NERCOMP EVENT
HBS Educational Technology Group - Virtual Worlds BrainGain
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You are invited to attend a special extended BrainGain on virtual worlds and how they are influencing business and education.
Workshop Organizer/Host: Harvard Business School
Date/Time:
Thursday, September 27, 2007
2:00pm - 5:00pm
Registration begins at 2:00pm
Location:
Harvard Business School Campus
Spangler Auditorium
Cambridge, MA
Special instructions:
The event is free, but registration is limited
Pricing:
NERCOMP Members: $0
Non-Members: $0
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Additional Information
Event Schedule:
2:00-2:10 Welcome and Introductions: Melissa Dailey of the HBS Educational Technology Group and Ben Decker, President of the Harvard Interactive Media Group
2:10-2:40 Keynote John Lester
John Lester is Linden Lab's Boston Operations Director and Academic Program Manager. John will discuss how Second Life can be used as a platform for learning, focusing on strategies for success. John is pictured holding a 3D representation of his Second Life avatar, "Pathfinder Linden."
2:40-3:00 Dr. Philip D. Long
Dr. Philip Long, of the MIT office of Education & Technology, and Chairman of the Board of the New Media Consortium, will describe what's driving the growth of the NMC campus and community, the largest educational presence in Second Life, occupying the virtual equivalent of more than 500 acres.
3:00-3:20 Bill Lichtenstein
Bill Lichtenstein, award-winning former producer for 20/20, World News Tonight, and Nightline, organized the first public radio broadcasts to air live from Second Life, featuring Kurt Vonnegut and a performance by Suzanne Vega, in August, 2006. Bill will discuss how virtual worlds are a new medium that allow us to convey experiences, rather than just transmit images and information.
3:20-3:40 Dr. Jonathan Reichental
Dr. Jonathan Reichental, IT Industries and Innovation Director for PricewaterhouseCoopers, will discuss how virtual worlds are part of a larger movement towards a societal, ubiquitous virtuality and how this is beginning to impact enterprises and how it may play out in the future.
3:40-4:00 Hilary Mason
Hilary Mason, Assistant Professor in New Media and Computer Science at Johnson & Wales University, led the development of Virtual Morocco in Second Life. Her talk will examine the radical expansion of learning opportunities available in virtual environments and best practices for educators.
4:00-5:00 HBS Professor Bob Eccles
HBS Professor Bob Eccles will engage the audience in an interactive panel discussion with all five speakers.
Speaker:
John Lester
John Lester, also known as "Pathfinder Linden" in the virtual world of Second Life, is Linden Lab's Boston Operations Director, coordinating the growth of the company's Boston-based office. He's also the Academic Program Manager, acting as a general resource and evangelist for educators using Second Life for teaching, academic research, and scientific visualization.
John joined Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) in 2005, bringing experience in online community development as well as a background in the fields of healthcare and education. Previously he was the Information Technology Director in the Neurology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he pioneered the use of the web in 1993 to create online communities for supporting patients dealing with neurological disorders. He also held an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School, where he created online collaborative environments for professors and students to advance the case-based teaching method in medical education. While he was at Massachusetts General Hospital, he created BrainTalk Communities, an organization whose mission is to provide online environments for patient and caregiver self-help groups focused on neurological disorders. He continues to work on his own time with BrainTalk Communities to create and support places in Second Life for people dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, and Stroke Survivors.
Speaker:
Phillip Long
Dr. Phillip D. Long is the Associate Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Office of Education Innovation & Technology. He is responsible for research and evaluation of innovative uses of technology in the MIT education. He leads the MIT iCampus dissemination effort for freely sharing technology tools for active learning & scalable web services for undergraduate instruction. Current research interests focus on designing learning spaces to support active, authentic learning strategies and emerging software tools to support them.
