Two themes emerged at the League of Worlds conference last week. Neither had been planned in advance, although some people who attended suspected otherwise.

The first theme was Second Life as an educational tool. Although this has always played a part in discussions, in the past more attendees used ActiveWorlds, or World of Warcraft, or some other platform; or (like Greg Jones) were building their own. This year most of the talks and discussions seemed to reference Second Life.

Since the keynote speaker was John Lester – Pathfinder Linden to Second Life afficionados – this was perhaps not surprising. If the keynote speaker had been Linus Torvalds I expect that everyone with an interest in talking about Linux, in the context of virtuality and pedagogy, would have made an effort to turn up.

It also undoubtedly reflects Linden Labs’ success in making Second Life the conversational gambit du jour. Indeed, in the last year or so it has often seemed to be the only game in town. ActiveWorlds and There have apparently given up. Moove never left the starting gate. Adobe Atmosphere was killed about the same time they hung Director out to dry. Multiverse and Areae have not arrived yet.

The second theme, which in some ways arose out of the first, was identity.

Robert Sharl talked about the emergence of fluid identities – Identity 3.0 in his words. I spoke about the contrast between augmentist and immersionist approaches to Second Life, and about a possible third way which reconfigured the relationship between user and avatar as the relationship between actor and character. Robert Sanders and others from AppState presented a contrasting view which looked at the trust issues involved in teaching immersively and the benefits of fixing identity. In their worlds everyone uses her own name, and avatars are a form of transparent clothing rather than an object with its own imperatives.

I have always been able to see the benefits of this approach, and to understand why AppState feel the need to embrace this model. I also understand why they feel that this approach is impossible within the current version of Second Life, and why they have therefore chosen alternative platforms. Since AppState have more experience in running whole educational programs online than anyone else I know, I feel this is a great shame.

It is even more of a shame when you consider that the current status of identity in Second Life is not designed to prevent this; it is just confused. I can’t be Owen Kelly in Second Life, but neither can I be, say, Boomer Brainstrust. As a new member I can only be Boomer Some name from the list of surnames currently made available by Linden Labs, which places me in the fabled middle ground aka the worst place to be.

However, as John Lester pointed out in his opening talk, this kind of problem is not surprising because Linden Labs created Second Life with no prior art, and the fact that some of their decisions have turned out to be problematic is almost inevitable. In many ways Second Life is a much more complex project than, say, World of Warcraft which has users who get given things to use. In Second Life users get given the tools to make things to use, which makes predicting the effects of a new feature several levels of complexity greater.

I have posted live copies of the Zoho Show slideshows that Jutta and I used; and I will write my argument up as a self-contained essay soon. Here I want to note that these themes related to a third notion, which bubbled through both of them: the idea of enriched access.

Some people were concerned primarily with the notion of who was doing the access; how that who could be authenticated; and how we could manage the myriad different whos that we were creating for ourselves. Others were concerned with the relationship bewteen our primary self and our secondary selves (between the actor and the character, for example). Still others were concerned with what we can access and under what conditions; and the effect that these conditions have on the learning process.

Some of this was resolved at the level of theory and philosophy, and some of it devolved into practical requests and suggestions. A practical area that interested me concerns the introduction of enriched access to materials in Second Life. There has been talk about html on a prim for several years now, but nothing has been released. It seems to me that this would make an immediate difference to the richness of material available in-world.

At a simple level t would mean that billboards and displays could be centralised on a web server outside Linden Labs and catalogued, controlled and updated much more easily. At the moment any billboards have to be loaded into Second Life as textures – and those textures have to reside in the inventory of a particular resident. If this material lived on a server that I controlled then I could establish a permissions system for the billboard editor that had nothing whatsoever to do with Second Life.

This would, I think, not only make my life easier. It would make Linden Labs life easier too, since the permissions system and assets servers would be called upon to do several things less.

However, there is another possible use of the web inside Second Life, which would be equally, if not more, powerful. At the moment I can script an object to show a so-called notecard when it is touched. This causes a two dimensional window to appear in the interface. This displays text in a fairly primitive (that is, unformatted) way. If it was possible to cause an object to call up a two dimensional window containing a web page, then “notecards” could become fully styled multimedia objects capable of containing forms that could be sent to my servers.

If this was possible then it should be possible to make one more leap. To embed the Zoho api into the Second Life viewer in such a way that residents with Zoho accounts could work, edit and share documents inside the Second Life viewer. The current moves on the web towards aggregation make perfect sense, because most people want their multiple identities accessible from one place. For this reason Zoho and GMail are both available from with your Facebook profile.

This means that the Facebook team can get on with developing the platform as an aggregated place for enriched access without having to do all the heavy lifting themselves. Given the Second Life team’s workload, and given its potential as a platform for both immersion and augmentation, I hope they consider going down a similar path.

To be able to work jointly on shared documents inside Second Life would provide a major leap forward for both education and business users.