NMC Campus Observer

Sunseed Bardeen’s Retrospective on Second Life

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Nov 14, 2007 12:32pm

Thanks to a blog post from Nancy White, we’ve just come across a fabulous thought piece on Second Life by David Sibbet, who lives in SL as Sunseed Bardeen. His retrospective is an important written work (it is a 40 page illustrated PDF) that finally adds some signal to all the noise we see in mainstream media coverage of Second Life.

If you are not familiar with David’s work, start now! As founder of the The Grove Consultants International, he brings great experience in working with organizations- at NMC we have had benefited from his visual facilitation skills for many of our projects.

He introduces his Second Life retrospective:

I just completely a 40 page illustrated retrospective on my learning from an initial year and half exploring Second Life. I’ve focused on 12 themes that have posed the most interesting questions and learning in this new medium, which increasingly represents an integrated experience in self-organizing, web 2.0 phenomena, all embedded in a 3D dynamic environment.

David has spent this year and a half participating, learning, and creating in Second Life, and has shared his work with a lot of people. He summarizes his perspective in a section in “Immersive 4D Environments”

Second Life provides a laboratory for observing through direct experience how new media and the world of web 2.0 is reshaping perception, communications, social behavior and even cognition at it’s most basic level. Now, sitting here in my virtual studio, wondering how this world will affect life on planet Earth, my observations have begun to crystallize into a series of interesting questions.

He expands on the concepts of:

1. Rapid Prototyping
2. Non-linear Presentation and Demonstration
3. Identity Exploration
4. Context-based Social Networking
5. Cross Generational Communications
6. Global, Cross Cultural Exchange and Problem Solving
7. Experiments in Governance
8. Four Dimensional Philosophy
9. Deep Dialogue and Ceremony
10. Seeing the Shadow
11. Experiments with Light
12. SL as a Sand Tray for Personal Development

You can download the full paper at http://www.davidsibbet.com/david_sibbet/2007/11/second-life-ret.html

We are hoping we can invite David to share his ideas soon with us on NCM Campus.

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