I must say that I find this discussion interesting. And if we are talking of SL alternatives has any one use Sony Home ? It is a closed beta right now but what I’ve seen seems interesting.

I was reading the educators list, just now, and someone pointed that:
Last week at ASTD’s TechKnowledge 2008 conference, Joe Miller, VP of Platform and Technology Development at Linden Labs, said that there are over 1300 regions involved in education/training.

Of course we do not know if they are all active, but nevertheless is a lot of educational regions

Paula: You fail to point a single source of real revenue, the one that is
capable of generating more revenue. You are counting on universities to keep
pouring cash into the system? That is the worst Business Model ever.

Paula didn’t fail to point out a single source of real revenue, since she
didn’t even tried to do so. Why should she? In your first post you didn’t talk
about Linden Lab’s business model, so in her rebutal she also didn’t. You
talked about if Second Life would survive or not, and, for that, you talked
about users, second life client problems and economical problems. So, Paula
talked about one example of Second Life users that she thinks will keep being
SL users for a long time: universities. It’s not about a business model, is
about who’s making it active.

If you want to talk about linden lab business model, we have to take three things
straight first:

Universities aren’t “pouring cash into the system”: they’re giving LL money
by buying land, as many others;
Second Life as a concept doesn’t need a business model: both client and
server is open sourced by now, so the code has a life of its own. When talking
about Second Life we are talking about Linden Lab’s instance of Second
Life;
When talking about Linden Lab’s businness model, for the sake of sanity,
let’s pretend that Linden Lab’s only business is their Second Life instance,
and developing products around the Second Life ecosystem.

When Linden Lab decided to open source their servers, discussion about Linden
Lab’s business model: after all it couldn’t be just generating revenue by
selling land in the virtual world, since nowadays anybody can do that. So,
what’s their business?

selling virtual land (with competition);
consult to other companies doing business in Second Life (with
competition);
virtual bank (with competition);
develop proprietary extensions to SL (I hope not, but it’s viable);
become a not-for-profit (which suits well, and if you see other examples of
not-for-profit technology companies, that can be a happy choice)…

And this is just a little of the HUGE amount of things they could do. There’s
a lot of money in VW’s nowadays, and growing, and only a fool would
ignore that factor. Plus, in all the activities with competition, they will
surely be the most trusted and considered the better (even if more expensive).

I can barely agree with the first one, but the others? Architecture models?
Medicine students practicing on a model? SL is a poor excuse for a simulated 3D
world. The 3rd person perspective kills any lessons one might learn for
architecture purposes. Just try to design a real house in SL and you end up
walking over every peace of furniture there. And practicing a delicate surgery
in a virtual model? Maybe practicing the theoretical steps would be possible
but more than that?

You seem to be skeptical with eLearning in general. That can be a nice
discussion to have, but it would be out of focus of discussing Second Life. For
the latter, it suffices to say that, like it or not, eLearning is growing
steadilly, and the efforts of using virtual worlds for eLearning have a long
history, and is also growing. I don’t believe (do you?) that the effort will
stop soon…

Why would a company want to be on SL? That is the real issue. Find a BM that is
capable of generating real revenue and maybe we can find a common ground. Until
them, for me, it is just a souped up academic experiment.

Companies can have a lot of reasons for wanting to be in Second Life. There’s a
lot of people there, and each avatar can be a potential client, publicity
target, partner… Plus, in Second Life you need services, so there’s a huge
ecosystem of companies doing “virtual work” (generating content and selling it,
for instance). Companies can loose money or make money on Virtual Worlds,
including Second Life. This isn’t speculation of belief: there are lot’s of
examples of both. Then, Second Life can also be used as a mean to reach a goal,
even if you need to invest (and that’s the use companies are making when
creating virtual environments for training purposes, simulate oppinion-making
practices, socio-economic evaluations on the impact of several actions…).
It’s all a matter of having an idea of something you want to do and that can be
done thanks to Second Life. It’s a difficult exercice for a Virtual Worlds
skeptical, but a fruitous one for some companies making real dollars out of it.
At the end, for lots of companies it can be just an “academic experiment”, but
good academic experiments have purposes, and if Second Life can enhance the
expirence and reaching those purposes better (in a quicker way, in a less
expensive way, or similar factors), then Second Life already has a possible
purpose.

SL has positive and negative aspects for education, but in general it is a good
tool and, for the reasons I stated before, the only one. Can you point me
another tool that teachers could use to have the same revenue SL gives?

SL isn’t the only tool for those things, but that’s a whole other discussion…
Take a look at what’s
being made on OpenSim, for instance.