Claudia Kimbrough Sep '07
Professors in Avatar Mode Begin to Work in Second Life
September 01, 2007
Professor Lynda Aiman-Smith & Claudia Kimbrough help students get a real taste of the virtual world.
In the past several months, Lynda Aiman-Smith, associate professor in NC State’s College of Management, has discussed services innovation research with IBM’ers located across the country, at the company’s Almaden Research Labs in San Jose, Calif. Claudia Kimbrough, College of Management lecturer, met with faculty from France and England for a discussion of possible collaborative international teaching activities.
Both attended the “iCommons Summit 2007” held in Croatia. Then they met together to prepare for the fall semester’s student projects – while Kimbrough was in Raleigh, N.C., and Aiman-Smith, in New Mexico. And they did it all without racking up travel expenses, thanks to Second Life, a 3-D virtual world created by Linden Lab in 2003.
The software to use Second Life is free, and as of August 2007, there are over nine million registered users, with usually about 40,000 users online at the same time, Kimbrough reports. Second Life is global, and the United States counts for about a third of the overall user population.
Educators make up a substantial portion of the Second Life activity, Kimbrough said. Over 100 universities from more than 20 countries have an active presence in Second Life, and a growing number of faculty have some component of their distance learning, computer-supported group work, simulations, marketing course field work, media studies, and science education done in Second Life.
“As part of an NC State University LITRE grant team, I will have some group activities held in Second Life both this fall and in the spring,” said Aiman-Smith. “My own experiences of collaborating in Second Life with individuals and groups of faculty in other universities and with my IBM colleagues have motivated me to introduce this to my students at NC State’s College of Management.”
Aiman-Smith is also part of a team preparing to launch a series of research studies on virtual teams in virtual worlds, working collaboratively with Mitzi Montoya, Zelnak Professor of Marketing Innovation at NC State’s College of Management, Tony O’Driscoll, assistant teaching professor at the College of Management, and Anne Massey, professor of information systems at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
Kimbrough also has her marketing classes engaged in activities in Second Life.
“This past summer, two classes of undergraduate marketing students working with several pilot projects in Second Life learned about the collaborative opportunities of a virtual environment as well as its marketing and creative potential,” Kimbrough said.
“I will continue working with my marketing students in Second Life throughout this academic year, on student projects. Lynda and I also are holding alternative office hours in Second Life, and students are already dropping by to chat and explore. It’s clear that this is a new and exciting way of communicating outside the classroom,” Kimbrough said.
“As a marketer, I’m interested in branding the College of Management , and to that end, we are in the process of building a modern version of Nelson Hall in Second Life, using it for educational purposes and to develop a strong presence for the college in the Second Life environment,” she said.
Kimbrough also is spearheading the development of a series of learning activities using historical advertising in this virtual space.
“Second Life is a great medium for showing material such as advertising in an up-close, interactive manner,” she said. “We are collaborating with Duke University’s library, which has an extensive collection of historical advertising artifacts, to bring this material to a wider audience and provide a rich learning opportunity for our students.”
A museum building is currently in progress in Second Life, to house a selected group of ads from the 1940’s to the present. Kimbrough’s Integrated Marketing Communications students this year will have the opportunity to help start and run the museum, tentatively titled the Virtual Advertising and Marketing Museum (or VAMM).
Tony O’Driscoll, a veteran user of Second Life, joined the college this summer as teaching assistant professor, fresh from an IBM project looking at collaborative leadership in virtual worlds. O’Driscoll notes that while these multi-user virtual environments are in a nascent stage, corporations are actively exploring their use for collaboration, project work, and marketing.
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