Everything’s Coming Up Metaverse
Photo by Sophie Grieve-Williams on Unsplash
December 1, 2021:
Hey, we’ll be having a Christmas party on December 18. You’re invited.
December 14, 2021:
Actual party invitation
Now it’s a St. Nick’s Frosty Metaverse Party. I wonder if they served Metaverse cookies? 😣
January 24, 2022:
Email:
Recently the concept of Education Metaverse is
sweeping the world. Lots of people are developing products and
researching on this topic. I have just co-published a concept paper on
Education Metaverse. If we can add Metaverse to our site, that would make it
more timely and trendy. Immersive Learning is the pedagogy underlying Education Metaverse. We just added Metaverse for Learning as a theme to (Anonymized Conference) 2022.
That’s an academic researcher advocating that an academic group should use a trendy word.
February 17, 2022:
Metaverse Conference (not it’s real name)
Opening day (ahem, one day, but still). Opening seconds after 30 second countdown.
Camera goes on. Live microphone.
First word broadcast: “Shit.”
Presenter leans back in chair, takes earphones off, and says to someone back off camera, “What?”
Sighs quickly. Strips off headphones, jumps up out of chair, and runs out of room and off camera.
Dead air.
This is 9 a.m. local and 11 a.m. Eastern US time zone on a Thursday in mid-February. I’m just reminding you of that because I’m stating the point, as a conference organizer myself, that these folks were right in the sweet spot of being able to handle an emergency no-show. They had a 30 second jazzy countdown graphic, with music! They could have had a “green room” concept. They could have published their one-day schedule earlier before the conference so that each presenter had plenty of time to know exactly when they were on schedule. Their admin staff could have expressed the presentations times to the presenters in their own home/local time zone (that’s only polite). There are many support steps to prevent what happened—it’s not like this presenter was woken up at 3 a.m. to suddenly go on camera. That’s what I’m saying…
Presenter comes back into room.
With no apologizes starts talking about the difference between Mountain time and a new made-up phrase ‘Metaverse time’ (which turns out to be an old allusion, I think to Second Life time which was Pacific, where Second Life was headquartered, because the other co-presenter was an hour off…late, which can only be construed as Pacific time with reference to Mountain time.)
The next 30-40 minutes are a bit of a jumble as the original presenter patch-presents a ~15 minute introduction and then the intended host shows up and also presents at a first compacted and then expanded set of concepts (which is recycled from other conferences). The intended host, to my chagrin because I like him, doesn’t even know who is coming next on the schedule and when.
The rest of the day has only one session that I found grounded in research and practice. The other sessions wildly pushed the “technology” button for the Metaverse. ‘Want to get started in the Metaverse? Build something!!’ I was actually surprised how much the host college pushed their own technology classes, but then again, what are you going to get for free…
It appears that many attendees were newbies to Metaverse because they kept saying that the concepts were “new” to them.
A definite low-lite was when a fight broke out in the chat about the WHO. Yes, that WHO, (not the band or the Doctor.) I took a break at that point. It’s clear that politics is coming into the Metaverse with us.
There was one high-lite but I can’t say what it is without saying which conference it, therefore, was so I’ll let that go.
But over and over, institutions wonder why women and minorities do not feel welcome.
Revisit that first few seconds of broadcast. You had your chance, after weeks of social media buzz, to make an impact.
You did.
You advertised your quality.
In one word.
