From Open University to distance education and other breath-taking virtual learning spaces, the scope of academic models is inexhaustible. The recent raise in Second Life consumption (SL) – yeah consumption, because this dreamer perceives SL as both a product and service – has provoked discourse in all circles populated by verbal and non-verbal communication skills that the creator blessed human beings with. SL, as ground-breaking as it is, has enjoyed its share of notoriety as a user unfriendly and amazing crap, still. Some say it will never unfold and its consumers are obsessed with blind optimism. But memory tells us that skepticism has always been a winner at crippling even the mind of the best. We heard them say the same about B.O. and now they claim yes we can, and yes we did. Yeah, these (political) memories are valuable in bolstering our faith in the potential of SL that one day soon the academic World will be revolutionalized by the first ever legally acknowledge Second Life University.
The Second Life University, fully operational in Second Life with no back-up from the physical World, yet creating equally credible graduates and reputation like the Ivy league Institutions – yeah that’s innovation! Anyone can start it, you, me, you and me if you want, them, them and you, them and I if they like, the combinations of entrepreneurial talents so intriguing by its nature. This dreamy innovation idea – which reminds me that impossible is nothing and begs me to humble myself before Schumpeter’s wisdom – is not fully radical. Only incremental is this innovation, because it’s feeding on the existing processes. The wholly Second Life University merely an upgrading of the Strategy & Change lectures we have in SL now and then, and only complementary to those academic conferences so innumerable and ceaselessly taking place in SL corners.
Why would anyone want to spend 3 years studying a B.A or a PhD in SL; the answers never easy to find. But why do people eat vanilla ice-cream? Have you prepared a check-list of the stuff needing to be perked up forefront? I have my Lord, albeit the list could never be complete. It’s innovation on the table my Lord, hence it steadfastly demands perfection. When would you launch it? Any day my Lord as long as all the competencies needed are pooled together; professor X, Y, Z from Innsbruck University to teach Marketing, Innovation and Leadership, Professor Z from Harvard or Princetown or Oxford, and so&so the Nobel Prize winner.
The idea to launch Second Life University would help to expand entrepreneurship, thereby contributing to the objective of “1st European SME Week – Small business, big ideas“. A plethora of achievements would be realized too for “Creativity and Innovation – European Year 2009” including these: “raise awareness of importance of creativity and innovation for personal, social and economic development, stimulate education and research, and promote policy debate and development.”
Meine Gedanken sind besessen von ‘Second Life’.
Take my brain, turn off. Seeed
Discussion