Real Communities in Virtual Neighborhoods: SL as an integrative tool

http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/hpceep/slc/FMC3flyer.htm Real Community/ Virtual Neighborhood: Second life as an integrative tool Good Morning! I'm JJ Drinkwater, an imaginary librarian with a real MSI from the UM School of Information I'm very interested in virtual world communities, in non-geographic communities, and the way I study them in SL is by creating libraries that serve specific communities (and teaching others to do so) and then watching what happens when a community has access to a set of resources that allows them to make more of their interests, and of their culture. That's what these little flags and symbols are, around the edges of my slides....symbols people have chosen for their communities. I had the worst time writing this talk: I knew exactly what I wanted to say to you today, until I went to set it down. I think that's because "Community" is one of terms that we all us as though we know exactly what we mean by it (and maybe we do) but that turns slippery and elusive when you try to pin it down. In the end I decided such a complex phenomenon as "community" might be the kind of category more usefully handled by a Lakoff-ian idea of overlapping common aspects, and central examples, than by a classical notion of " a community has exactly this set of properties" Still, I want to start by talking about communities How does a virtual environment go about creating a community? We speak lightly of "virtual communities" Is there some opposition between virtual communities and real ones?