Living, Learning, and Business in Second Life

Randy Hinrichs is CEO of 2b3d, a virtual world company with offices in Second Life. He stopped by today to demonstrate the locales that they’ve built to help clients conduct business and do work online on Second Life.

We were treated to a tour of their office. Features included board rooms, employee training facilities and medical training facilities. These spots are augmented with communicative and training tools. For example, the board room includes slideshows, blackboards, and other live conferencing tools.

The Center for Internet Studies

An Introduction to the Center for Internet Studies
with Chris Coward and Maria Garrido

The CIS is a recent addition to the family of research groups at the iSchool here.

Quick Snapshot:
What do they study?

Their central focus is the study of ICT and development of countries (economic, social, etc…).

How do they study it?

- They have a number of frameworks from which they draw:
Development Communications, Participatory Development, Sustainable Livelihood, Development Informatics, Social Movement Theory, Social Network Analysis, Development Economics
- Methodologically speaking, they leverage both quantitative and qualitative methods. They depend on the research question to drive the choice of method.

Where do they study?

At least one of their projects has a roster of 25 different countries.

They migrated from the Evans School to the iSchool (working at the Roosevelt Commons Building). Today, they took the time to formally introduce themselves to our community and engage in conversation about their work. Currently, they are starting new projects and appear very open to collaborations and ideas. Some of that conversation is excerpted below:

Rise of the Net-Native Class

Welcome back to a new school year. We are now resuming regular meetings and corresponding blog reports on each conversation.

The “Net Native”

Bob presented preliminary work on the rise of the “Digital Native” or “Net Native” and their impact on the workplace. There is a new class of employees on the rise. They have particular characteristics that are different from employees before and are conflicting with existing work practices and other structures. These people are the “Digital Natives” or “Net Natives”.

Bob’s group has begun to investigate the characteristics of these people and to model their impact on knowledge management in the company structure.

During this research conversation, a majority of the audience’s questions challenged Bob on the scope of his generalizations and relevance of his focus on “Net Native”. This summary will briefly summarize Bob’s findings and then summarize the discussion. I encourage you to chime in via comments.

Understanding Cultural Differences in the Use of Mobile Phones

Understanding Cultural Differences in the Use of Mobile Phones
by Sandra Hirsh, Microsoft

Her task was to explore the mobile space to provide a solid understanding of cultural differences. This would inform the design of the Windows mobile platform.