 Hello everyone. We celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Berkman Center just last spring. When we started the Berkman Center, I say we meaning at the time John Ziffrin and myself, some of us saw and felt that somehow in the future education would turn out to be and should be the highest use of the internet. At this Berkman 10th celebration, I had the pleasure of speaking and being introduced and I am hoping that I can repeat for you here at the introduction So how is it possible for you to cut the rights down a little to see if the sound works? I am Eon, Dean of Cyberspace. Welcome to Berkman at 10. I am personally so renowned that I need no introduction, but perhaps you need to know something about our next speaker. Charles Nesson is the Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He was raised to be a real estate tax lawyer, but somewhere along the line he took a left turn. Professor Nesson has come to stand for the deepest values of the net, openness, individual freedom, and the inalienable right to make mischief. As the founder of the Berkman Center, Charles has been innovative, supportive of others' creativity, and mostly a total pain in the ass. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Charles Nesson. I just started with Second Life at a conference at the Berkman Center. It was held back in the spring of 2005, I believe. It was called Beyond Broadcast. It was a conference that brought together primarily people from public media, particularly public television and public radio, who were suffering the same kind of constraints that many others had felt would be internet. That is, a feeling that they were locked in the silo of producing their particular form up and into this internet communication environment in a way that would fulfill their public mission in a manner more broadly than the siloed structure that they'd found themselves in. And as preparation for that conference, the idea formed of establishing a Second Life replication of the Ames courtroom, which was the room in which the conference took place. And so, as it developed, we did build Berkman Island. And at that conference, people sitting in the chairs in Ames courtroom relating to others in the room about the problem of going beyond broadcast also found themselves in this virtual world, which replicated the real world they were in. And it instantiated this idea that there was another space in which one could be at the same time one was in real space. It was after that conference, thinking about it, that I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to do something in Second Life? And so, with the help of, oh, is this right? No, no, no, no, no. Excuse me, excuse me. You may recognize this person here to my left. I'm Charlie Nesson. I'm a professor here at Harvard Law School. I'm teaching a class with my daughter Rebecca this fall. It's a class about argument, but not argument in a courtroom, which is what I usually teach, but argument in the new integrated media space that I call cyberspace. Students will engage this class and make their arguments in a variety of cyber media, through blog, through Wiki, through podcasts, through webcasts, through community television. Students who take our class through the Harvard Extension School will experience the class in a virtual world called Second Life, a world of avatars. Allow me to introduce you to mine, Ian, Dean of Cyberspace. Come with me into the virtual classroom where I will introduce you to my daughter Rebecca's avatar. She is a computer scientist at Harvard and a longtime Extension School teacher. Welcome to Second Life. This classroom is where we'll be holding our classes and our other meetings. It's a replica of the Ames courtroom at Harvard Law School where the law students will have their classes. As you can see, we can do all of the things here that happen in a regular classroom. We'll watch the videos of the lectures at the law school and we'll have our own lectures and class discussions and more. In addition, in Second Life, the possibilities for what we can do are endless. If you want to meet with me informally, I'll be holding office hours here in Second Life. And I'll be holding office hours here in my real office at Harvard Law School. If you are interested in learning more and especially if you're interested in participating, please take a look at our website, thecourtofpublicopinion.com. We had the support of a grant from the Provost Office. With the interest being this question of, is it possible to engage in some kind of distance learning that doesn't fall prey to the kinds of faults in distance learning that have crippled correspondence classes in the past. We had as starting premise the idea that we did not want to do this for credit in the sense that we were not wanting a transaction with a distance audience in which they were expecting to earn a credential of the kind for which you would pay money. We wanted participation if we were to get it from people who were at least being less demanding of what the product was. And we wanted to do it in a way that honored the rule that I feel I had learned and I know Rebecca had learned that technology is not good for everything. There are some things that technology can do better than other things and some things some technologies can do better than other things. But the real name of the game is to find out what the technology is actually good for and use it for that. Now Second Life has got a steep learning curve on it in some sense. It's not something that you can hear immediately download you although you can and immediately feel comfortable moving around with. It takes a while and it raises a natural question of well what does it really add? Why isn't this just a chat room with some pictures of dogs? Isn't it exactly the same with just a little more visual? Well it turns out that Second Life has this verisimilitude of presence that's simply missing in that chat room environment. It has some of the capacities that a campus environment actually offers where you meet people, you talk with the kind of gathering which is so typical of our classroom and campus. It's a great experience where you have a sense that the others who are in your group are likewise sharing that same experience. And so it without question has a potential for richness that the simple chat room doesn't have. What I found in the course of the class that we did was that