Surinder and I are currently attending the Mardi Gras conference on virtual worlds in Baton Rouge along with our colleague Rui Huang. We are here to present our paper that I discussed in last week’s post and also to hear the exciting work that others are pursuing in and around virtual worlds. I am amazed by the breadth of interests that people have in the area and the innovative research that has been conducted on topics such as education, leadership, e-business, and networking within virtual worlds. One major take away that we have gotten from the conference is that people are still struggling to understand what virtual worlds are and what benefits they can have for both individuals and organizations. The variance in conceptualizations and ideas is fascinating and educational.

One presentation by Tony O’Driscoll of Duke University echoed some of the ideas we discussed in an early post, Time to Think Differently About Virtual Worlds. Tony’s point was that when it comes to virtual worlds, we my be falling into a routinization trap, where we take direct replicas of not only physical environments but ways of doing into the virtual world. An example would be the use of rooms that look just like real world classrooms with avatars giving students power point presentations as a way to use Second Life for teaching. His argument was that we need to literally break down the walls of our thinking about how we can best use virtual worlds to enhance information flows. These same ideas can be translated to virtual teams and breaking virtual meetings out of virtual meeting rooms and finding ways to leverage the unique affordances of virtual worlds.

Christian Wagner of City University of Hong Kong discussed how he uses Second Life to educate his business students studying global business and innovation. Students must form teams, design and execute a business idea that takes advantage of the unique culture of Second Life. The project forces students to learn about teamwork, strategy, marketing, decision making and other important aspects of running an organization. In addition, the built-in economy of Second Life offers a concrete metric for judging the success of the organization–making Lindens. While business simulations or games are not new in educating business leaders, it seems that Dr. Wagner has hit on one other aspect of virtual worlds that make them effective for training–interaction with objective 3rd parties who can give performance feedback through their  behavior and choice to interact with you or your business.

The participation and excitement at the conference around many different aspects of and applications for virtual worlds reinforces the notion for us that virtual worlds can be a very useful and innovative tool for many things, including leadership development and team training. The presentations and interesting discussions that arose showed us that if you are still struggling with the best way to take advantage of virtual worlds, you are not alone.