Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

CLASS SUMMARY:

There were presentations from three guest lecturers in three different locations for this class meeting. The photograph taken at an art installation shows, from left, John O’Connor, Elfay Pinkdot, Inish Karu and Ham Rambler (in his Paddy’s Day leprechaun guise). The session begun with Ham, Mayor of Virtual Dublin, telling the story of how he came to develop the space in Second Life. It started out as an Irish Bar, The Blarney Stone, that built a regular clientele for live music, story telling and general socialising and gradually grew into a replica of the centre of Dublin City. From the elegant arena where Ham delivered his talk the class moved to the Dublin Conference Centre originally built for Dublin Tourism and containing a virtual build of the former church that now hosts the Tourist Information Office. There Inish Karu, a graduate of the module, spoke about her involvement in role play in Second Life and how this led to the development of a community of role playing pirates and many long term friendships.

Finally, Elfay Pinkdot brought the class to an art installation to share her experiences producing and presenting one of the longest running radio programmes in Second Life, Coffee and Pajamas Jazz programme.

ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT CLASS:

1. Post: a blog entry discussing the importance of regulation, convention and etiquette in online communities.
2. Watch: ‘From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation‘ (accessed 03/07/14) by Prof Axel Bruns (Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland Institute of Technology) who explains his theory of user-led collaborative content creation.
   
3. Read: ‘User Generated Content and Virtual Worlds‘ (accessed 03/07/14) a paper on the legal background to creating content in an online context.