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

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:

"Metaverses & Scholarly Collaboration"

Overview:

In recent years, there have been fewtechnologiesthat have caused such a split in the academic world between advocatesanddissidents as metaverses -- particularly Second Life.

What can metaverses bring to thescholarship ofthe Humanities and the Arts? Can they leverage collaboration and offera commonground for the exploration of the Grid?

And what can metaverses contribute toeducation?  Do they offer unique new tools for or modes of teaching andparticipatory learning?  Do they present overwhelming challenges andhowmight we address these?

While "metaverses" are currently used inseveral domains of Science and Engineering for collaboration, theiradoption byHumanities, Arts and Social Sciences has been much slower.

In particular, the adoption ofSecondLife by higher education has been evolving in a problematic manner. Theissuescover a large spectrum of problems from technological, tosocial/ethical, tocomplex intersections between these. Scholars that resist the adoptionof SLpoint out security, privacy issues, frequent crashes of the system andlowinteroperability with the rest of the Internet. They caution us againstthefact that most avatars are of white race with physical traits that arein consonancewith normative expectations of aesthetics and social acceptance.Furthermore,academics are concerned with the future of the user-generated contentthat isbeing left in SL by hundreds of higher education institutions, giventhecentralization of the technology in one corporation ? Linden Lab?Regardless of howinnovative the EULA (End-User Licensing Agreement) of SL is (andindeed, itis), the technology is proprietary.

Advocates of SL for Higher Education notethat thepopularity of Second Life is responsible for a critical mass that isunmatchedby any other metaverse and which has an important impact in itspotential forHigher Education. They see Open sim as a promising venture that willwed theopen source philosophy with Second Life and will handle communicationbetweenthe client and server in the case of SL but also across metaverses. Thecritical mass behind SL is also the reason why large companies such asApple,Facebook and IBM are investing in the development of mashups, plugins,widgetsand other forms of integration of their technologies with SL.

Thinking beyond the classroom, how mightmetaverses,by adding "embodiment," create an environment that is inviting toHumanists, social scientists and artists to the collaborativeexplorationof the Grid? By redefining the subject of research as a space that canbecollectively explored, a metaverse can be used for collaboration acrossdisciplines and attract those scholars whose disciplines have a socialobject.  Can metaverses nurture the kind of trust and reciprocity thatareessential principles of scholarly collaboration?

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

Ana Boa-Ventura is a Fulbright doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertationexplores virtualcommunities leveraging social support for smoking cessation. In Portugal, she is working withjournalists ondigital storytelling (DST) to promote social interventions, as well aswithinnovative applications of DST in corporate communication. She isinterested incross-cultural communication across boundaries ? whether they aregeographic,ideological or disciplinary - and this includes collaboration betweenscholarsin the Arts, Social Sciences, Humanities and Computer Sciencescommunities. Sheis interested in understanding who these scholars are, working in thefringesof their own disciplines and promoting the twilight zones that aredefining anew 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/.]