Alluding to the new SL Viewer 2.0,  he talked about taking the wraps off the new user experience work that Linden Lab has  been working on during 2009!  He started with a summary of some 2009 statistics:

• 2009 User-user transactions grew by 65%.
• Xstreet Sales grew 74% 2008-2009.
• User hours grew 21% to 481 million per year.
• Active users grew by 5%

• Announced Linden Endowment for the Arts, designed to support, encourage and highlight Second Life artists. Recipients of an arts endowment will include a land grant; the creation of a dedicated Second Life arts committee; and the capability for Linden Lab to store art creations for future generations.

But so much of the content has been in a walled-gardent, because of “thick” downloads and viewers.  ”We must make it easier to amplify your awesome“.

In order to bring in new users, creators, business’s, organizers, etc., and because Linden Lab knows that new users become consumers the only way to do this (to increase the 5% user growth noted above) is to make the platform/ecosystem successful.  In doing this Linden Lab looked to lessons learned from Facebook and iPhone -”experience matters”; the  Quality of the Experience!  The eco-system (Second Life)  creates the experience.

For 2009 the focus has been on the user experience and how it is mediated via the viewer.  The complexity of the viewer made it hard to adjust to Second Life, creating a feeling for new users of being overwhelmed.  To address this issue  Viewer 2.0 is being rolled out as a Beta today.

Viewer 2.0 -  is the most ambitious project by Linden Lab to date (hmmm I’m thinking the Second Life platform had to be pretty abmitious for them).  Some of the Viewer 2.0 capabilities are: shared media (support for Flash – finally), better search, easier navigation, alpha masks, and most importantly it is easier to use!

Search:  Powered by Google Search Appliance,  my understand is that search will be an html experience allowing for search to be  desegregated from the client.

Communication:  Separate public from private chats. Made an effort to make voice more easily accessible.  Messaging can now be managed (just like an in-box).

Home Panel – 100% html, will be (or can be) account and location aware.  Mesh is not part of 2.0 but is coming later this year.

Shared Media (game changer??) – place any web URL onto a surface and allows you to interact with it just like a web browser, as you click a part of the web page the viewer will animate the  camera to view the media – it breaks down the walled garden of Second Life including access to flash.  Opens up Second Life to web-standard type tools and technologies.  Supposedly this feature is drag and drop!

For 2010 Roadmap Linde Labs will be looking at asynchronous and synchronous interactions and how that works.  But more broadly thinking how to improve the overall experience for the full life cycle, not just the newbie experience.  Social experience, creator and developer experience will be targeted.  Introducing new capabilities Media, Mesh, investing in platform (more scalable, modular), virtual goods, etc.

Intellectual Property – new tool for IP, called the viewer directory that lists 3rd party viewers that respect the rights of content developers.  Viewer developers must comply with SL policies and SL terms of service.  IP complaint process, IP takedown tool, Viewer Directory, Seller Register, and a new Commerce System.  The openess of SL can not harm integrity of SL, SL will protect creators.

SnowGlobe 2.0 was also announced.

Tom’s biggest message seemed to be Linden Labs supporting “Amplifying the Awesome” by creating a platform that will help developers and through the new viewer allow new users to enter Second Life and not be overwhelmed with the “what do I do now” question.  The attempt is to make the functioning of Second Life more intuitive – lets see how things shake out.

As some might know I’ve been using Second Life in my financial accounting class at the University of Central Florida since the fall 2007 semester.  Since that time my class size has gone from an average of 200+ to 800+.  I have tweaked the learning objects each semester to try to improve the students learning experience, from the way the students interact with the 3-D accounting equation and interactive T-account to how they submit their homework, now employing automated homework boxes that examine the formatting of the data and the naming convention of the notecards that the students use.  The homework on the notecards is now automatically read and sent to a MySql database and a confirmation e-mail is sent (well usually this works) to students so that they know they’ve submitted things properly.

As the occasional reader of this blog will know, well firstly I only occasionally post, but secondly I’m interested in using Second Life to engage my students in what surprisingly I’ve been told is a rather un-engaging topic.  So I’m always listening to feedback from my students about my use of Second Life and the problems some of them have.  In fact when asked how my students feel I usually reply that anecdotally the students fall into thirds: 1/3 really like it, 1/3 really hate it, and 1/3 just use it because it’s something that is required.

But as I prepare for the start of the Spring 2010 semester I thought I should look at some actual data to see how students feel.  I am always cognizant of the cost/benefit of using Second Life for my students and for ME (as it takes up most of  my time, answering orientation questions, grading non-automated HW assignments, dealing with students whose laptops aren’t powerful enough, etc.).  And I wanted to see if the “noise” from the 1/3 “I hate it group” is causing me to actually inflate the size of that group – the old squeaky wheel thing going on.

