This event is now booked out
Researching Second Life
Thursday 7th February 2007
London Knowledge Lab
Noon – 4:15 pm
Convened by the project team (Learning from Online Worlds; Teaching in Second Life).
This event is supported by the Eduserv Foundation
Researching Second Life is a half-day seminar RL discussion on topics relating to the researching of ‘learning, teaching and culture’ in Second Life. To allow for discussion, participant numbers will be limited. The event begins with an update of our Eduserv funded project, ‘Learning from Online Worlds; Teaching in Second Life’. The rest of the afternoon will be for discussion.
In order to generate discussion, some participants have kindly contributed short ‘position statements’ in response to any one of the day’s key themes, and these are available to read here.
The four key themes are:
- Defining Second Life: How should SL be defined? What are the disciplinary, conceptual and methodological ramifications of this definition?
- Defining learning in the context of SL research. How do we know learning when we see it? Does learning only count when we can measure it? Is there life beyond ‘assessment-based’ models of learning?
- Second Life Literature reviewing: Is the attention directed at SL resulting in the emergence of a compelling body of research literature? What previous research/fields do SL researchers ignore at their peril?
- Research ethics or ‘ethics’ ethics? Ethics in relation to: privacy, teaching, research practice and priorities, documentation, observation, methodology, culture, policy – and Second Life.
Timetable:
Presentation 12.00
Lunch 1.00
Theme 1. 1:45 – 2:15
Theme 2. 2:15 – 2:45
Coffee 2:45 – 3:00
Theme 3. 3:00 – 3:30
Theme 4. 3:30 – 4:00
Conclusion 4:00 – 4:15
February 6, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Apologies that this is a last minute entry, and only a *very* limited position statement… external examination duties intervened.
Defining Second Life: We need to recognise that Second Life is only one of many MUVE platforms. If we want to ‘define’ it, I guess we need to consider ways in which it is unique and ways in which it is the same as other MUVE platforms. In terms of uniqueness, the freedom for user creation of content would appear to be the key element that differentiates it from others – which might give such abilities to admins or developers but not to end users.
Defining learning in the context of SL research. I do question whether we need to restrict the context so tightly. Should we be looking to MUVEs more generally or open it out to the field of CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work). While the affordances may vary, will learning need a new definition for the narrow context of SL?
Literature Reviewing:
I’ve mentioned CSCW already. There is also a related field of CSCL, which afaik has not produced a huge body of literature but which is clearly relevant.
Text-based virtual worlds have been used in learning over the past couple of decades – and there is a scattered literature here also.
Virtual Reality seems like an unpopular and best forgotten relative when reading much work on Virtual Worlds – but there is a body of work looking at collaborative learning in the context of VR, which is worthy of review at least.
Research ethics or ‘ethics’ ethics?
No comment at this time!
Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow!
February 7, 2008 at 7:16 am
For those of you who’ve not met Daniel before today, there is information about Sloodle here:
http://www.sloodle.org/
And there’s lots of interesting stuff at Daniel’s blog, here’s the link.
http://learninggames.wordpress.com/