UWA Art Activities Presented to Russian Conference

From FreeWee Ling:
JayJay and I were asked a few months ago by Yuri Krylov (SL: ykrylov Bluestar), an educator at Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics, and Informatics in Tver to present papers at the 10th International Scientific and Practical Conference on the theme: "Partnership of Business and Education in Regional Innovation Development." My first response was something like, "Lol. Who me?" Yuri is interested in developing resources in SL for his region and insisted that UWA's activities are a model that would be good to hear at the conference. He was not offering to fly us to Moscow to present the papers, unfortunately. In any case we were certainly honored to be asked and he told us they would publish our papers in the proceedings of the conference.

And so they have. A couple weeks ago I received in the mail a dense little package with brightly colored stamps containing a paper bound book of 400 pages. The table of contents is over 4 pages long. Of course most if it is in Russian, but it seems they bundled all the papers in English together at the beginning and the first and second articles are authored by me and JayJay, respectively. I'm thrilled to have my paper published at all, much less at the front of the book, though I presume there is no particular significance to its location.

JayJay's paper is an overview of UWA's presence in SL and especially the arts activity as a case study for bringing many creative people from around the world together in a highly productive and successful project. My paper is a bit more about relationship building and so on, but covers the same idea, i.e., that in virtual worlds a relatively small investment can have a very large impact. You may see our articles scanned from the book (with permission) this PDF.