teams, assigning six teams to a project for Target Corp. and five teams to a project for a large Fortune 100 financial services company. With an array of Web tools at their disposal (document repositories, e-mail, chat, wiki, blogs), a place to regularly meet (NCSU’s Delta campus in Second Life), and access to their sponsors’ virtual islands, where they could learn more about the company and interact with company representatives, the students discovered that, indeed, virtual worlds had real-world value. For the dispersed student teams, Second Life provided a way for them to build relationships and collaborate in real time. Their ideas for potential services that companies could deliver through Second Life ranged from business-to-consumer services to more internal applications, such as employee training. (As an extension of the course, the Kelley School of Business’s Kelley Executive Partners program unveiled its own virtual island, modeled after the limestone buildings on the IU Bloomington campus, in the world of Second Life.) it’s All about presence With her students convinced — and their corporate sponsors impressed — by the largely untapped business and teaching potential of virtual worlds, Massey has turned her attention to the issue of performance as it pertains to virtual worlds. More
problem, but proving that it addresses the problem or provides a value-add, that’s the next step.” The real power of the virtual world Judging the efficacy of a new technology is far from a new phenomenon. Framed on the walls of Massey’s office are several vintage telephone advertisements that illustrate her point. In one 1930 s ad, a woman in a nursery filled with children feels safer than ever because she now has a telephone at her disposal. “No bother, there’s a telephone here,” she is shown saying. Another ad, clearly targeted at the business executive, focuses on the allure of the instantaneous communication and immediate feedback that a telephone provides. “Virtual worlds will be similar,” Massey says. “Social media is all about communities, content, context, and connections. We’re beginning to see the integration of virtual worlds with social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Integration will accelerate their use and acceptance.” At IU alone, a number of projects illustrate growing interest, including the Virtual Congress at IU’s Center on Congress and the Department of Telecommunication’s LondonTown and Synthetic World projects. Massey is careful to point out, though, that virtual environments are not the answer to every business or academic
specifically, she is researching whether it is possible to link the unique characteristics of 3-D environments, in particular one’s sense of “virtual presence,” to actual outcome measures such as learning outcomes or team performance. In a series of experiments, she and other colleagues, including Mitzi Montoya, have developed and validated a scale to assess perceptions of presence in virtual environments intended to support purposeful collaborative work. Drawing from past research on mediated collaboration and group dynamics, their scale assesses three relationships: self-to-others (awareness), self-to-task (absorption), and self-to-environment (immersion). Working with corporate partners, Massey and colleagues are now using the scale to assess the link between virtual presence and performance outcomes. They are also using it to compare and contrast virtual world platforms. “I can sit here and talk ad nauseum about all of the characteristics of virtual worlds,” Massey says, “but from a business perspective, you have to show value, and value lies in outcomes. Our metric is a way to start to assess the characteristics of virtual worlds in relation to performance, whatever your outcomes of interest are. It’s the same challenge we’ve had with Webinars or any collaborative technology. I can throw technology at a
collaboration need, and that she and her colleagues have only begun to scratch the surface of these brave new, 3-D worlds. “[Virtual worlds] are just one element of what we call the collaboration tool kit,” she says. “There are times when the telephone is sufficient. There are times when wikis are sufficient. We need to collaborate on a document … well, I’ve never written a document in a meeting with people. We need to go away and work on our own.” But virtual worlds are clearly a piece of an ever-expanding puzzle. “They may be another channel with regard to consumer marketing. They may be another avenue for distance education. That’s what is exciting about them,” Massey says. “We don’t know the bounds. We don’t know what they are. There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of risk. Some find that kind of scary. But for others it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really a landscape, and I can paint whatever I want!’” Ryan Piurek is assistant director of University Communications and a freelance writer in Bloomington.
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“Social media is all about communities, content, context, and connections. We’re beginning to see the integration of virtual worlds with social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Integration will accelerate their use and acceptance.”
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