[ECAR 2007 Summer Symposium] Second Life panel

The second morning of ECAR starts off with a panel discussing the educational use of Second Life. The panel is titled:

This Ain't Your Daddy's Classroom For Sure: Serious(ly Fun) Living and Learning in the Virtual World of Second Life. Participants include:

* Eric Hackathorn, IT Specialist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
* Phillip D. Long, Assoc. Dir, Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, MIT
* Sarah Robbins, Instructor of English, Ball State University
* Angela Thomas, Professor, University of Sydney
* Session moderator: Laurence F. Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, The New Media Consortium (NMC)

Larry kicks it off with a movie that the NMC folks put together about their campus in Second Life, and notes (in passing) that the NMC is making real money contracting with institutions to build spaces in the environment.

The panelists were asked to address these questions:

What brought you to SL?
What are the key insights you have gained to date? Issues you have had to solve?
What questions about SL in particular or virtual worlds in general remain unanswered for you?

Phil Long (the MIT one) starts off by talking about their path to second life - they were looking for ways to express the cultural differences among residence halls at MIT. That led the m to start developing some 3d gaming environment, but in reality they were looking for a social environment, not a game.

Phil notes that the terms of service of SL are a big issue for many institutions, which took them six or seven months to agree on, particularly in regards to indemnification and the resolution of legal issues. Service levels are also an issue - the grid is down every Wednesday for several hours, and once it's upgraded you have to install a new version of the client. It's an extremely engaging place - it's hard to multitask while doing sl. They're interested in exploring other virtual worlds, and the issue of portability across them. They're still trying to figure out the syntax for interacting and what are the affordances for different disciplines. MIT is interested in partially virtual worlds - the notion that you're pervasively existing in both virtual and real space at the same time.

Sarah is PhD candidate at Ball State and director of Emerging Technologies at Mediasoft. She teaches freshman composition in SL. She wanted to put the course under a microscope - within 72 hours of sending an email invite out she had 300 students wanting to sign up - for an 18 person class. She's been teaching for a year now and measuring levels of engagement and community formation. On the whole it far exceeds the levels of engagement in f2f classes. She has lots more questions than answers - it's a student-centered space - students can construct their own learning environments. When students are in charge of their own learning, can we trust them to know what's best? We have to offer some guidance, and we're still learning how to do that in SL. A second question is how to use the environment to encourage the development of lifelong learning environments.

There's a list of universities in second life on the secondlife.com web site.

Angela Thomas was featured in Australian Vogue. She's written a book called Youth Online. She's been researching virtual worlds since '95. She teaches a new media course in SL. She's discovered that the students are extremely committed and excited about second life, more than blogging or forums. The online role playing communities are a unique part of virtual worlds - she encouraged her students to get involved. She also has them do linguistic and semiotic analysis of avatars to understand what lays behind the body construct. The 3D space is compelling because her students are very busy English teachers - they don't have a background in new media or computing, and the 3D space is familiar for them. The aspect of play in SL is also important. Has the potential to flatten hierarchy and let students be more self-directed. Questions - how to find the balance between the delivery of content and student self-direction. She needs, for example, to teach a framework for linguistic analysis. It's not a neutral space - it has some ideologies and discourse the underlies the practices in the environment, and she has questions for how to get students to look at that in a critical way.

Eric is the chief architect for NOAA's virtual island in SL. It's turned into something like Disneyland meets science education. You can fly a virtual P3 Orion through a hurricane, ride a weather balloon, visit a tsunami, etc. IT Security at the US Capitol wouldn't let them demo their second life site there - wrote it off as a video game. 36% of their visitors hadn't heard of NOAA before. Questions - what's about 508 compliance (disabled access). What about content management in the environment? What about borders between organizations? Security is a big thing - right now all chat in SL is in clear text. Gauging return on investment - you have to define what value is - it's not necessarily traffic. SL gives you tools for monitoring the engagement - you can see where people spend time, see who's been idle, who's interacted with what objects, when conversation is happening. There are privacy concerns...

Phil - what is the value proposition for MIT? The opportunity that's enticing is the way of modeling social action in virtual environments, playing out social structures and models through those simulations, e.g. what makes for an effective emergency room in a hospital? Imagine doing that simulation with real live participants. Analogous to cad/cam modeling for social interaction.

Larry - lots of interesting possibilities for expressing data in the environment.

Sarah notes that she saw evidence in her SL courses of real community formation that didn't happen in her other classes - developed their own linguistic conventions, objects in space, etc, and some of those extended outside the space.

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