Happy New Year. And … what next.

Wishing all readers of Virtual World Watch – sceptics, evangelicals, academics, researchers, students, the media, the just plain curious – a healthy, productive and prosperous 2012.

A round-up of things.

Snapshot #10 is slightly delayed (thankfully only by a few weeks, this time). It’s been the most enjoyable of the ten snapshots that have been compiled since, gosh, the Spring of 2007. Rather a lot has changed in that time, in the world (anyone remember Tony Blair and George Bush running things?), the economy (no-one used words such as “sub-prime default” or “austerity” then), in technology (such a long list), and in education (compare the cost to students then, and now). But the basics of compiling a Virtual World Watch snapshot report have stayed pretty much the same.

So the online version of Snapshot #10, which is slightly more up to date than the printed versions sent out over the last few weeks, will be on this website on Monday 23rd January. It may be up here a bit before that, but the announcements will go out there.

Here’s a screenshot of part of the front cover:

To answer the most frequent questions over the last month or so:

1. What next for Virtual World Watch? Well – and this will require funding or income from somewhere – we’re looking to take the focus away from solely doing a snapshot, to looking at the evidence concerning the effective use of virtual worlds in education. Back in 2007, there wasn’t much out there relating to virtual worlds. Several years on, with much research completed and ongoing, and open access making more research openly available, there’s some meat we can get our teeth into. There’ll be more of that in the snapshot report.

2. When will the next report be? As said before that depends on finding funding, which for snapshot #10 was one-off in nature. Personally, it would feel good to do several more in the three years of 2012 to 2014, including another one in 2012 to see if there is much shift from Second Life to OpenSim and other worlds. But, we’ll see.

3. Can I still submit for snapshot #10? No. But if you send something relevant and non-PR in nature about your virtual world activities in a UK educational institution, we can put it on the website as a blog entry.