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February 22, 2008
Brown Bag Notes: January 18, 2008 - Research in Second Life
ATTENDING:
Perplexity Peccable
Memetic Projects
Vitesse Vella
Kaiya Qunhua
Gyokuran Enzo
Kinderella Bright
Bridget Jennings
Rudolfo Woodget
Seluj Pelous & Friend
Vic Novi
FREEBIES:
UM Block M Sweater, appropriate for the cold and snowy weather we were having.
Teachers starter kit from Desideria Stockton
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
InfoIsland Tour w/ Rolig Loon
Blog: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/
DISCUSSION:
* Research issues in Second Life
- Research intense sims
* Nanotechnology Island
- Teaching research skills
* Genome Island
- Using SL to do actual research
* Virtual Hallucinations
+ "They created a build that teaches awareness of what it is like to be schizophrenic by simlulating the hallucinations. You walk through and experience a little of what it is like."
+ "The voices creep me out."
+ "they also WARN people clearly what to expect and how to turn off the voices if they bother you."
+ advocacy / consumer health education / intervention / research
+ Pretest / posttest
+ model for social science research in SL, well done
- IRBs and SL
* Description of research project proposed, modeled partly on Virtual Hallucinations for advocacy and information about facial difference
* Some places, they are having trouble explaining SL to the IRB folk
* Linden Lab's research approval process: http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Research
- How are RL researchers using SL?
* teaching about research
* remote attendance at events (meetings, presentations)
* sharing / socializing / collaborating
* doing actual research and accumulating data, usually in the social sciences
- Collaborations:
- Why SL?
* Why use SL for research?
+ "work needs to be done before survey instruments & data collection processes can be adapted to SL"
+ "e.g. in Cognition & Perception research, a lot of instruments depend on subject reaction time"
* Why are you personally in SL? What do you hope to get from it?
+ meet people from around the world
+ attend conferences and presentations
+ learning and personal development
+ interested in using SL for education, search instruction classes
+ "looking for ways to make the distance learning environment better than powerpoints with audio"
+ engagement
+ alternative to webinars
+ "I feel less compelled to multitask while attending a SL event, compared to a Centra/Webex conference"
* SL Cons
+ "I get a little bored when I am just typing and reading in SL."
+ "learning curve for second life is difficult also and you can't really get people who have not used it before to become efficient enough to attend"
+ "is it realistic to attract people who have never used second life to attend classes there?"
+ "trying to set things up to do stuff is so much harder on the teacher"
* Could we have students do research in SL?
+ simulations / collaborations
+ what resources would be needed?
+ discussion of Genome Island
+ "team project work (game design, softtware engineering, user interface design) many teams have both in class and distance learning students on them"
+ collaborative problem solving (divided teams: half do planning, other half do building)
+ many places using powerpoint for instruction, just like in RL
+ "research projects in using immersive environments to provide interfaces to information repositories"
* What about voice chat?
+ "I don't like it"
+ "found it confusing"
+ audio problems:
- with conversations -- voices overlap near and distant and it can be confusing
- wonderful for presentations, bad for discussions
- unable to configure it to work on a mac laptop with a small keyboard
- folks in voice utterly ignore all IM and chat communications
- Takes a really high powered set up to archive in the way chatlogs are archiveable
- I've been places where someone accidentally hit their trigger key and broadcast a private conversation from RL into SL
- I haven't ever attended a voice presentation where someone in the audience didn't complain about the audio
- "so there are no "moderator" type controls, like in telephone conference calls?"
- "If everyone was crystal clear on the mechanics, and agreed to follow Robert's Rules of Order, then it would probably work well for discussion."
Posted by pfa at February 22, 2008 11:37 AM