Using the virtual world of Second Life to snag young IT talent

Organizations are standing shoulder to shoulder around the global talent pool, trying to hook their share of Gen X and Gen Y keepers. But despite their youth, these new recruits are as wary and tight-lipped as a wily old bass. If you don’t find just the right way to attract them, they won’t give you a nibble.

[From Using the virtual world of Second Life to snag young IT talent ]

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Frequently we forget that the students we teach are going to need jobs. As various IT skills move into the virtual realm, will environments like Second Life become richer recruiting environments? Can we use this to diffuse some of the creepy treehouse of second life?

Sometimes we are so awash in resources that some real gems pass us by. So it has been with some the New Media Consortium published in November, the 2007 NMC Conference Proceedings which has a good set of SL papers authored by SLED colleagues.

The papers in the proceedings were authored by presenters at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference in Indianapolis. Participants at the conference voted on sessions that ought to be invited to author papers, and the final product represents a more formal write-up of their conference sessions.

The entire proceedings is available as a free, Creative Commons licensed PDF (2.6 Mb, 133 pages) and is full color with active hyperlinks and embedded video (note to Mac OSX users- view with Adobe Acrobat Reader and not Preview for the full media effect).

Among the papers relevant to Second Life and virtual worlds you may find of interest

• The Arts Metaverse in Open Croquet: Exploring an Open Source 3-D Online Digital World Ulrich Rauch and Tim Wang | University of British Columbia
• Beyond World of Warcraft: the Universe of MMOGs Ruben R. Puentedura | Hippasus
• ClevelandPlus in Second Life Wendy Shapiro, Lev Gonick, and Sue Shick | Case Western Reserve University
• Out of the Cave or Further In? The Realities of Second Life Gregory Reihman | Lehigh University
• Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: Socio-emotional Dimensions of Digital Culture Which Are Transforming the Shape of New Media Literacies Angela Thomas | University of Sydney
• Teaching Field Research in a Virtual World Ed Lamoureux | Bradley University
• A View from Second Life’s Trenches: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler? Cynthia Calongne | Colorado Technical University

We will be repeating this effort for the NMC 2008 Summer Conference, hosted this year at the RL Princeton University, which will offer sessions and pre-conference workshops on Second Life and Wonderland.

    Associate Professor Robert Walker wanted to take advantage of the synchronous learning opportunities that Second Life offers in teaching an online version of his Music Appreciate course. In the planning stages, he identified a key skill in the course that students found particularly challenging – learning to listen to a composition critically – and then developed period appropriate locations in Second Life to house the music files students otherwise would have listened to alone.

Read more about his experience Using Second Life to Enhance Teaching and Learning, including early data and assessment results.

Instructional designers often talk about using the specific affordances of a technology to achieve a specific course objective, and this is an excellent example of how one instructor is taking advantage of Second Life to provide an enriched learning experience for his online students!

- Posted by Fleep Tuque

NYT article about kid’s virtual worlds. Thanks to Steve Hornick

Reuters article about Gen Y and libraries. Thanks to Ken Hubble