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Alumni Home > Learning & Travel > Learning
March 12, 2008
On Wednesday, March 12th, the MIT Alumni Association hosted a webcast exploring virtual worlds and how they are changing the ways we interact.
Whether you are just learning about virtual communities or spend most of your life in cyber space, you don't want to miss out on this program! View the broadcast.
The Broadcast featured:
Speakers:
- Hello Avatar! What Virtual Worlds Mean for Human Communication
Professor Coleman will discuss her research on the use and design of avatar-based virtual worlds and how they are entering popular use in networked communication.
Beth Coleman, Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media
- What Kind of World Would You Make: Second Life as Thought Experiment
Second Life and other virtual worlds represent a powerful demonstration of what I call Participatory Culture. From the start, it was marketed as a world which would be created through the collective contributions of its users. And because
users come with many different motives and from many different kinds of settings, Second Life represents a hybrid media environment, one where
commercial, nonprofit, governmental, educational, subcultural, and amateur contributors seek to reshape the world in their own images. Each of these
groups are deploying Second Life as the site for thought experiments which allow them to rethink their real world institutions and practices.
Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities
Moderator:
- Steven R. Lerman '72, SM '73, PhD '75, Dean for Graduate Students; Class of 1922 Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering; Co-director for the Singapore-MIT Alliance; Chair, Faculty Advisory Committee of the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW); and Director, Center for Educational Computing Initiative.
Viewing Opportunities
View the broadcast. (You will need Real Player 8 or later, which can be downloaded for free.)
Other Related MIT Resources:
MIT World
Technology Review
- Second Earth: Print Edition - A startup hopes to compete with Google Earth by building a more natural world. By Wade Roush, Technology Review, July 2007
- A New Perspective on the Virtual World - The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an immersive, 3-D visual environment that combines elements of social virtual worlds such as Second Life and mapping applications such as Google Earth. What happens when the virtual and real worlds collide? By Erica Naone, Technology Review, September 2007
The Sociable Media Group
The Sociable Media Group, part of the Media Lab, investigates issues concerning society and identity in the networked world. Meet the people, explore the projects and read the articles coming out of this exciting initiative.
MIT Hosts Institute-wide Second Life Design Competition
The challenge of the competition was to design and create a space within Second Life to represent campus living spaces, represented by clusters of Pods. The Pods were to be modular, replicable and easily customized so that any MIT student could join Second Life and, with little foreknowledge, create and add his or her own Pod to a cluster.
How Virtual Worlds Will Transform the Way We Do Business
On February 20th, Enterprising Georgia, a joint venture of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta and the Georgia Research Alliance hosted "How Virtual Worlds Will Transform the Way We Do Business." This event is now available for online viewing.
Previous Broadcast
"It's a Small World," took place on November 15th, 2007, and included a panel of three MIT faculty members, from a variety of disciplines and research areas, discussing the various aspects of nanotechnology and the ways in which MIT is paving the way in this field. An archived webcast of the discussion is now available.
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