VWBPE 2015: Staying the Course!

Location: VWER Meeting

I don't get Iggy into SL much any more, but I decided to pop in to hear about this year's VWBPE Conference, one I attended when I was more active in my use of virtual worlds.

This year's conference sessions look really interesting. Sadly, I'll miss it, since I'm going to be participating virtually, via Skype, in the CCCC 2015 Conference for writing teachers that week.

There's some irony there: me presenting via my RL self about work done a few years back in a virtual world. I would love to attend the SL conference, too, but I'd need a clone.

The resilience of VWBPE is timely. Just this week, I was at an academic meeting where an article was mentioned by a colleague. The source? Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

It's an indication that these worlds are getting closer to that academic mainstream, for scholarship if not for widespread use.  Perhaps that will follow.

Bringing SL Back to the Conference Room?

Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Celia Pearce image from her Web site
Tom Boellstorff image by Olivia Hotshot

I'm pleased that VWER will again host Tom Boellstorff, author of Coming of Age in Second Life, and Celia Pearce, author of Communities of Play, will be guests at a special meeting on August 30, 12:30 SLT. To teleport to the venue at Bowling Green State University in SL, click here.

Tom was an excellent guest before, and we'll all put questions to him in a voice-chat event hosted by AJ Kelton. I'm reading Pearce's Communities of Play now, and I'm looking forward to the two scholars next project, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method.

This time, with two noted scholars and a venue that could be comprehensible to those without avatars, I have offered to show the meeting in one of our conference rooms on campus. Faculty and staff should then see the potential of virtual worlds for the sorts of meetings that would be hard to arrange and moderate on the fly in real life.

Given my experience with conferencing software, I also feel that virtual worlds offer a better venue that encourages less passivity. There is something powerful about embodiment, even as a cartoon character, that gets folks to talk back in a meeting.