UK Guardian features virtual world crime

There's a long special feature in today's UK Guardian newspaper (Saturday, 17 November 2007) looking at crime in virtual worlds. It includes coverage of Second Life and several other virtual worlds. Not a bad article actually. It suggests that in South Korea 43% of the population is a member of the virtual space Cyworld. Wow!

An online version is available, though I'm not 100% sure that it includes everything that is in paper version.

Caitlin Kiernan on BBC2 via Second Life

Second Life will feature on UK television tomorrow (Saturday, 16 November 2007) when the BBC2 programme 'The Culture Show' uses it to undertake a remote interview with Caitlin Kiernan, whose novelisation of the new Robert Zemeckis’ film Beowulf, has recently been published by Transworld.

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Second Life in the mainstream US media

Barry Joseph of Global Kids provides an interesting analysis of the recent appearances of Second Life in both The Office and CSI:NY, A Tale of Two Second Live Promotions: The Office Vs. CSI. Not that I've seen either myself... but definitely worth a quick read to see how SL is being portrayed. The point being that the way the general public's attitude towards SL is steered by the mainstream media is critical to any significant integration of SL in education.

The more the public views Second Life as a place to extend their real life – like a telephone – the closer we get to it being viewed as a place for real world education.

Quotes and mis-quotes

I'm quoted in an article in The Times today - Today’s tutorial will take place on the virtual beach.

This is the second time I've been quoted in the national press recently, the previous time being in the Education Guardian. Hey, I must be doing something right? Either that, or people are so desperate to get out some kind of story about SL and education that they'll talk to any old idiot! :-)

For the record, the spirit of the Times article is probably about right but the specific quote is a bit wonky. I would never say "everybody knows that it has huge potential" since I wouldn't pretend to speak for others (and I'm well aware that not everyone thinks like that).