Second Life was remarkably useful at doing something that I as an evidence teacher had always wanted to be doing with my students. I'd always wanted to be doing moot courts where students actually got the opportunity to question a witness and make an objection and have it be ruled upon. But I'd never been able to succeed at doing that because when you think about the practicalities of doing that live, it doesn't really work. Students don't ask crisp enough questions. There's no transcript being taken so that when someone objects you can't go back and see just what they objected to. Witnesses run on forever. You can't cut them off very easily. All of a sudden transformed into the Second Life environment where the form of interaction was typing. You actually typed your words. Suddenly those problems vanished. Because they had to type the words, questions got much more succinct. Quickly realized that you won't read more than a few lines at once in the back and forth on Second Life. The transcript was self-generating. The objections were right there. And so suddenly you've got a format in which the moot court would work. I found the same thing to be true when we did mock legislative hearings. A format that really worked was one in which we would take a subject and treat it in a seminar environment just the way one normally would in introducing a subject to students. But with one group, subgroup of the students having the responsibility of then carrying forward with that subject matter. So that first week we would introduce the subject matter. Second week the group would focus on what the key issues were. Where the key conflicts were in opening up the subject. And articulate roles for legislative hearing. That is what witness testifying for what proposition would be the best for the affirmative side. What witness would be best for the opposition. And then the third week run it in Second Life. So that we would have the experience of being in a classroom in which all the students are on their laptop. All in the Second Life environment in a virtual legislative hearing. Each of them playing a different role. Council on one side, witness, two witnesses. Three legislators. Council and witnesses on the other side. And it turned out to produce remarkably interesting and quite deep inquiry into the subject. So that I was convinced at the end of that three week period that we had done an excellent job in exploring that subject matter. These students understood the subject matter in a way that had truly engaged them. Question. Hit the button, Scrib. Wait, wait, wait. How do you educate the avatar of the different people working? The question was, you know, how do you create the knowledge base of the avatars? In other words, if the students are interacting, where does the knowledge base for the avatars come from? Well, understand what the avatar is. The avatar is just you. You may assume an identity, but the person doing the typing has got to have studied the subject matter, at least in the modes that I was describing, and bring knowledge to it. So that the students are actually asking the questions, actually answering the questions. They're manipulating the puppets that are the avatars. And their avatars are saying what they say, and they're interacting in that way. That's exactly right. We probably should have started with Rebecca first. Well, thank you, Charlie. Rebecca will definitely show you. Fred and I go way back. He was a classmate of mine here. When was it? Don't say. Long time ago. Long time ago. Right. So the subject here tonight is virtual world's open education. And I'd like to focus on the open education part. First, let's recognize that the virtual world represented by second life is very crude. This is the first 3D immersive environment that is actually subject to some form of reasonable manipulation. But still, it's klutzy. No question about it. Nonetheless, you can see once you're in it how enormously suggestive it is and how far it could go when the same kinds of technologies that have been developed for, say, World of Warcraft or any number of other video immersive environments now is brought to bear in a way that allows students and teachers to work with them. The potential seems quite limitless. One can further observe at that point that we're talking about an educational environment of the future which is owned by a private corporation, a corporation. There's not a university that owns this. Second life is a company. And one faces the question as an educator thinking about developing educational strategies that one hopes could scale to the breadth of the internet that one is developing it within the framework of a corporation which has its own profit motives and who knows, it can be bought out, it can be changed, it can be updated, it can be not permanent. And so one of the questions that I think Second Life throws up that has real dimension to it is whether the next generation of immersive 3D environment can be seen as an open educational environment, not simply open in the sense that everybody can get to it but open as well in the sense of its fundamental organization as part of the university world. And that is a real challenge, I think, for those who are in the educational business thinking about this in terms of the strategy of its development for the future. One of the most exciting things that has happened and focus on this to bring my remarks to a close is that the idea of open education seems finally to be coming to the surface. We've seen the internet create innovation in a remarkable fashion but its initial drive was the drive of venture capital, the dot com universe. The possibility of the internet acting as a mode of communication which could aggregate the willing energies of institutions with public missions towards the common goal of creating open education. That has been an ideal in the background but now I believe is coming towards the fore. When I was first getting into the net when my children were very small my daughter Lila made a cartoon of me which I wish I had brought actually it was just a little line drawing of me sitting at a computer with this wild look in my eyes and hair going straight out and I've often thought of that image it stayed with me as in some way capturing the moment at which it occurred to me as a real possibility that these threads, these hairs standing up straight could be thought of as connections to anyone