Fleep's Deep Thoughts Explore the Metaverse

Discovered this little nugget over on the Not Possible In Real Life site. The author talks about Second Life in 2008 with Larry Pixel aka Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium (NMC), a big mover and shaker in the educational arena of Second Life, Forseti Svarog aka Giff Constable, COO of the Electric Sheep Company, and Seifert Surface, a brilliant mathematician who created the tesseract house.

If you’ve never heard of the Horizon Report, it is a collaborative annual report from the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE that surveys emerging technologies that will impact education in coming years, and I highly recommend it, especially for instructional designers and others involved in educational technology.

In any event, I’ve been looking forward to the 2008 report and spotted some surprising words from NMC CEO Larry Johnson in the interview:

Larry Pixel: NMC Virtual Worlds plans a big announcement after the first of the year. It will come out first in the NMC Campus Observer, about January 10th.

Also, the NMC’s highly influential Horizon Report (75,000+ copies downloaded or purchased in hard copy in 2007) will be released in late January. The contents of the 2008 report will be announced on the wiki next week.

Notably, this will be the first year since 2005 that some form of virtual worlds is not mentioned in the Horizon Report. I am not sure if that means it is now mainstream for edu, or if it is passe, but among my Real Life constituency, there are many many established projects, and many of these are clearly reaching mainstream faculty and other groups. Within the NMC, virtual worlds are still important, but are no longer considered the set of hot emerging technologies they once were.

I’d say the 2007 Horizon Report was a key piece of ammo for me when I first approached my dean about the possibility of using Second Life at the University of Cincinnati, and I wonder if its absence in this year’s report might be a blow to later coming faculty and IT staff who are making the virtual worlds pitch at their own institutions. Hopefully there are enough reports and data from other sources in 2007 to bolster their efforts, but I’m still surprised to hear that it won’t be included in the 2008 report.

It also means I’m even more anxious to see what the 2008 report _does_ hold. Will let you know when I find out!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Community, Education, Media, Second Life, Technology, University of Cincinnati, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.