Today, I will be speaking to a couple communications classes at The College of New Jersey entitled Beyond Second Life. The genesis of this talk was a discussion between myself and the professor teaching the class about the relationship between Second Life and other media. I spoke about my role as business editor for the Second Life News Network and the coverage there, and other places of the financial sector in Second Life, particularly the Second Life bank failures and the turmoil in the Second Life stock markets. The description of my talk said that I “will talk about the historical antecedents to Second Life, the relationship between Second Life and competing virtual worlds, and the relationship between Second Life and other online media that reports about and supplements Second Life. A particular focus will be placed on businesses operating within Second Life.”

I am not a big fan of PowerPoint presentations, so instead of creating a PowerPoint presentation to display in Second Life, we talked about different websites that would illustrate my points, together with actions within Second Life that would help illustrate my points.

I will also try to record the presentations using Fraps which is a great video capture tool for Second Life and other online games. Unfortunately, I could not get Fraps to capture my voice, and I wanted to have a third person view of the presentation for the video anyway, so I’ll log in with my wife’s computer and avatar to record the event from her perspective.

I’m still trying to work out the display of web pages in Second Life. I hope to follow the method described in this video, and am working out the details.

I intend to pause at the end of each section to encourage some discussion with the students. I’ll give the presentation twice, but the room is small, so we probably can’t have guests during my talk. However, if you’re interested, you could try IMing Yolanda Zimmer to see if there is room at either 7 AM SLT or 12:30 PM SLT.