Thanks to the nearly 80 folks who turned out for the Second Life simulcast of the FCC Workshop on Education and Broadband Access! Special thanks to Hamlet Au, Pathfinder Linden, Ricken Flow, and others who helped promote the workshop to their networks. And congratulations to the FCC for taking a chance on these new forms of public engagement.
There were lots of interesting comments by the panelists about the importance of broadband access for education, from the government, broadcast media, publishing, academic and education sectors. For those that were not able to attend, you can watch the archived video accessible on Broadband.gov as well as continue to provide your written input at their Ideascale site.
During the event, there was an equally interesting backchannel conversation happening within Second Life, discussing everything from games-based learning to the high cost of textbooks. One of the advantages of virtual events is the multi-modal nature of communications, where you can have a video stream playing that everyone is watching, an ongoing public text chat providing commentary, private IM messages, notecards, and various non-verbal communications going on, all at the same time. That said, two hours is a very long time for someone to be in Second Life, so we had significant drop-off in attendance after the first hour.
More screenshots from the workshop simulcast here.