else on the net who wanted to connect with me and the recognition that, whoa, as a teacher I have the possibility of an extraordinary audience and if I consider it to be in some way part of my responsibility as a teacher to reach out to the audience the means are right in front of me they're actually just right here. That idea of open education I'm hoping is now alive and well the most significant thing I think that was done at Harvard last year was the unanimous adoption of a resolution in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that our scholarly work would be published open access that was passed unanimously by our faculty it's remarkable and then that same resolution was brought to the Harvard Law School and our faculty at the law school passed it unanimously we have a new librarian in Robert Darden we have a new librarian at Harvard Law School in John Palfrey we have a growing realization that to a very large extent the internet is our library of the future that's where we do our research that's where we do our looking and that open environment is one that suggests the utility of all sorts of shared technologies of which Second Life is extremely interesting but very much only one so I wanted to call your attention to this Wheeler Declaration which is quite a remarkable summary of what is meant by open university the free culture movement is a student movement it exists at our college and many other places it's basically in the past been students whose major focus if one had to call it was in somehow dealing with the RIAA the copyright world that is after the students for downloading and the ideas of intrusion that some students feel in response to that but it's now graduated to this much grander mission the idea of actually supporting open university and by open university is meant that the research of the university is open that course materials and educational resources are open that the university embraces free software and open standards that the university patent policy be sensitive to the objectives of openness and that the university network itself maintain an open architecture and the thing that was remarkable about this platform was how uniform the agreement was amongst a widely diverse and multiplicative student group that these were things that we could stand for now this doesn't mean everything has got to be open that's just not the message the idea is that we're looking for balance I'm fond of saying that all open would be a desert all closed would be a cave, a prison that what's needed is an open environment in which closed environments can exist our Harvard Business School functions on a closed model to a very large extent, no desire to wipe it out but on the other hand the idea that the resources of education could be put to open use that what we produce could actually be open access that seems a wonderful idea and the commitment of universities to keeping the net open would be the most fundamental institutional support that the net could possibly have and indeed the net, the openness of the net is under threat it is the objective of the copyright industry to filter the net all of these lawsuits that you see those are all designed to make life so miserable that the general counsels and presidents and the provost of our university will say I'd rather have filters on our net so we don't have to mess with all this litigation and once the universities agree to that the copyright industry will go to the congress which they control to a very substantial extent and say if filters are okay with the university ISPs then they're probably going to be okay with the commercial ISPs and all we need is a little help from you in mandating and whap our open internet is gone so open access, virtual worlds it would be great to engage our alumni in manners that offer you something and I think the best thing that we could offer you is open education coming from Harvard next September is the centennial of the Harvard extension school the Harvard extension school is the most natural place in the university as a focal point or funnel through which open education could flow they've been doing it in a way for years but with a somewhat closed format the opportunity through the extension school is still open to offer well produced well presented material to the open net the very active preparation and presentation of which is itself an educational enterprise within the university that seems like a wonderful project and that's what I'm hoping to work on for the fall so thank you very much I'd love to introduce to you my daughter Rebecca Rebecca has been my collaborator on matters having to do with educational strategy since the days I drove her back and forth to Cambridge Ringe in Latin and she is a natural born teacher and I am just so proud to introduce her to you Rebecca here take this I'm unfortunately a little bit under the weather so hopefully you all excuse me but I'm going to do my best to give you guys a sense of what Second Life is actually like when you're in there what you're seeing on the screen right now is a group of people who are gathered for the purpose of watching this event right now in live webcast into Second Life some of these people are sitting here in the room with us some of them are spread out all around the world there's somebody in Tampa, Florida there's somebody in Scotland there's somebody in Peru that was just from my brief survey of who was there and who was willing to say who they were in real life and I know there are a few people who are scattered just right around the room and who have been helping to let people know what's going on when it isn't clear on the video that they're seeing you've heard a bit about what we've been trying to do with education in Second Life and I just want to say a word about that before I take you on a tour around this island and also take you to Harvard's other island so you can get a sense of how we've been getting started in Second Life one of the key advantages for Second Life in my opinion was for enhancing distance education, the distance education experience for students and in my opinion one of the things that was very challenging in this experience up until quite recently was this just getting a feeling of connection to the class when students are local to a class they come once a week or twice a week to a classroom they have an opportunity to mill around before class meet their fellow