Earlier today on a snowy afternoon in downtown Boston, students, faculty, staff, members of the Mayor of Boston’s Office and others convened at Emerson College to watch a deed and virtual key to Boston Island in the virtual world Second Life presented to the City of Boston. The video above features footage from the event, including a presentation by Gene Koo, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School to Bill Oates, Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston.
During the event, Emerson College Professor Eric Gordon said the event today was a celebration “to launch the work we’ve been doing in Second Life called Hub2 with the City of Boston and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.” Hub2 is a project “using Second Life to stir up ideas about our shared spaces. To build together and do something about the spaces that we share now.”
Gordon also said the purpose of Hub2 was “not to leave our bodies behind but to use virtual worlds to harness the physical world. This is a launching pad for doing more work in the future to change the way that we think about civic engagement.”
Bill Oates, the Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston said the project “Tried to carve out a piece of us to think about innovation, as technology evolves.” And he asked, “How can we utilize technology to engage better with the citizenry? We don’t know where this is going to lead.”
Oates said this project is a “great way to think about using new technologies” for
(1) Working with institutions in the areas
(2) Workforce development, and
(3) Socializing our youth into these technologies to think about how they can become better engaged.
You can read more about the event today, from the press release at Hub2.
RUNTIME: 00:01:49, SIZE: 320×240, 20MB, .MOV, H.264 codec
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