But does it make good sense, my conference host asked, if commercial organisations were also to give away their products with no charge? Would this not result in lost revenue for those companies? The predominantly corporate sector audience waited expectantly for my answer. There were more suits on view than at Moss Bros. In my response, I echoed what I had earlier said in my Zukunft Personal keynote - Open Educational Resources are the start of a movement that is already transferring itself to the business sector. It is already happening not just in companies such as Google and Facebook, whose business model is to advertise on the back of free products in a pay-per-click strategy. I pointed out that some major players in the gaming industry are participating. One of the leaders in the game engine world is Unity, who sell their Unity Pro developer software package for $1500 but give away a lower level version of the same package for free. How can they afford to do this? The reason is quite clear. Unity wants games developers everywhere to use their software, and wants to encourage a community of interest to form around its products. It gives them a competitive edge over their rivals. Unity does so by not only offering free software but also an evaluation service on games that have been developed using their software. Last year the company announced its Union partnership scheme. If your game is deemed to be commercially viable, Unity will market it across a variety of platforms, and takes 20 per cent commission on all subsequent sales. Other gaming companies are following similar business models. How long will it be before companies in other sectors of business and industry begin to give their products away for free to become even more competitive in their niche sector?
Business games by
Steve Wheeler is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Occasionally this blog hosts guest posts. Today, Tim Handorf writes about the experiences of one university in Second Life. We all know that Second Life, the virtual reality world that has become basically indistinguishable from our increasingly unreal physical worlds, is a powerful tool for learning. In fact, it's pretty much a powerful tool for everything, considering the small but growing number of Second Life millionaires. The fact that there are, as of January 2010, 18 million registered Second Life users demonstrates the power of the virtual world to connect, educate, and enhance our daily lives in an almost revolutionary manner.
But, of course, as is true of the "real" world, Second Life does not come without its problems. Most recently, the brick-and-mortar university Woodbury was booted off Second Life —thousands of students were affected—by the virtual world's moderators, a company called Linden Lab. What's interesting is that Woodbury was torn down from the site for the second time, the first time being in 2007
What's even more fascinating about this whole scenario is that Linden Lab did not specify, really, what terms of agreement Woodbury had violated, although this was the accusation. Linden Lab has remained largely silent in the press, a silence that has infuriated many. What Woodbury University is so upset about is the suddenness of the Second Life ban. In a matter of minutes, the virtual university was destroyed, some professor and student accounts were blocked, and thousands of dollars and years of time were essentially thrown away.
Although Linden Lab has not been forthcoming about the problems with Woodbury, users and the media alike speculate that it has to do with the university's too lenient openness. For example, the university's buildings were largely student-created, and it has few restrictions on who can associate with the campus. A supposed result of the university's openness was its attraction of users known as "griefers", usually young or middle aged men who vandalize Second Life property, like placing swastikas in different places. Apparently, because of its acceptance of various people, Woodbury had become a hotbed of these "griefers."
While it is understandable that Second Life moderators would want to control activity that denigrates the efficient functioning of a world rife with useful applications pertaining to the real world, it seems that their measures were a bit too extreme. After all, Woodbury University had fully utilized the educational tools that Second Life provides, and students and professors alike had reaped many intellectual rewards from the process. The university paid good money for it, too. The prime culprit in this debacle, I believe, is the unwillingness of many in the Internet community to fully embrace transparency. Linden Lab should explicitly state their reasoning behind the banning of Woodbury and the two institutions should work out a compromise that doesn't leave so many in the e-learning community without a resource to turn to.
By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Tim Handorf, who writes on the topics of online college rankings. He welcomes your comments at his email Id: tim.handorf.20@googlemail.com.