students talk to the instructor and generally end up with a sense of feeling connected to the class and a certain sense of responsibility to the community of that class as a distance student the experience is often a lot more disconnected your connection point is a website that you go to in order to receive materials watch videos and you perhaps submit your work by email and you rarely get any opportunity to get to know other students in the class and sometimes not even much opportunity to get to know the instructors in the class the best technology prior to virtual world for trying to do something like this was along the lines of sort of enhanced chat room software that teachers could run during a live class session where students would come and discuss but even in those situations the student would be represented at most by a picture and usually just by a little screen name and the general feeling of those environments is the instructor asking a lot of questions filling up the screen with text from the instructor and very little actually being contributed by the students who had a certain amount of shyness about jumping in there and getting their voices heard in those environments second life basically pulls the legs out from under those problems it gives you the ability to create a community it was created as a social technology it's a world that is set up in such a way that the people who come into the world really build the environment that then they exist in and the idea was that it was mainly going to be a commercial and social space there's a currency in the world that people exchange you can create goods in the world and sell them for this currency and the currency actually has an exchange rate with US dollars so that people can trade their money in and out of second life some people are actually able to make a modest living or at least enough money to support the existence of their second life avatar by doing this type of in world business and there are a lot of social activities going on the advent of using it for education was sort of I think a little bit of a surprise to the creators of linden lab although they've been to the creators of second life linden lab although they've been extremely supportive of it since people have started adapting it for this use and the reason that it's so appealing is that it allows to build a campus like the campus that you're looking at up here on the screen that looks a little bit like our campus it feels a little bit serious even though it has a cartoony look it lets students know when they come here that this actually is intended to be a serious educational environment and the campus is persistent and so then some of the basic ideas of what it feels like to be in a class translate very directly to the experience of coming to class in second life even though it's your avatar coming instead of you coming when you decide to you're going to go to class you might change your outfit that your avatar is wearing in order for it to be something that's more appropriate you arrive a couple of minutes early and you find there's a couple other students hanging around so you have a chance to talk about your homework or to comment on the new dress that somebody has found somewhere or created for themselves in the world and so relationships do start to form among the students in a way that was previously missing in distance education environments. We designed our course so that students would be doing some of their work in groups in second life so that there would be activity on the island at other times other than when they were there specifically for class so that you could come to the island and sort of have the feeling that you were walking around your campus where you could go and meet people and talk to other people who were engaged in a similar educational experience to the one that you're engaged in and so this served I think to create some greater community in the course that we taught and the subsequent courses that we've worked on than what we had previously been able to do so with that said I want to move on to taking you on a little tour around this island and the other island and answering questions as you go and don't be shy about asking any question that you want about second life this is a very new environment for many of you some of you may be more familiar with it so whatever is confusing you or you'd like to know educational or otherwise go ahead and raise your hand and we will try to get the mic to you and ask it okay so let me just start by showing you my avatar this avatar looks somewhat different than the one that you saw earlier in the video because I've put a lot of time myself into making it the one you saw in that earlier video was made by an undergraduate student here who helped to build this island Radica Buzescu who now is a consultant who works full time doing consulting for companies that are setting up installations in second life and she really helped us get this project Bergman Island off the ground and got us going in this environment it's a little challenging as a teacher who isn't necessarily a video game playing type of reason to get started using this technology in a class and that's one of the things that I think still really needs work in second life and in other virtual environments in terms of actually integrating it and making it possible for students and their teaching assistants to be able to use it easily the learning curve is a little steep but once I got into it I decided I did not want my avatar wearing what she was wearing or wearing so much makeup and I put some time in and tried to make her look like me as much as I could and to me that was very it's very satisfying to have a version of myself that I feel you know that I can feel reasonably represented by in this world one of the first things that we built on the island that Radica and a team of people who she recruited from within second life many of whom she never met in person was this replica of that in the hall which is probably familiar to most of you from the campus that we're on right now it's a beautiful replica of this building and it has this ability to lend a certain austerity to the campus it lets people know along with some of the other landmarks on the campus like the Weeks Foot Bridge over a river which is sort of like the Charles River that this really is Harvard this is meant to be a place that has a little