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I am a librarian at Cal Poly Pomona. I have an M.S. in library and information science and an M.A. in English. This weblog reflects my interests in library & information science, literature, language, culture, and the arts. Click for my full profile.
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Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums Conference (3/08/2008) Today was my second time attending a virtual conference and my first time attending one in Second Life. Here's the first of several writeups I plan on doing to keep the lessons fresh for myself. For starters, this conference required a registration fee of US$30 be paid in Linden dollars. I had to deposit money into my Second Life account, where it's converted to Linden dollars, which I then used to pay the conference registrar. If you've never deposited money into your Second Life account before, the first time you try to do so you will discover that you cannot deposit more than $10, but after that your daily trading limit goes up. I made 2 deposits on 2 separate days to add up to US$30. To attend the conference, I crawled out of bed this morning at 7:30 am, put on my bathrobe, grabbed some breakfast, turned on my computer, and logged into Second Life. I scrolled through a list of conference-related messages and accepted a a packet of conference materials, including a schedule with locations/SLURLs. To get to the keynote at 8 am, I opened my schedule, scrolled until I saw the keynote listed on the schedule, and clicked on its SLURL to get teleported to the amphitheater where it's being given. I repeated this process for the presentations at 9am, 10am, 11am, 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm. I was impressed that all of the presentations started right on time. Every presenter used audio chat to talk to the audience. There were some technical difficulties early on, both on my end as I fiddled with my audio chat settings and on the presenters' end, but they were resolved very quickly as there were many conference volunteers on hand to help. For the text chat portion, some presenters got help from volunteers or co-presenters to type as they spoke, and some copy and pasted notes into the chat window. Very few provided no text at all and only did so after confirming with the audience that this was acceptable. Seating was limited at each location due to (I believe) connectivity purposes. While your seat location matters less in-world than in real life (RL) because you can always zoom to see better, it does help to sit close to the projection panel if you want to take snapshots and avoid getting the tops of people's heads in your pictures. As far as meeting people, I was utterly delighted at how similar a SL conference was to a RL conference. To find out more about the presenters and my fellow conference attendees, all I had to do was click on their names, open their profiles, and read the information they provided. I added many people as friends, the SL version of exchanging business cards, and joined several groups I didn't know about as well as one that I did know about but couldn't join until a member added me today. Today's conference in SL beat the virtual conference I attended several years ago by miles and miles. Back then a virtual conference was all asynchronous. To "attend" the presentations and posters, I had to scroll through pages and pages of text. I didn't feel engaged at all, and of course I met no one. The RL conferences I've attended are barely any better. They're expensive and exhausting. The long plane rides, the uncomfortable hotel beds, the constant running to get from one presentation to another, and the lack of time to feed oneself have led me to come home with a cold more than once. In comparison, today I was able to take a nap between the morning and evening sessions just by walking from my computer to the bedroom. The feedback survey I filled out at the end of the conference indicated that our input would be used to plan next year's conference. I sincerely hope there will be one because I'll be the first to sign up! PS: Check out my pictures from the conference! PPS: Read this entry on the ALA TechSource blog by Tom Peters. |
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Copyright 2003-2008 Julie Shen