Over the last five years there has been an increasing use of immersive virtual worlds, in particular Second Life, in Higher Education. A Practical Guide to Using Second Life in Higher Education is a pedagogically-informed text that guides staff in the use of Second Life for Higher Education. Although there are currently a growing number of books about Second Life available, much of the focus has been on designing the environment, ways of building and the general ease and use-value of the environment. This book is aimed at those who want to use Second Life for teaching in further and higher education. It provides both an overview and an in-depth stance about aspects of the immersive world for teaching, learning and assessment, as well as suggestions about researching (in) Second Life.

Explores our developing participatory online culture, establishing the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. Argues that what is emerging is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collarborative communities: produsage.

Virtual worlds are places where humans interact, and as such they can be environments for research and learning. However, they are complex and mutable in ways that more controlled and traditional environments are not. Although computer-mediated, virtual worlds are multifaceted social systems like the offline world, and choosing to study virtual world phenomena demands as much consideration for the participants, the environment and the researcher as offline. By exploring virtual worlds as places of research and learning, the international practitioners in this book demonstrate the power of these worlds to replicate and extend our arenas of research and learning. They focus on process and outcomes and consider questions that arise from engaging in teaching and research in these spaces, including new approaches to research ethics, internationalization, localization, and collaboration in virtual worlds. This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning, Media & Technology.

There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By 'writing the net', Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of 'electronic literature'; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers' body to the work of the net. The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net's ?becoming-literary,? by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer's body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of ?as-if.? Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary.

The wholly virtual world known as Second Life has attracted more than a million active users, millions of dollars, and created its own—very real—economy. The Making of Second Life is the behind-the-scenes story of the Web 2.0 revolution's most improbable enterprise: the creation of a virtual 3-D world with its own industries, culture, and social systems. Now the toast of the Internet economy, and the subject of countless news articles, profiles, and television shows, Second Life is usually known for the wealth of real-world companies (Reuters, Pontiac, IBM) that have created "virtual offices" within it, and the number of users ("avatars") who have become wealthy through their user-created content. What sets Second Life apart from other online worlds, and what has made it such a success (one million-plus monthly users and growing) is its simple user-centered philosophy. Instead of attempting to control the activities of those who enter it, the creators of Second Life turned them loose: users (also known as Residents) own the rights to the intellectual content they create in-world, and the in-world currency of Linden Dollars is freely exchangeable for U.S. currency. Residents have responded by generating millions of dollars of economic activity through their in-world designs and purchases—currently, the Second Life economy averages more than one million U.S. dollars in transactions every day, while dozens of real-world companies and projects have evolved and developed around content originated in Second Life. Wagner James Au explores the long, implausible road behind that success, and looks at the road ahead, where many believe that user-created worlds like Second Life will become the Net's next generation and the fulcrum for a revolution in the way we shop, work, and interact. Au's story is narrated from both within the corporate offices of Linden Lab, Second Life's creator, and from within Second Life itself, revealing all the fascinating, outrageous, brilliant, and aggravating personalities who make Second Life a very real place­—and an illuminating mirror on the real (physical) world. Au writes about the wars they fought (sometimes literally), the transformations they underwent, the empires of land and commerce they developed, and above all, the collaborative creativity that makes their society an imperfect utopia, better in some ways than the one beyond their computer screens.

Today, it has been said, the world is "flat," as online media allow information to move easily from point to point across the earth. International legal differences, however, are increasingly affecting the ease with which data and ideas can be shared across nations. Copyright law, for example, affects the international flow of materials by stipulating who has the right to replicate or to share certain kinds of content. Similarly, perspectives on privacy rights can differ from nation to nation and affect how personal information is shared globally. Moreover, national laws can affect the exchange of ideas by stipulating the language in which information must be presented in different geopolitical regions. Today's technical communicators need to understand how legal factors can affect communication practices if they wish to work effectively in global contexts. This collection provides an overview of different legal aspects that technical communicators might encounter when creating materials or sharing information in international environments. Through addressing topics ranging from privacy rights and information exchange to the legalities of business practices in virtual worlds and perspectives on authorship and ownership, the contributors to this volume examine a variety of communication-based legal issues that can cause problems or miscommunication in international interactions. Reviewing such topics from different perspectives, the authors collectively provide ideas that could serve as a foundation for creating best practices on or for engaging in future research in the area of legal issues in international settings.

Airlines willing to develop insight from foresight relating to the expected 'step phase changes' will eventually improve their margins. In Flying Ahead of the Airplane, Nawal Taneja analyzes global changes and thought-provoking scenarios to help airline executives adjust and adapt to the chaotic world.