Students presenting in SecondLife - one last time!

The students from qualitative research methods during the Spring 2010 semester presented the results of their project during public talks in Second Life on our school island. They talked about art, music, games, dance clubs, tinies, anonymity, relationships, brands, real world architecture, and pregnancy in Second Life.  We have about 12 sessions total with usually two students presenting at a time. So far, we have had nice crowds at the sessions and I didn't have to eject anyone. Thanks to everyone who came out to listen and ask questions.

Here are a few pictures

From the relationship talk, here's what the presenter sees:

From one of the sports presentations, a view of one of the students and the images she used to illustrate her talk. She's wearing clothes she got at a tennis club in SecondLife.

More pictures can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgregson/sets/72157623921898667/

Another event at the Smarter Technology sim

Today they had someone from Cisco who's involved in education - not in terms of employee training but in terms of what do students need to learn to succeed in the future. Skills for the 21st century. He's the avatar on the right and the picture is the cover of a book that he wrote that's coming out soon.

I like the space Smarter Technology has - there's a raised stage, seats that are sloped so you can see without throwing your camera around. There's not muchin the background to be distracting. They ahve some big spaces for product demonstrations too.

Nice mix of avatars too - almost always a good size crowd. A few furries, a tiny or two. And that's Mitch Wagner the robot in the picture on the right.

Library Widget Test

Image via CrunchBase

SL Research Projects are In

Image via WikipediaThe qualitative research class (2 sections) turned their final projects in on Friday. I"ll post some comments here about them as I grade and hopefully some good pictures that they took.

There were a wide variety of topics this semester - role play, sexual subcultures, drug culture live music, fashion, education, dating, how you learn appropriate social behavior, bar culture, religion, and sports. Each group did participant observations, content analysis, and interviews in SecondLife. They got some good interviews - store owners, people who work as DJs, preachers, people who build and invent things in SL...

I'm not sure we'll do again role play and sexual subcultures again because they are the hardest to get people to talk about. The role play people usually stay in character and don't want to be interviewed. The people actively having sex in SL are ... well .... occupied, and don't want to be disturbed by students (or anyone else for that matter) either. In each case, the students got good stuff, just not from the people actually heavily involved in the topic.

Image via WikipediaSomeone suggested we add a topic about money for next semester and I like that idea - how people in SL think about hte in-world currency (do they actively try to earn money, what do they do with money, do they ever put in or take out real world money from the game...)