Having had some interest in virtual environments for some time, initially through Second Life, there now seems to be a critical mass of projects and people as well as a growing interest for Virtual Reality environments in the education and research community.

Of particular interest here is a paper [1] by Nancy Jennings and Chris Collins documenting current practices and uses in education and research within Second Life. The survey covers some 170 accredited educational institutions and is a very good starting point to get an idea of the kind of activities that are being carried out using this new media in order to augment, transform and start (re)thinking how some Real Life activities may be re-visited through such technologies. Mew media warrants new thinking! It will be very interesting to see how education and collaboration will look like in a maybe not so distant future…

[1] N. Jennings and C. Collins, “Virtual or Virtually U: Educational Institutions in Second Life”, International Journal of Social Sciences, Vol 2, No. 3, 2008, ISSN 1306-973X. (PDF File Here)

Interesting comments from Tim Berners-Lee reported in the Financial Times today about how the IT industry is dangerously engaged in short-term views and is consequently missing out on major potential risks and opportunities in our increasingly networked society and economies. Particularly emphasized is “the [current] lack of support for long-term research” which prevailed in the past in labs of major technology companies (such as AT&T, Xerox, IBM, etc.) and contributed to significant advances in the field. Nowadays, the tendency appears to be product driven over a period of 18 months rather than, as quoted : “here are some really big problems, go away and think about them, take some risks, come back with some ideas we don’t believe - the sort of things that triggered big advances in the past.“

Also noted is the necessity for research on the future of the Web to “draw on experts from a mix of backgrounds, including technologists, economists, psychologists and sociologists.” in order to rethink Web interaction, organizing society and maybe replace existing forms of democracy.

I couldn’t agree more. In my opinion this goes far beyond industry research. This is also valid in the academic environment where some IT related disciplines such as MIS and IS are facing growing concerns with dramatic drop in enrolment. We need to take a step back and rethink our disciplines in ways that integrate the ever increasing dimensions of our societies. Of particular interest here, is the emergence of Services Sciences as a discipline drawing form disciplines too often isolated such as computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences. IBM has been instrumental in this direction which they now brand under the title of : Services Sciences, Management and Engineering (SSME).

Predictions are hard to make. However my “gut feeling” definitely includes evolution towards interdisciplinary research in our field to address the challenging issues of our networked economies and the growing pervasiveness of our “read-write” societies (borrowed from Lawrence Lessig, great talk at Linuxworld 2006 and TED Talk March 2007), but this is another story…

Source : FT.com, Dec. 6, 2007, “Web founder warns of short-termism“, Richard Waters and Kevin Allison,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/36c5b334-a467-11dc-a28d-0000779fd2ac.html