bit of the feel and the types of activities that we do here at Harvard it turns out that once we got started using this island we discovered that this replica of Austin Hall while useful for setting the scene is not actually very useful as a teaching environment and this was one of our first sort of object lessons in translating into a different space there are several problems with it one of them is that these chairs are lined up in these big long rows and it's very difficult for people who aren't quite skilled with their camera cameras for their avatars to see other people in the classroom when they're sitting in this orientation in the classroom the other big problem with it is that when you're indoors in second life and you try to take a long view and see what's happening you suddenly find yourself outside the building so it turns out to be much more comfortable and much prettier to do what you want to do outdoors which is why we built this outdoor classroom and I'm very glad that we have Austin Hall but we spend most of our time in this outdoor amphitheater where we show these videos my father talked about the ability to run mock trials and in order to do this we built a courtroom on our island so that we could actually have the experience of doing mock trials in a court setting and we did this all with volunteer work by people who were participating in our class as at-large members of the class this is something my father alluded to earlier we really had three audiences for our course there was a group of Harvard Law students enrolled in the course for credit who came to class on a regular basis over in Pound Hall those lectures were videotaped and then that evening by an industrial student they were digitized and made available online and in second life for the people who were taking the course through the extension school people taking the course through the extension school never met in any actual classroom some of them were spread over the world so Mark was sitting a few rows back in the middle so one alumnus of that class who was physically here in town even though I didn't see him physically during the course Yvette was very far away taking the course were you in Seoul yes she was taking the course from Seoul Korea and so we never met until she came here to start a degree program after the course so the extension school students were enrolled for credit in this course just like a regular distance education course at the extension school with our course meetings in second life and what we did is we just had all the extension school students register their avatar name with us so we knew who their avatar was just like we knew who their person was who was submitting homework on the website and we had our course meetings in second life they watched some of the Harvard Law school lecture videos but because that was geared towards a law school audience and it wasn't exactly the right material for the extension course so we designed it so there would be one lecture a week that was for everyone and then one live lecture that was for the Harvard Law School students and one class meeting in second life that was just for the extension school students but we had a third audience that my father discussed briefly which was what we called the at-large audience and this was the open aspect of our course we decided to make all of the videos from our course freely available in second life and on the web for anyone to participate and to attempt to make an experience for people who didn't want to get credit in the course who weren't ready for the commitment of doing that many hours a week or didn't want to actually enroll at the extension school to participate and have discussions with other people about the issues that we were discussing in the class. This had great benefit for the people who were able to do that we got a lot of wonderful feedback from people who were extremely excited to have access to this material and be able to participate but the exciting thing for us was that it had great benefits for the people who were in the class who were actually enrolled in the class as well because this gave us a large group of people who were interested in what we were doing and grateful for the students to students for sharing their experience with the community at large and so when it came time to do to build the courtroom and to do a mock trial we were able to build the courtroom entirely from labor of people who were among our at-large audience and who just wanted to help out building a courtroom and then when it was time to do the trial and we needed a jury we were able to select a jury from among the at-large members people who were willing to volunteer their time and come and have the experience of having a case argued before them by Harvard Law School students in front of a Harvard Law Professor judge and I think that that was a fun experience for everybody involved. It turned out to be a great way to try to actually make use of the openness in a way that redounded to the benefit of the people who were enrolled in the course. I'll give you one more thing on the island and then I'd like to pause and ask for questions before we take a quick trip over to the other Harvard island. This area here that I mean is called the Sandbox and this was a critical part of the island. It's an area so the entire island is open to anyone. It's possible to restrict your island so that only your students could come to it but ours is open to the public and in this area of the island anybody who wants to can build anything that they want. The way it works in Second Life is that you're endowed with the ability to create any object that you want to create. A building a piece of clothing some kind of robot. They can be programmable objects or just interesting looking physical objects and the only restriction is that you can't just put them down anywhere. You can carry them around in your infinite size pocket but you can't leave them places and so one of the things that's necessary is to have a place so here's somebody building some gigantic green thing right over my head. It's to have a place where you're free to actually build something and put it down for a period of time while you work on it and so these areas are called Sandboxes. We have one here where you can build something and it will last for four hours as long as the time you're working on it but once you stop working on it it