So I looked at data I collect at the end of each semester.  I ask my students to take a survey in which I ask for feedback on all the technology I use in the course: Second Life, Twitter, Concept Mapping software, My Accounting Lab, and Meebo (yes I know its a lot of technology for an accounting course).  I’m not going to go over all the results to that survey in this post but want to examine one of the questions that I ask:

For each of the Second Life objects listed below, use the scale below to indicate your agreement with the following: I felt that the Second Life objects helped my understanding of the underlying accounting concepts in acg2021

These are the results:

For Fall 2009 40.7% of the students agreed or strongly agreed that Second Life helped them understand the underlying concepts of financial accounting! And it’s actually better then that.  Included in the average % is data related to students who used Second Life to watch my lectures (as opposed to using a website – though 15% of students did report they watched lectures at least some of the time via Second Life), removing that and just examining how the students felt the learning objects helped them to understand the underlying concepts of financial accounting we see that 47% of the students agreed or strongly agreed that Second Life helped them to learn accounting!  Wow!  So how do previous semesters stack up, here they are:

Spring 2009

Fall 2008

Spring 2008

You will notice that when class sizes are relatively smaller more students felt that the use of Second Life helped them to understand the accounting concepts, those students who agreed or strongly agreed overall represented 55.5% and 58.6% when using just the learning objects.

Fall 2007

The number’s here are comparatively low, but during this semester Second Life was voluntary and not a required component of the course.

So (and BTW if you’re still reading this far down, thanks!) I would say that any tool in which 40% or more students agree helps them to understand accounting is well worth the effort.



Second Life Prefrences for Text Chat

Once you’ve done this, you can now chat with a group of avatars and they will see your chat translated into the language you’ve selected in your prefences (see Chat Language above) and their chat will also be translated.

I teach accounting so you might wonder how this could affect me.  Well not only does the chat translator work with avatar chat but it also works with object chat.  That is, with the text an educational object is scripted to “say”.  This could be objects used in an orientation for your students, or in learning objects.  Now if a student is more comfortable in a language other then English, they can use the same objects you create and read the chat in their own language.  For example see this image of my accounting equation providing feedback and notice that the text is shown in both English and Spanish.

Second Life Translations

Now I don’t know Spanish so I can’t vouch for how good (or not good) they are, but I imagine they will only improve over time.  Certainly if I was teaching a foreign language this would be a huge boon, but I can also see other possibilities, what if there were an accounting translation version?  Accounting after all is the language of business, and many first time students struggle more with all the new terminology then with the actual number crunching.

To try it out yourself you need to download the beta Snow Globe Viewer, the links are provided below (Note: I was using the Mac version and it worked just fine).

For Windows, Mac, or Linux

“Green Phosphor’s product is called Glasshouse, and it is a gateway which can take a database query or a spreadsheet and place a 3D representation of it into a virtual world. Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively – all from within a virtual world.”

But as reported in the post the capabilities of data visualization are many:

“First off I believe that visualization of money in/money out could have turned authorities on to the fishy accounting Enron was up to, and caught them earlier. Perhaps better visualization would have revealed Madoff’s ponzi scheme as well. It’s a matter of seeing the big picture; money must come from somewhere and be tied to intrinsic value at some point. My third example is similar, but rather than money in/money out it is about energy in/energy out. I believe proper visualization of the process for producing ethanol fuel, including energy cost of fertilizer, would reveal the uselessness of subsidizing cornbased ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuels.”

Now imagine being able to walk through, and interact with financial reporting data, via XBRL brought into virtual worlds like Second Life – the possibilities seem endless. Glasshouse is now in public beta, I plan on trying it out soon and will certainly report back with visuals of XBRL data when that happens.

http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=1168

http://sl.nmc.org/2009/02/09/peeking-at-orientation

Here’s a link to the graphs if you like looking at pictures:  http://sl.nmc.org/reg-stats.php

The first presentation was for the 17th annual Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies and I presented some initial results of student perceptions of engagement related to their Second LIfe™ use and it’s impact on their performance. I have a lot more analysis to do and will be presenting a more detailed analysis at the upcoming Second Life™ Education Community Convention taking place September 5 – 7 in Tampa, Florida this year in conjunction with the Second Life Community Convention. I will post details of that after the session, but for those interested will post my slides from the AAA below.

My second presentation was given as part of the Conference on Teaching and Learning and was geared to how I used Second LIfe™, Twitter, Camtasia Studios, Meebo, Jing, and Concept Maps in my course. Whew that was a lot to over in 40 minutes! The slides for that are provided below.

