UWA Professor wins Pearson Prize for Second Life Study

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Professor Wade Halvorson Teaching at the UWA Sky Theatre

A/Professor Wade Halvorson of the School of Business, University of Western Australia (UWA) has won the Pearson Education Prize for the best Case Study paper at the July 2010 Academy of Marketing Conference. The Academy of Marketing annual conference is the largest academic marketing conference in the United Kingdom, and was held this year at the Coventry University Business School.

The case study concerns “Virtual Dublin”, a very successful online business in the virtual world, Second Life (Halvorson, W., Bal, A.S., Pitt, L.F., and Parent, M. (2010) Cashing in on the Green Dots: Marketing Ireland in Second Life, Academy of Marketing Conference, Coventry University, UK. July 2010).

Professor Wade Halvorson

This follows hot on the heels of the nomination of the University of Western Australia’s Second Life Presence and Jay Jay Jegathesan of the School of Physics, UWA (founder of the UWA Second Life presence), being nominated into the top 10 for the 2010 Linden prize for contributions to Art, Architecture, Research and Teaching in Virtual Worlds.

Professor Halvorson who uses Second Life as a teaching tool to undergraduate and postgraduate students at UWA for the Bachelor of Commerce and Masters by Coursework programmes said, “This means that Second Life businesses can be taken seriously. The case study presents a viable business model that works in the virtual world and that increased our knowledge in this field. Virtual world businesses have seen exponential growth. The total annual revenue of virtual products has reached a staggering USD 2 billion.”

Professor Halvorson described a paradigm breaking moment while he was completing his PhD at a Swedish University, while using Second Life to conduct classes with his students in Perth who were logged in at the UWA Sky Theatre within Second Life while simultaneously being addressed by a guest lecturer from Vancouver, Canada.

“It opens up the world to my students. We have students using the computer labs to conduct international consumer behaviour research. Second Life also allows me to conduct tutorials in brand communities such as at Harley Davidson Island in Second Life and give students exposure to brand community members without leaving their desktop.”

Since its official launch on the 2nd of October 2009, by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Robson, the UWA presence in Second Life has seen a meteoric rise and is a recognized education leader in the virtual world.