Call for Abstracts/Participation

Please join us in a workshop on Learning and Research in Second Life on October 7, 2009 in Milwaukee at Internet Research 10.0 (http://ir10.aoir.org/).

** Abstract Deadline August 7th.  **

Second Life(R) is a 3d virtual environment created by Linden Lab, which has captured the attentions of researchers and teachers from around the world from a variety of disciplines.

This workshop aims to improve the understanding of Second Life as a Learning and Research environment. It will bring 35 researchers and professionals together to collaborate, discuss and workshop diverse topics related to research and learning in Second Life. The workshop will be a full day workshop, from 9am to 5pm.

Layout of the workshop

We’ll start the workshop with “speed networking”, after which we’ll work on the two main topics of the workshop: learning and research in Second Life. We’ll try to answer questions like: How can we better enable learning in this sphere? How can we better enable research? What kind of features do we need from virtual environments for our work? What can we do to help develop virtual environments even further? The goal of this workshop is to create a roadmap of future use of virtual environments for research and teaching. As a highlight, John Lester (Pathfinder Linden) from Linden Labs will give a keynote at the workshop. The talk will be broadcast to Second Life.The workshop is a live exercise of learning and working simultaneously in RL and Second Life . This workshop will be simultaneously organized in Second Life and the two workshops will meet at key points during the day. In order to facilitate interaction between the RL and Second Life groups, all participants of the live workshop in Milwaukee are encouraged to take a WiFi-enabled Second Life capable laptop with them. All participants are asked to update the Second Life profiles, as these are printed and used as “calling cards” at the workshop.After the workshop participants are invited to collaborate in writing an article Roadmap for Next Generation of Virtual Environments for Research and Teaching, which will be based on the outcomes of the workshop.

Submissions

We encourage researchers to submit abstracts and short biography which will be distributed amongst participants before the workshop. First invitations will be offered to those who provide abstracts or full papers for consideration. Subsequent invitation will be made based upon research/teaching statement and biography. If you are interested in participating, please send an email containing your abstract/paper and biography (pdf, doc, rtf, odf) to isto.huvila(a)abm.uu.se.  Indicate in your mail also whether you are applying to participate the workshop in RL in Milwaukee or in Second Life.

Decisions will be made by September 1st, barring incident.  There is a limit of 35 participants at the physical meeting; the event will be simulcast into Second Life.

We welcome professionals, faculty and graduate students to participate.

This workshop is organized by Kim Holmberg (Åbo Akademi University, Finland), Isto Huvila (Uppsala University, Sweden and Åbo Akademi University, Finland) and Terry Beaubois (Montana State University, USA). Questions may be sent to secondlifeworkshop(at)library2pointoh.fi.

In the midst of writing up the thesis and with the approaching deadline I find myself more and more neurotic about what I’m doing. I’m questioning whether I know what I’m doing and turn to Web search engines for guidance, because we all know that they know everything, even where you have left your car keys when you can’t find them.

First I turned to Google to find more about webometrics, and to my big surprise I’ve got it completely wrong. I thought webometrics started in late 1990′s with a paper written by Almind and Ingwersen (Almind, T.C. & Ingwersen, P. (1997). Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: methodological approaches to “webometrics”. Journal of Documentation, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 404-426.). But boy did I get it wrong. It was a lucky fluke that I checked with Google and can correct this error in my thesis now. Apparently webometrics have been around since 1526.

Now that I got the correct date I turned to the new search engine that has an answer for everything, Wolfram Alpha. I asked Wolfram: “What is webometrics?” and after a few microseconds I got an answer:

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

My thoughts exactly. And what a relief, because if Wolfram doesn’t know what webometrics is, then I don’t need to know it either. Phew, I’m glad I turned to search engines for help. Now I can happily continue writing my thesis and write about all these new things I’ve learned about webometrics.