will disappear after four hours so it's sort of a self-cleaning area and the existence of the Sandbox created a community for us on this island. It helped us to have the island not be an empty space a lot of places you go in Second Life have this eerie feeling of emptiness all the time. Berkman Island for the most part if you go there during the evening hours on east coast time and a lot of other times you will find people in the Sandbox who are socializing and working on building various different things and that community was helpful to us as a resource for our students. One of the interesting things that happened is that people can, if they have the ability to build things, they can build things that are really a nuisance and give other people a lot of trouble while they're in Second Life and that started to happen in our Sandbox and because we had a constructive group of people who used the Sandbox regularly and cared about it as a community I was able to appoint a sort of a volunteer police force the Sandbox peacekeepers who are empowered with the ability to stop people who are doing things that are a nuisance or something that was generated out of our community. It was kind of our own interesting law making experiment. So at this point I'm going to teleport to the other Harvard Island which I want to say a few words about but I just want to pause and see whether people have questions about Second Life or anything. Yes? In First Life we tend to very much concentrate on the faces of people who are doing the talking and we form opinions and beliefs about the truth or falsity of what they're saying by very specific muscle contractions that they make in an autonomic way and these creatures don't seem to have faces that can interact in that way and therefore if I was thinking if you were watching a trial and you couldn't actually watch the muscular movements of the face of a witness how would you form an opinion as to the truth or falsity necessarily or the emotional content of that witness's testimony? That is a fabulous question it raises a lot of really interesting issues. First of all it's an extremely good point about the limitation of Second Life at this point and perhaps a more general limitation of our computer technology. There are facial expressions in Second Life but they're controlled by you can do some key strokes to make a kind of a ghoulish smile on your avatar's face it's not something that most people use and eye gaze is controlled by the mouse so people are often looking past you even though they're talking to you and it's very disconcerting for people at first in exactly the way that you indicate. A lot of the cues that people are used to in real life or First Life are just completely unavailable and that can be very difficult to get used to. One thing that's worth noting about it is that for people of a certain generation I think the age in John Paul Frey and Urs Gasser's book that they say is 1980 people born after that are digital natives they are used to having a huge amount of their interaction take place in online environments without these kind of facial cues already and so this kind of concern is something that often doesn't arise for certain younger people and then a lot of older people who spend more time on the web. All of us I think have become much more expert over the last several years at figuring out how to decide what kind of information we're going to trust when we don't actually have information about the character of the person who's behind it as we get used to so much of our idea coming to us in this sort of disembodied way. But with respect to how this affects the specific classes that we are teaching we just do the best we can with the technology that we've got. There is a possibility that in the future this is something that can be incorporated. Our computers now have built in video cameras that could be in a position with a certain amount of more advanced computer science research to detect points on our face, the corners of our eyes, our mouth, the forehead and chin and actually make our avatars do this kind of interaction. Another thing that I would like to see in Second Life is the ability for people to or in another virtual world technology to go more seamlessly between their avatar and a video. If you'd like to be able to speak and have your face on a video that's something that would be extremely useful in education and work collaboration environments, it maybe isn't so necessary for the applications that they were thinking of when they created this. So these are some examples of things that we can hope will be improved in future iterations. Let me just say one last thing about this. Often noted inspiration for Second Life is Neil Stevenson's book Snow Crash which Second Life is supposed to be based on the virtual world described in that book The Street and one of the main features of that that they say is the reason why this virtual world takes off in that book is the ability to have the avatars have facial expressions. One of the characters in that book says this is what we really need and it's a very notable absence here in this thing that's supposed to be modeled after it. So let me just briefly show you what we're looking at here and then I will take a very few more questions before we move over to the reception where we can do plenty more talking and questions. So we are right now on I Commons Island. This is an island maintained by FAS faculty of arts and sciences and there is a Harvard library installation here, some classrooms and a meeting space and also this master's thesis project being done by an extension school student in museum studies who has built this 3D replica of an archaeological dig site based on information from the actual archaeological dig pictures, audio, all kinds of things including these balls that if you go into them let me see if I can get into one. Well I won't do it right now because we're so short on time. They give you a 360 degree panoramic view of the experience of being in the location. So I just wanted to show this to you just as a way of demonstrating the kinds of installation projects that people have been working on in their academic work here. The last little thing that I want to show before we get done is a map of where we are which may take a minute to load. This island that FAS has purchased is basically managed by an organization called the New Media Consortium that