I hear all the time how we should be so cautious about virtual friends and how dangerous that is. But when my "real life" co-worker mentioned that she had to do a project for her MBA, I had an idea.
For her project, she had to research one of several topics including the "Human Genome Project" (HGP) and the "Mars Rover Project." In SecondLife, I had met Archivist Llewellyn at the NASA Colab and joined a group that fed information to me about NASA activities. So I would attend these activities when I could and just starting talking with the Archivist. After a while, we became Facebook friends where she'd feed even more great information to me. We shared interests in teaching, Science, and space. So when my real-life co-worker mentioned her project, I got excited and hooked them up.
Turns out, Archivist Llewellyn is really Shannon Bohle, an award winning scientist/educator who worked on the HGP as well as on the Curiosity AI for the new breed of Mars Rovers. I attended Shannon's presentation in SecondLife at the VWBPE conference this past March, where she showed us a virtual prototype of the Curiosity AI Mars Rover and gave us a quick tutorial for writing AIML (artificial intelligence markup language). I knew what I was witnessing was history. The educators in the session agreed.
This weekend, I am witness to the power of virtual friends connecting with real life friends. Shannon has provided my co-worker with expert research materials for her MBA project. Shannon is an amazing woman, sharing her knowledge with a complete stranger, out of the goodness of her heart and because of her passion for teaching. I get nothing out of this, except a reinforcement that virtual friends can also be great real life friends, too.
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