Dr. Long's professional activities are numerous: New Media Consortium (NMC) Board (06-09), NMC Project Horizon (current & 2006), 2006 Syllabus Conference Campus Host, 2006, the SAC Program Committee (2005-07, 06 Chair), MIT DSpace Policy Committee, Steven's Institute of Technology WebCampus board, Adobe Higher Education Advisory Board, past member of the US Army Distance Learning Subcommittee, and many others. Dr. Long is also a Senior Associate with the TLT Group, a non-profit dedicated to improve teaching and learning by making more appropriate and cost-effective use of information technology. He holds a Ph.D. in biology from The Pennsylvania State University.
Speaker:
Bill Lichtenstein
Bill Lichtenstein's LCMedia is an award-winning independent media production company located in Cambridge, MA. LCMedia has extensive multimedia production, distribution and educational/community outreach experience, particularly with health, human rights and social justice issues. LCMedia produces The Infinite Mind, public radio's most honored and listened to health and science program. LCMedia also produced the highly-acclaimed documentary film, West 47th Street, which follows three years in the life of four people with mental illness. Bill's work, and that of LCMedia, has been honored with more than 60 major broadcast awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.
LCMedia has pioneered the use of 3-D virtual reality, in the online community Second Life, for public broadcast, health, education, and other non-profit social uses. These include the first public radio broadcasts to air live from Second Life for The Infinite Mind, featuring Kurt Vonnegut and a performance by Suzanne Vega in August, 2006; a live event for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Darfur featuring Mia Farrow; and the co-development of a corporate site for Dell, Inc. in Second Life, featuring a science and technology center and a factory where visitors can build their own computers.
Speaker:
Jonathan Reichental
Dr. Jonathan Reichental, the IT Industries and Innovation Director for PricewaterhouseCoopers, is responsible for focusing on and understanding the impact of disruptive, business-aligned, emerging technologies and processes to PwC. He works to align, through the firm's IT strategy, substantiated ideas and industry-emerging trends with PwC's path to distinction. He connects and leverages internal and external innovation, research, and thought leadership groups. His team delivers detailed analysis and conducts proof-of-concept work on select innovations for the purposes of determining feasibility. Jonathan holds a Ph.D in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University in Florida.
Speaker:
Hilary Mason
Hilary Mason is an Assistant Professor in New Media and Computer Science at Johnson & Wales University. She holds degrees from Grinnell College and Brown University, and has wide research interests, from web applications to social media and virtual worlds. Hilary directed the Virtual Morocco and Virtual BLAST projects in Second Life, where she is known as "Ann Enigma." Virtual Morocco is a full-sim Second Life experience designed to educate visitors about Moroccan culture, while enticing them to visit the country. Virtual BLAST is an NSF- and NASA-funded scientific ballooning project to examine the origins of the universe. Hilary worked with the BLAST scientists at Brown University, University of Toronto, and UPenn to recreate the gondola in Second Life. The Second Life balloon and gondola can be visited at the International Spaceflight Museum, and will be included in an upcoming documentary film on the project; see http://www.blastthemovie.com.
Speaker:
Bob Eccles
Bob Eccles is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. He first joined the faculty in 1979, received tenure in 1989 when he was made head of the Organizational Behavior Unit, and left in 1993 to pursue a variety of entrepreneurial ventures through Perception Advisors, of which he was a co-founder. Perception Advisors is currently focused on the areas of corporate governance, corporate reporting and managing reputational risk. Bob rejoined the HBS faculty in 2007 to teach an MBA elective course on "Leading Professional Services Firms," and to teach in an Executive Education program of the same name. One of his objectives for these courses is to strengthen the technology component. Although a neophyte of the metaverse, Bob is exploring its relevance to professional services firms from a number of perspectives. Bob has an S.B. in Mathematics (1973) and S.B. in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973), and an A.M. (1975) and Ph.D. in Sociology (1979) from Harvard University.
Related Media Files:
Contact Information:
Melissa Dailey
617.495.6092
mdailey@hbs.edu
Hotel Information:
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