Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

Given that students have now been split into groups to work on their ideas for end of term showcase, we spend this session discussing the dynamics of group working particularly in an online context.

Our guests from the MSc in Applied elearning made it to this week’s  class and also took part in the conversation. Second-life life as a bit laggy today but it didn’t stop the class from having a good conversation around the topic.

It was concluded that working collaboratively online could be successful if managed right. To manage it right, key things such as communication, clarification of agreements and goals, using appropriate tools which can track work such as Google docs or wikis(pbworks) were all deemed as important. It was also determined that a project coordinator was required and not so much to lead but more to ensure things stayed on track . The students also felt that is was important to be able to “contain” both people who had a tendency to dominate and those who had a tendency to hide behind others.

All in all, we hope to see evidence of good teamwork in students end of term presentations!

Next week’s class will hold on the Friday instead of the Thursday and students will be presenting what they propose to do for the showcase and also explain how it meets the module objectives from their perspective.

On the 19th of April, students will hear from a graduate of this module: Sitearm Madonna  on how to tighten their work as a group and he will also suggest some approaches and tools to consider.  Apart from being a graduate of this module, Site works online on various SL projects.

Class started with a reflection on last week’s class led by Elfay and the class visit to Thousand rooms where we were hosted by Jaynie and met with a number of very interesting people who had build up significantly large communities within  second-life with some even expanding into real life.

For class 5 we focused on the creation of content for online. That is digital content.

Digital content in our context refers to images, sounds, videos, text,etc. As art an design professionals, a lot of work is created for the online medium and even work that isn’t can end up in an online space.(e.g real life sculptures). In this class we discussed the relevance of being able to responsibly share work created by  others and what to consider when making our own work available.

Discussions then touched on the use of the web as both consumers and producers referring to Axel Bruns and hs concept of produsage .

Students have now been split into their groups for the end of term  assessment showcase

The concepts of copyright and creative commons were introduced and students were given an assignment to blog about their perspectives on how to handle theft or misuse of their work as had been experienced by one student.