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...)

We're going in

The semester is starting (ok we're in week 3 already! yikes)

Today the students in qualitative research methods started in secondlife. And it all went smoothly this semester. The computers downloaded the viewer software quickly, everyone found a last name they liked. We had to deal with taking off face tattoos and wigs once they started playing with their avatars.

Side note - why does LL even bother with the different avie choices when making accounts? As soon as ya get onto orientation island you are shown how to play with your appearance. And people don't know as new users about tattoos and attachments versus clothes.

Students were going thru the orientation island tasks. I showed them a little about search.

The semester seems to be starting off well. Here's a pic of one student with his torch