has been busy setting up islands and making them available to universities who would like to have a presence in second life so the universities can do it for a short term and with some help from the organization. And so if you look around at the parcels of land on the map around us here you'll see that there's an MIT island, there's USC island, tons of other universities. It's a large land mass that is just filled with universities that have been coming into second life. Harvard was one of the very first to do this and it's nice to have the school and the Extension School to have been pioneers in this area. It's also very nice to have a large community of educators now thinking about the best ways to use this because every time we teach one of these courses we learn a lot of lessons about ways that we can do it better. We've developed so many norms for doing good classroom teaching and it's a tough proposition to figure out when we switch to a new environment that works differently in terms of the way people interact and just the general mechanics of the environment to figure out which kind of norms we want to have carry over and what things we need to do differently. And so it's a real practical educators problem to try to figure these questions out and I think we'll be making a lot of progress over the next few years. So is it okay to take a few more questions? Okay. Let me have someone who hasn't had one yet. Let's go here. How does Linden Labs make its money? Good question. So Linden Labs mainly makes its money through selling land. They maintain a large server farm and when you purchase land what you're doing is essentially leasing a server from them. So you pay an initial cost and then a monthly fee for the maintenance of that land. I think that they additionally make some money on the currency exchange and also on premium accounts but for most people you're perfectly happy using the free account and using the free software download. And for educational institutions there's a big discount. So my main issue with Linden Lab is not so much that they're a for profit company that we're depending on as that their incentives for development of the technology don't necessarily align with the incentives of an educational institution. So they're features that they want to add that are not the same as the ones I want to add and features that I want to add that they don't care at all about. Yes. Yes, it was interesting to have come across here. Mark Trial there. There are people that work with environments in the first life that immediately, for example, the first thing that struck me when you showed that perspective of the court outside. I actually as a media specialist at Northeastern University at the time set up a program for the law school with videoing the interaction of practice of mock court. And here the space, I just smiled because it's like a subliminal thing. It gives you the adrenaline fight of flight instinct which is interesting because actually when you're in a courtroom it's kind of stimulating something that was not attention but it's so close to the cliff of the edge of the water and when you're flying over you cannot help but like inside kind of like squeeze back. That being said you made a very good point about two goals that you'd like to see that later you said as an educator and that's the multimodality of it. There already is John Lester hopped on board as evangelist for adding sound and as recently as two weeks ago when I asked at CEMENT which was about health education as well as health applications, media and health applications, technology and science and media. There was no immediate goal for that sound ability and the expressiveness for someone who's asking about ability to communicate well. It doesn't just have to be video, it's about text is nowhere near as expressive as our classroom feeling nervous and you know that you are not having the other person be at ease that kind of thing. Is that one of your models? That's a very interesting point. When we first taught this class in 2006 there was no voice in Second Life. All of the conversation was done in text and at the outset I thought that was going to be a real limitation. I ended up loving it. I thought that I ended up finding that it was a wonderful way to run a class and there were several reasons for that. In the text space environment students had the opportunity to take their time to compose their thoughts that they were going to say and I think one of the main results of this was that it removed a lot of the scary feeling of being put on the spot in a classroom and having everybody suddenly turn to look at you. It's your turn to speak, what brilliant thing are you going to come up with to say. It just made it easier for people to sit back and figure out what kind of comment they wanted to add into the environment and enter it when they were comfortable. It also I think made it easier for students for whom English was not a first language and it's even more difficult to speak up. The other thing once you get used to it is that the chat sort of rolls across the screen and so it takes a little while to get used to following the multi-threaded conversation but it has the opposite effect of handling the students that speaks too frequently quite naturally because there is no way for somebody to dominate the conversation. They can have more lines scrolling across the screen but they can't keep ending every sentence with a conjunction so that no one else can start speaking. Other people can also put their comments into the conversation and it's just up to the people who are reading it to select what threads they're going to respond to and so I found that I had one of the most participatory discussions in my class of any class that I had ever taught before. Subsequently they've added voice chat into Second Life which I think is a great addition. Now there's the ability for people to choose which way they want to use it and depending on the number of people that you're working with and what the relationship is and what you're working on you can choose to go either way. So I'm glad that they've put it in. I think we should probably close here and head over to the reception where we're going to have some computers set up for people to give this a try themselves and also just a chance for people to talk and have a good time. Thank you so much. Thank you to Charlie and Becca. Thanks so much.