Lastly, I was interviewed yesterday by CDB Barkley from the New Media Consortium as part of their Studio One series (follow the link for other interesting interviews). I mainly focused on the use of NMC’s orientation island which I’ve discussed previously in this blog and my plan on bringing in over 700 students this fall into Second Life™ (in just a few weeks, which says quite a bit about my lack of blog posting this summer).

Well it’s been a busy few weeks, but the real fun begins in 2 weeks as 700+ students enter begin using Second Life™, I promise to keep everyone posted with greater frequency.

One of the issues she brought up with the website performing all the tasks is that the owner is at the complete mercy of the website.  If the website malfunctions the owner looses all of its business that it would have had in that time span.  One instance in particular that was discussed during the interview was the fact that sometimes the server is overloaded and cannot process  the Linden properly.  Cathy has seen some businesses in Second Life actually go out of business as a result of this issue.  So it is defiantly something that Second Life needs to address and try to improve. 

Another possible  problem that may occur in Second Life can be associated with all aspects of the internet.  With having all of the transactions occurring between virtual users and accounting transactions being sent virtually there is a very real possibility of hacking.  There are always layers of security to protect against hacking, like encryption, firewalls, intrusion detection devices, incident response procedures, and audits by external specialist, but the possibility still lingers. 

Cathy’s business is extremely profitable.  She pays nothing to generate her tattoos, they are created in Photoshop and she uploads them to the site.  One of the expenses in her business is that it cost 10 Linden to upload a picture.  She stated out doing the tattoos for fun and it turned out she was really good so she decided to try her luck at running a business in Second Life. 

If I could go back and ask Cathy more questions I would definitely be interested to know exactly what things are listed on the sheets that Linden Lab provides to the business owners.    I would also like to know how often the sheets are provided to them, weekly, bi-weekly, etc.  All of the information I obtained during the interview was very informational and helpful.  Before this class I was not even aware Second Life existed.  Now i have a character(that now has a tattoo!!)  in a virtual reality world that i can take anywhere i want, anytime i want and  be whoever i want, and i have to admit im a little hooked.  Second Life seems to be popping up everywhere I look now, Just the other day I was reading an article on how Al Qaeda has been linked to Second Life.   I think that it is a wonderful learning tool when utilized properly as Dr. Hornik has fully demonstrated and hope that i continue seeing thses types of tools used in my future education courses.

Through the interview, Lou has provided surprisingly thorough insight into his business, and the business of virtual worlds in general. Beyond this, he gave detailed information on the accounting procedures he employs. The questions I asked are as follows:

1. What first led you to pursue a business related to Second Life?

TheSLAgency understands the potential for Virtual Worlds and how they bridge geography, enable unique experiences, and expand the imagination of its participants. That being said, we knew we needed to be in this space as the future of ‘digital dwelling’ looks more and more promising. TheSLAgency looked at several virtual worlds and found Second Life to contain a nice balance of ease-of-use verses functionality / audience. Understanding that Second Life, from a marketer’s perspective, should be used as a tool…and not a pool:

2. What are some of the companies you’ve worked with? What type of services did you provide?

TheSLAgency has successfully executed various types of marketing services for The Ontario Public Service, Nestle Nesquik, The World Bank/IFC, and MIRA Publishing to name a few. Services range from 3 to 6 month branding/messaging programs to live conferences events, recruitment drives, brand interaction, author readings/discussion, display media and virtual brand ambassador programs.

3. Why should companies consider expanding into virtual worlds?

The common denominator for all virtual worlds is the memorable & emotional experience they provide. When you can engage a consumer for upwards of 30 minutes, provide an interesting (read non-boring) training vehicle, or cost-effectively bridge geographic bounds via Virtual Meetings; it is difficult to overlook the value that VW could provide.

4. What advantages are there in marketing within virtual worlds, compared to more traditional means? What are the disadvantages?

Having a footprint in a virtual world allows for a unique brand experience and provides that emotional connection – this is an already establish goal of traditional advertising. A brand can engage their message target much more effectively and creatively via 3D content that is dynamic and innovative. Doing so builds brand affinity. From the business / corporate perspective; Virtual Worlds can enable branch offices from around the globe to meet, chat, and visualize ideas without paying hundreds of thousands in hotel & travel arrangements.

One may look at the non-standard metrics as a disadvantage to Virtual Worlds. Second Life for instance is not unlike the world-wide-web in 1995. It’s still new, adopted “only” by a few million users (compared to overall internet users) and still has many milestones to reach before it’s completely like the internet we know today. Content development in almost any virtual world is typically propriety, although in Second Life, content can be developed by anyone who learns the basics of the built-in toolset. This slight learning curve, coupled with any lack of “community management” can leave your consumer-targeted Second Life space devoid of visitors. This is what many 2006/2007 brand entrants into SL fell victim to: a poor understanding of the community, it’s wants/needs, and dreams.

