, in a rapidly growing population,

have contributed content to a world that is 100% user created.

As a place of endless creativity, Second Life provides a richer creative social experience

than is available on the 2-D Web.

Unpredictable, emergent behaviors abound, in a world where users are given free rein.

And many Second Life residents have turned their play environment

into their real-world careers.

Lindex is a free-market currency exchange that enables content creators,

whose varied skills range from graphic design to software development,

to sell digital worlds for real money.

Entreprenuers in marketing, real estate, and professional services,

have created professional companies around the platform.

A secondary market of contractors has emerged to support entreprenuerial efforts.

The NMC campus exists in this virtual universe,

and is designed both to complement and extend it.

The societal and economic aspects of Second Life inform the mission of the campus,

which is to demonstrate how rich virtual worlds like Second Life

can be put to productive use solving real-world issues.

A variety of meeting spaces facilitate this work and allow the exploration of the human side

of working in a 3-D virtual environment.

The library and museum are experimental spaces.

The Malcolm Brown Library is the focal point of experiments exploring the intersection

of 3-D virtual space and the Web.

The Aho Gallery and the Constable Room are places where the boundaries

between art and representation and between art and derivatives, are explored.

Originally built to support a series of virtual conversations,

the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning,

given the tremendous response it has received,

a wide range of activities are now planned for the NMC campus.

From large-scale virtual components of real-life events, like the NMC Summer Conference,

to events held entirely in Second Life,

one possible future of the NMC campus is to be the home for a series

of NMC meetings in virtual space.

Already underway is the significant use of the space by undergraduate and graduate classes

interested in virtual environments, and much more such use is planned.

What is most likely, however, just as in all of Second Life,

is that the visitors to the NMC campus will find uses for it

that we cannot possibly imagine today.

To learn more about the NMC's journey into virtual space,

and to follow along as the project progresses,

see the NMC Campus Observer, a blog set up to record not only our insights,

but those of other Second Life residents as well.

www.nmc.org/sl