Ham and M talk SL Future

Educational institutions are a key market for LL as they innovate with the technology. A quick browse of the http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Institutions_and_Organizati... simteach list (NOT comprehensive like they say) gives a much wider overview of institutions with an interest in SL. At the moment there's several hundred edus with a presence here, and from a recent University of Texas open day for their SL based projects - many educators themselves are extremely happy with the possibilities SL provides..... but why?

Educational institutions have a tacit duty to get on top of emerging technologies and bash them around a bit. They try and use them in new and innovative ways, figure out all the use cases, what's interesting and unexplored about them, technical constraints and social and economic implications. When they're not actively experimenting with these things they're researching them and writing about them, or encouraging their students to do so. As such edus are often the first to find new approaches to these media. Back when I was teaching it was cdrom based multimedia , emerging business models for web projects and online networked learning stuff. So a lot of innovation comes from universities, edus, or associated institutions.

So edu projects of today may be the business models of tomorrow - but that leaves actual in world business.... Perhaps the most important aspect of edu revenue models is they're generally out of world and so can reach stability/profitability before an in world economy does. Edu already has a market here as they create their own - but in world traditional marketers must create their market or wait for it to emerge.

As we saw in the early days of the web, trust in an online economy grows slower than interest in exploiting it; ten years passed while we moved from doubting giving our credit card details to reputable companies we knew from the real world, to giving money to some Joe we don't know on ebay. Now we think nothing of going online to recharge our phone, do our banking, and buying a second hand vase from a complete stranger in another country. Until both the business models exist and the trust is there the markets don't properly emerge. So educators are the early adopter market you want to foster. You get them in bulk lots - the money comes out of a budget. They are more interested in intangible return on investment (positive learning outcomes, knowledge of emerging markets) than monetary ROI. They sort out what works and is worth trying for real, and what is doomed to failure. They invent new ways of using your product.

As for marketing, we know every sale is an individual, so we must fight for every mind we wish to sell to. In an emerging market the people we rely on to sell to do not yet trust the medium, nor the products we sell and so we need to overcome the trust hurdle. I've criticized the lindens for not doing enough to make it cheap and easy for educators to get into SL - even their early adopters got PR breaks but not monetary breaks. Tech museum for example was Phil Lindens pet project, and is using SL to collaborate with the general public in building real world museum displays. Though they get Phil and his hair at their events to evangelize the media (got for LL too) and that goes into the LL PR folio, they haven't got any monetary or tech support breaks back for supporting the platform. This was my main criticism of the "Linden Prize".

A truly entrepreneurial company does not give out a prize, they give out a grant. This is a fine disctinction - but a prize is saying "you done good, here have a reward"... a grant says "you are doing good and consistent work, here's some funds relief to continue innovating". If the Australia council for the arts can annually give out twice the funds of LL (and the Australia Council doesn't print linden dollars) it looks a bit thrifty on the part of the lindens. Let it be noted that the Australia Council is most often criticized with it's prize, for giving it to people "who have already earned their remuneration through other channels". The money goes not to emerging and worthy projects, but to those successful enough that they don't need it. This criticism hit the public eye when they gave it to Brett Whiteley back in the ninties - causing commentators to ask the question; why is someone considered an emerging innovator and worthy of 100k for "development" already earning that 100k every time they exhibit? So (at risk of annoying the boss :P )

I will say I totally advocate giving educators monetary breaks. If nothing else it gives students (and the innovators of tomorrow) a chance to knock their heads on emerging technologies and find new use cases. Indirectly those poor students are paying for SL already if it turns up in their courses or projects, so that's gotta filter down to their substantial student debt when they hit the real world on graduation. Poor saps :P ... and in a few years we'll be hiring them when this virtual worlds thing finally takes off. For the lindens, edu is almost free R&D, for marketers the edus are working out the bugs and preparing the next generation... but for the average Joe edu is perhaps the most important at this stage. SL has no Ebay yet - so we need to see it applied for something beyond Barbie dressups and yahoo chat.... those are the use cases the edu sector is banging out.

Education makes SL interesting, and that's worth it's weight in gold :)