OUseful Info

OU Second Life Explorations

So yesterday I finally found out who's working on the OU SL island - Jacqui Bennett, as part of a COLMSCT project.

(COLMSCT is one of the HEFCE funded OU CETLs - Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.)

The island is invite only, so if you're an OU reader and want acces then you'll need to get in touch with Jacquie.

I also found out that another OU project - Schome - not school, not home - is looking at using SL, which could be interesting. I really need to have a chat to them about doing some robotics outreach in world, something Mike Reddy (?!) talked about using flashmeeting (albeit not too successfully) at the RoboFesta-UK annual meeting last year.

Anyway, having found out that free SL registrations are now available (without the need to provide credit card or bank details) I created a new SL OU persona for myself - Tony Ehrlich. If I can get a ticket for the island, then maybe I'll have a reason to learn a bit of SL scripting...

I still only pop into SL occasionally - my old laptop couldn't really cope with the SL client - but my new Mac Book Pro copes fine, albeit once you get passed the huge client download that's required once a fortnight (i.e. every time I log in...:-( And I still haven't tried to build or script anything. But now that I have a machine that's responsive enough for me to distinguish between me getting confused with the avatar controls, rather than the machine getting flustered and stalling of its own accord, maybe it's time to try and have a bit of a doodle...

There are mutterings around two or three course teams about hosting activities in world (I thought it would provide an opportunity for OUSA - the OU Student Assocation - to host paying music/cultural events, just as 'trad' Student Unions take over dining halls for gigs, for our growing number of younger students;-)

Rapid Stereotyping

One of the things Jacquie mentioned having tried out were in-world exercises in team building, where teams were given construction tasks and had to allocate roles etc. One amusing observation was that the 'players' went away and customised their appearance to suit the roles that had taken on: suits for the administrator and so on.

I loved the idea of this, and how it seemed to have naturally engaged the team members in the playful nature of the space. The potential for using costume/appearance based 'rapid stereotyping' to expose people's assumptions about a role must be enormous? The extent to which particular skins/avatar appearnances influence behaviour in world might be interesting too?

In a similar vein to the old psychology experiments like the Stanford prison experiment (recreated since in several reality TV shows) where subjects were placed into costumed roles as prison warders or inmates, students could be given particular avatars to use in the context of either role play exercises, or simply just specified tasks.

SL is big enough for this to be happening already, of course. In just the same way as the SL economy leaks into the real world (e.g. through being able to buy Linden dollars - the SL unit of currency - for real money, or SL artefacts on 'real' websites like Second Life Boutique) so research/experiments carried out in SL is likely to start leaking into real world academic journals.

Maybe now would be a good time to pull a 'Second Life Research' conference together, in world. (Maybe there already is one...?)

Whether or not the current hype surrounding SL will lead to its use in a mature way (as in stable, rather than porn related: this is a huuuuuuuge issue for institutions wanting to run events in SL - it's all too easy for the unwary to find themselves in "adult" related areas of of SL) I don't know.

Certainly, I'd like to know more about how they count their subscribers. Trying to set up my new user yesterday, I got stuck in the login procedure several times as my captcha authentication repeatedly failed (I suspect because of the OU firewall?). The names I tried to use during those aborted registrations were locked when I tried to go through registration using them again (i.e. locked as in 'this name is already taken'). I don't know if - or how often - they garbage collect names that are associated with aborted registration attempts, but this part of the process seemed really slack to me.

I also wonder how many registrants ever go in world more than a couple of times, especially given the 20MB+ download that's required every time you attempt to log in if you are an infrequent visitor. (Hopefully this will settle down over time). To their credit, SL do publish the number of people who have logged in over the last couple of months, as well as the total number of registered avatars:

So it's not that many...why all the hype? maybe it's the $$$$? But even then, I guess this figure represents an exchange rated view of the amount of in-world trade going on using Linden dollars? And as users get a monthly allowance from Linden Corp, I wonder what the actual actual amount of real US$ related trade is going on?

Posted by ajh59 at October 13, 2006 11:56 AM