Second Life Education Research

A recent veritable onslaught of anti-Second Life journalism seems to be the “scoop de jour” for the end-of-the-year tech stories. Shirky and others are having their five minutes of fame on the back of Second Life user stats. Good for them. I suppose when there’s nothing more important to write about journalists become mathematicians and […]

I’m working on a book chapter entitled “’CVE, MUVE, MMOE, MMORPG…What’s the difference?’: Virtual Environments as Compositional Models.” In the chapter I attempt to delineate between different types of digital environments in which communication/composition can happen. In effect, what I’m doing is laying out the qualities that an instructor may be looking for in an […]

Among all the other projects I’m endeavoring to wrap up over holiday break (book chapters, case studies, conference papers, oh my!) I’m also doing a major rebuild of Middletown island where I teach my class. Based on student feedback and my own reflections of exercises that could have gone better, I’ve made plans to change […]

I make a practice of checking out free online games. I call it research. You can call it goofing off if you want to. Regardless, when I come across a gem like this one I can’t help but think my “goofing off” is time well spent.
In an effort to attract young women to their company, […]

Final papers are graded; scantron sheets filled out and turned in; the semester is over. We walk away from our offices for break, looking forward to the work we have to finish before the spring semester starts. Rarely, a student might ask for his/her final paper comments but usually after the questions about grades are […]

I’m going to be writing half a dozen articles summing up the semester, my thoughts, and what I’ve learned while teaching in Second Life this semester.
This week my students presented their final group presentations, showing off their websites/wikis. As they finished presenting I asked each group what role the build played in their writing process. […]

As part of the sessions I’ve been running with local high school students I’ve been asking them to take an anonymous survey to tell me a little about how they use the internet. I’ll use the result to tweak my goals for the project. However, as I look over the results I’m finding lots of […]

If you read my blog at all then you know I’m infatuated with the concept of identity as it appears in virtual worlds and especially as it appears in Second Life. I recently developed an alt avatar to explore some of these concepts. The image above (click on it to see a larger image) shows […]

This week I spent time meeting with each teacher in the English department of the high school where I’m doing contract work. I should begin by saying that I am NOT a high school teacher nor have I ever been one (or want to be after this). These teachers should be commended for the great […]