• http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus/97/90/23
• http://www.nmc.org/pdf/The-NMC-Campus-Project.pdf
• http://www.nmc.org/pdf/linden-prize-documentation.pdf
• http://sl.nmc.org
• http://virtualworlds.nmc.org

The key to the success of the NMC Campus Project, which has been completely self-sustaining now for more than two years, has been three fold: to be a good community member; to set a high standard for design, aesthetics, and technical proficiency; and to make educational spaces as compelling and immersive as possible.

All indications are that we have hit those marks - the average time that the 15,518 unique visitors who came to the NMC Campus sims over the last 100 days was an astounding 98 minutes per visit. These visitors span the globe, with visits from more than 56 countries over that same time, including areas such as North America, Europe, China, Malaysia, Australia, Japan, and even Africa! More than 14,000 individuals have voluntarily provided us with their contact information; the NMC Campus Observer blog routinely sees more than 4,700 unique visitors each month from dozens of countries around the globe. Since July 2007, the NMC has ushered in nearly 6,500 new educators to Second Life via its own reg-API site, averaging upwards of 450 per month.

As our own sophistication with Second Life has grown, we have continued to add to the ways we support educators. When we realized that educators lacked safe, dependably PG neighborhoods for their classes, we created special educational communities to provide educators with inexpensive ways to begin using Second Life (for more, see http://www.nmc.org/pdf/nmc-edu-communities.pdf). As we saw that faculty needed a more in-depth orientation to Second Life, one that had a variety of levels of learning, we created the NMC Orientation island, now the most popular island on the NMC Campus by far.

Our original goal was to move virtual worlds into everyday use by campuses by getting a critical mass involved, and we have directly helped more than 125 real-life institutions in ten different countries. That work took place not only in English-speaking countries like the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada, but also in Sweden, Turkey, Slovenia, France, and Spain. Our indirect influence - through our own highly successful series of virtual symposia, through dozens of keynotes and sessions at real-life conferences, via an extensive web documentation of our activities, and an ongoing stream of highly regard research and academic papers, including the NMCs renowned Horizon Report - is widely cited as the reason several hundreds of other colleges and universities have decided to build out programs in Second Life.

NMC has applied for the Linden Prize because we believe that we exemplify the values of creativity, of collaboration, and of continued pursuit of excellence that underlie that recognition. Now beginning our fourth year in Second Life, the NMC is as committed as ever to its mission of helping educators make the highest possible use of this platform via support, the sharing of models and resources, pushing possibilities, and absolute transparency. At the NMC, we share everything we learn, and give back to the community every way we can.

There is far more to this story than can possibly be told here. For the full text of this narrative, see http://www.nmc.org/pdf/The-NMC-Campus-Project.pdf. Documentation of the project is at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/linden-prize-documentation.pdf