Virtual Citations: Defining and Creating Ethical Content in Virtual Worlds

Presentation from the 2007 NMC Symposium on Evolution of Communication

As the landscape of technology changes daily and new information is created, distributed, mashed up, and distributed again and again...the nature of how we communicate citations is becoming confused. While the Creative Commons license and the trend of public domain publishing exists, there are no intuitive ways to cite within virtual worlds, and governing bodies like the MLA and the APA have not provided directions to cite from virtual world documents (notecards, text chat, object text, and scripts). This lack of communication is frustrating to academics and students using virtual worlds for education and research.

This hands-on collaborative workshop will help participants create ethical content in Second Life by exploring available tools and discussing current trends. Participants will work together to create a user-friendly system for documenting within virtual worlds and from virtual worlds in real life writings. The resulting documentation will be published by Beth Ritter-Guth upon completion under the name "Virtual Documentation Style" (VDS). All participants will be listed as contributing authors, and the work will be released under the Creative Commons license.