Imagine RIT
Exhibit Highlight
Calling Earth to Second Life
An increasing number of people are ditching their jobs back on Earth to make their living entirely online within Second Life’s virtual economy-making thousands of U.S. dollars selling designs, developing virtual property, or creating virtual market branches to offer real products.
Familiar with social networks like Facebook and MySpace, Professors Neil Hair (E. Philip Saunders College of Business) and Susan Barnes (College of Liberal Arts) decided to collaboratively teach an Online Advertising class-initiating the first cohort of business/marketing and advertising/public relations students into the virtual marketplace of Second Life.
“Network is the key concept we are trying to get across, and how we’ve used these networks in our teaching to enhance opportunities,” Hair says. “We are teaching students how to use Second Life, working for real clients on consultancy projects. It’s not a game anymore; we’re actually helping clients make money.”
According to Barnes, their class-work project will be a WOW for Imagine RIT on May 3. “We re-conceptualized the classroom and gave students online experience where they had to create advertising and marketing proposals for real consumers in Second Life.”
Adds Hair, “If you were going to charge for similar work in the commercial world, you’re looking at $4,000 worth of work per project. Pro-bono projects offer us all a win-win-win situation: Students learn more because they can see the application of the theory to the real world, local enterprise benefit from state of the art thinking that costs nothing except their time briefing the students, and faculty benefit from a more engaging classroom environment.”
The student proposals will be featured at Imagine RIT, plus big screen demonstrations of Second Life, as well as YouTube videos highlighting the socially networked classroom. In fact, MIS senior Matthew Anthony, an expert and teaching consultant in Second Life, designed a virtual Saunders’ Lowenthal Building-in which Professor Hair taught the world’s first in-world advertising class.
“I see using Second Life in the classroom as training for the future,” Anthony says. “I fully believe this kind of technology will be the next evolution of the Internet, like the World Wide Web was after news groups.”
Advertising is key to Second Life and the different ways to use it, explains Barnes. “Second Life has magazines, it has kiosks, it has blogs. Our students were exposed to all the tactics they use and they had to come up with a strategy for a client based on what they had been learning in the classroom. More importantly, they also learned how to deal with people who come from all different walks of life.”
As COLA senior and class participant Ryland Bacorn confirms, “A setting in a virtual classroom stimulates optimism, creativity and exploration. These new ‘worlds’ are where the consumer economy is moving at a furious rate. These new worlds are tricky to navigate, and I am extremely pleased to have been exposed to it in an educational environment versus the workforce.”