Synchronicity and Second Life

Despite the lack of response to my original post on Second Life, I will forge on. A number of serendipitous encounters over the past week during lunch-time forays and one particular Sunday evening on the roof of the ALA Tower have convinced me that I have little choice in the matter!

Any skepticism I entertained about Second Life (SL) pretty much vanished last Sunday (March 4th, how appropriate!) while sitting on white-and-green-striped lawn chairs on the roof of the new ALA Tower in SL. I had been organizing my inventory on the ALA grounds, when Galen Noltenius (Washington Office) called down to me from the roof. Because of our Friend status (and that I allowed it to track me), he was notified that I was online. He was working, folks, at about 11:30 p.m. EST, fixing the ALA banners that let people flying over know that this particular building houses ALA. I flew up to the top of the building and he immediately contacted Abbey Zenith, who teleported (TP is the slang for teleport) over. Abbey is sometimes in touch with our anonymous SL sponsor. Galen introduced us (all done using chat windows that put text across the lower left part of the screen) and as we got to know one another, she offered Friendship and membership in the Librarians of Second Life.

Abbey was able to contact Lorelei Junot so she could join us as shown in the screenshot at left. Part of being Friends allows teleporting to each other's locations, exchanging money, notecards and virtual items. One can use internal IM (instant messaging) to speak from different locations and it's best to find out if one really wants to TP before just sending the invitation. Abbey and Lorelei as I understand it, are able to contact whoever has donated the parcel of land and the building to ALA. (Let's also be clear that these are SL names, not real life names.) We discussed what kind of furniture we might need to outfit offices. Yes, furniture and probably much more.

Lorelei informed us that there are 440 people who identify themselves as librarians working in SL. Compared to the more than 4 million registered citizens of SL, that may seem incredibly small, but I was thunderstruck. Outreach to these people is definitely worthwhile. Abbey also asked if we thought ALA would like to help in the beta test of sound zones in SL. What this would mean is that with a microphone headset, you can talk rather than type at whoever's in the zone. SL is taking a huge step toward fulfilling its potential as a viable online education platform.

There's more to say about synchronicity but not a lot of time. In exploring recreational aspects of SL, another friend of mine told me about MechanizedLife and asked if I'd be interested in the Google Calendar Kiosks this SL person had created. You can scroll down the blog page for details, but the gist of the device is that you can use Google Calender to feed to an events display window, for example, in the SL Washington Office, that will trigger announcements as they reach a horizon, say five days ahead of the event date and display it there. I've share the information with Abbey, who thinks it's definitely worth investigating. Networking with SL folk is simply amazing as well as amazingly simple.

Monday, if the dreaded timezone change doesn't defeat our training room PCs, a group of ALA staff are meeting to form a users group and begin to populate the offices of the ALA Tower. I plan on being there to lay claim to space for RUSA.

What do you think?