Next session in the vBusiness Expo: Fleep Tuque on "How to sell virtual worlds to stakeholders". She's been active in SL for many years, and has had to sell SL on many occasions to many audiences: the dean, the faculty, and even the university president. She drew from this rich experience to provide us with some key tips.
First off: know your audience, be prepared to answer the kind of questions this audience will likely have. Be authentic. Have experience, know what you're talking about.
If you're going to pitch SL for educational purposes, study some of the demographic materials available. Over a hundred new virtual worlds have been created in the past few years, most of them aimed at kids or tweens.
Why Second Life? It's still the leading virtual world platform, where it's relatively cheap to get online. You don't have to hire an expensive 3D designer to get your in world presence done! (I thought this was debatable, btw - if the experience is amateurish, will it still appeal to the students?)
Another good thing about SL is, that is has a certain critical mass of educational organisations in world, either through land presence or through groups. There's simply lots of educators in world - lots of people to meet, to talk to. And, the other way around, Second Life is an unique environment that merits study all by itself, which makes it interesting for educators as well.
Fleep had much more to say, but I'm off to the next panel discussion - see ya later!
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