Two Dutch students, Sebastiaan Schelfaut and Matthias Buyle, who are studying architecture at the University of Ghent, Belgium, wrote to Arcada last week to ask if we would take part in a survey about our use of Second Life. Lars passed the letter to me and I went to FreeOnlineSurveys.com a few minutes ago and answered the questionnaire. Since I might want to remember what I said at some future date, I am reprinting the questions and answers here.
1. What is the name of your organisation?
Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland. Our project in Second Life is called Marinetta Ombro.
2. Is your organisation owner of a private sim?
Yes.
3. If yes, what is the name of the sim?
We currently have nine: Rosario A1 to Rosario C3. To complete the island of Rosario we will need three more.
[Question 4 was for people who don't own a private sim.]
5. Why is your organisation present in Second Life?
We are researching the possibilities of developing a project-based immersive pedagogy.
6. How does your organisation use Second Life?
Students use Rosario for project based work in Photoshop, web design, concept design, scripting and client-oriented production. They create brands, start companies, build products, hold events, and research into the uses of Second Life made by other groups.
7. Has the use of Second Life an impact on the real life situation of your organisation? If yes, how does it influence the workings of your organisation?
For the media students it has drawn together many different strands of the digital interactive media course. It has also been used in learning situations by business students, industrial management students, tourism students and the community health care courses. This has enabled the creation of multi-disciplinary projects in which students rehearse the roles and negotiations that they will experience when they graduate.
8. Does the use of Second Life have a spatial impact on your organisation? If yes, how?
Much of the learning related to the Marinetta Ombro project happens in Second Life, which means that students do not need to be in classrooms. Face to face meetings are thus rarer and used for specific purposes: for taking stock, planning, and socialising. Our need to book one of the much-in-demand and fought-over larger computer rooms has thus diminished.
Use of Second Life has had more of a temporal impact however, as students can not only work from home but can also work after midnight or before dawn if they so wish. And they often do.
9. Did the presence of your organisation in Second Life satisfy the expectations? Why?
This is the third incarnation of the Marinetta Ombro project. We entered Second Life to explore its suitability for our purposes; and it has proved very suitable. Primarily the existence of other users who are spending real money on virtual goods has provided a new level of realism for those exercises and projects that require students to address the needs of a (real or imagined) client. Formerly the clients were, in the main, imaginary. Now they are usually virtually real.
10. Will the experiences in Second Life have an impact on the future strategies in real life or Second Life? If yes, how?
Yes. Our current aim is to make Rosario financially self-sufficient within the next fifteen months, which requires us to pay increasing attention to the in-world cultures and economies, and to focus on them as core issues within our planning and management courses.
11. If you have additional remarks, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
The key question that you have not raised is the question of immersion vs augmentation. Our project is immersionist in a very specific way. Many “educational” projects in Second Life are augmentist. They are not doing the same – or comparable – things at all.
Thus comparing them may confuse rather than illuminate!