5. What are the chief problems, if any, that you encounter when pitching the idea of marketing in Second Life (specifically to big name businesses)?

Some businesses fail to make the connection and see how Second Life can forward their message / brand experience. We haven’t found this to be unique to large or small businesses. A similar song has been played when CMO’s and VP’s were being pitched to budget a public website. TheSLAgency believes we are at that point again where innovation tentatively hangs up in a “why do we need this” meeting. Surprisingly enough, most businesses are intrigued, and excited about the value Virtual Worlds can bring to their brand; however, some are overly cautious, while others are willing but fail to do the proper planning.

6. Do you find that it’s becoming easier to make the case for business in virtual worlds?

There has been a surge of interest in finding & implementing business solutions within a virtual world such as Second Life. We say ‘finding’ as each approach to leveraging virtual worlds for a goal should be done analytically and carefully planned out. No solution is cookie cutter and truly visionary corporate representatives understand this.

7. What is the future of marketing in Second Life?

We see an heavy push by the business world to be involved in Second Life . Recruitment and Training are the top reasons why business-centric (non-consumer) companies inquire and work with TheSLAgency.

8. What do you see in the future of virtual worlds in general?

While it is difficult to see the future; we do see a inevitable expansion of Virtual Worlds into everyday life. This “mainstreaming” will come about when the general populace overcomes the stigma that was first associated with the internet. E.g. being “plugged in” to a virtual world.

9. Are there any other virtual worlds you’re looking at for your business? Any that interest you otherwise?

While our developers have been prototyping in several other virtual worlds; we enjoy working with Second Life due to its flexible functionality.

10. Finally, what method of accounting do you use? (Accrual, cash-basis, or “I don’t know – ask my accountant”). How do you account/keep records for transactions?

A single point of “cash” is utilized and budgeted out to the required departments. Since this leg of our business is done primarily in a virtual world, we primarily use the linden dollar to pay all but high-level employees and fund development projects when not done in-house.

Relatively speaking, accounting of SL Transactions is rather easy. Each month SL enables you to download a record of all transactions. Mind you, some transaction sheets can be thousands of entries long and require a fair amount of man-hours to process. A service-based QuickBooks template, as well as a basic understanding of spreadsheet software is really all you need.

Louis Volare (Real Life – Louis Landon) - you have to experience his music in order to believe it! Please be sure to check out Louis Volare in SL at Landon Arts, Landon (133, 243, 23) or through his RL (real life) website http://www.louislandon.com/…. You won’t be disappointed! 

Louis Landon is a wonderful musician, smart business man, and a promoter of peace that has been using SL to his advantage. Louis has stated his personal mission is “to create a more peaceful world by writing and performing music from the heart.”  That statement tells of Louis Landon’s passion for his music and mankind.  The amount of work that Louis puts into promoting his CDs and his mission of peace both through SL and RL is extensive and the success of his newest CD is proof that he is doing a great job.

 1.  What made you decide to open a business and play your beautiful music using SL?  I thought that it would be a great way to increase my fan base and reach people with my music and mission.  

2.    Do you see the use of SL as a plus to the advancing of your music/business?  Definitely.  

3.    How do you track sales and/or tips through SL?  It’s not possible to see where all CD sales or downloads come from,  but the downloads that come through secondtunes.com are all from SL. iTunes is impossible to tell, but people often tell me why they bought my CD on cdbaby.com.  And I would say that maybe 60% of my sales there are now because of SL.  

4.    What is the most challenging part of keeping accounting records through SL? It is not really a challenge at all.  SL does all the work for me and all the information is available for download. 

5.    Are you able to extract the necessary information from SL to prepare financial statements and/or tax returns?  Yes.  Everything I make in SL goes into PayPal and then is transferred directly into my corporate bank account.  Every penny is accounted for.  

6.    What advice would you give to other musicians who are contemplating using SL? I’d say, jump in. I still see SL being at the formative stages.  I believe there is a strong upside potential in SL.  It has not grown as fast as I had thought, but it is growing.  And I think the best years of SL are ahead.  My business model there continues to evolve and I find that more things are leading to RL work.  

7.    (This question is one that many fans wonder about… the Volare brothers… so I had to ask) Are you and Luigi really brothers or are you the same person?  I can’t answer that question because both Louis and Luigi would come after me. I’m not so worried about Louis. hehe

submitted by: Terri Berry (SL Avatar: TerriBerry Wrigglesworth)