Second Life for Education: fabulous opportunities or over-hyped fabulation?

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Greetings HASTAC!

Thanks to the many of you who contributed your thoughts, questions and experiences, we had a fascinating inuagural HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum on "Participatory Learning" featuring Howard Rheingold and HASTAC Scholar Joshua McVeigh-Schultz.

I'm writing to invite you all to join in for our next forum, which will open for discussion this coming Monday, September 22, and will be facilitated by HASTAC Scholar Ana Boa-Ventura. The topic:

Overview:

In recent years, there have been few technologies that have caused such a split in the academic world between advocates and dissidents as metaverses -- particularly Second Life.

What can metaverses bring to the scholarship of the Humanities and the Arts? Can they leverage collaboration and offer a common ground for the exploration of the Grid?

And what can metaverses contribute to education?  Do they offer unique new tools for or modes of teaching and participatory learning?  Do they present overwhelming challenges and how might we address these?

While "metaverses" are currently used in several domains of Science and Engineering for collaboration, their adoption by Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences has been much slower.

In particular, the adoption of Second Life by higher education has been evolving in a problematic manner. The issues cover a large spectrum of problems from technological, to social/ethical, to complex intersections between these. Scholars that resist the adoption of SL point out security, privacy issues, frequent crashes of the system and low interoperability with the rest of the Internet. They caution us against the fact that most avatars are of white race with physical traits that are in consonance with normative expectations of aesthetics and social acceptance. Furthermore, academics are concerned with the future of the user-generated content that is being left in SL by hundreds of higher education institutions, given the centralization of the technology in one corporation – Linden Lab… Regardless of how innovative the EULA (End-User Licensing Agreement) of SL is (and indeed, it is), the technology is proprietary.

Advocates of SL for Higher Education note that the popularity of Second Life is responsible for a critical mass that is unmatched by any other metaverse and which has an important impact in its potential for Higher Education. They see Open sim as a promising venture that will wed the open source philosophy with Second Life and will handle communication between the client and server in the case of SL but also across metaverses. The critical mass behind SL is also the reason why large companies such as Apple, Facebook and IBM are investing in the development of mashups, plugins, widgets and other forms of integration of their technologies with SL.

Thinking beyond the classroom, how might metaverses, by adding "embodiment," create an environment that is inviting to Humanists, social scientists and artists to the collaborative exploration of the Grid? By redefining the subject of research as a space that can be collectively explored, a metaverse can be used for collaboration across disciplines and attract those scholars whose disciplines have a social object.  Can metaverses nurture the kind of trust and reciprocity that are essential principles of scholarly collaboration?

Come join the discussion and share your thoughts!
Monday, September 22 here at www.hastac.org

Ana Boa-Ventura is a Fulbright doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation explores virtual communities leveraging social support for smoking cessation. In Portugal, she is working with journalists on digital storytelling (DST) to promote social interventions, as well as with innovative applications of DST in corporate communication. She is interested in cross-cultural communication across boundaries – whether they are geographic, ideological or disciplinary - and this includes collaboration between scholars in the Arts, Social Sciences, Humanities and Computer Sciences communities. She is interested in understanding who these scholars are, working in the fringes of their own disciplines and promoting the twilight zones that are defining a new type of scholarship.

[Thanks to the "Educational Uses of SecondLife" photostream on flickr for these photos!  You can visit the Second Life in Education website at  http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/.]