joesanchez's blog

I thought I would post this video I made about Second Life a few months ago. This video was part of a presentation I gave to the Austin Technology Forum and many asked me to post it. I'm finally getting around to it. Enjoy. If you are interested in learning about the process of making the video and more on virtual worlds i often blog at http://educatorscoop.org/blog

Looking for personal land in Second Life has always made me feel dirty. The hidden fees, unscrupulous land lords, lack of zoning laws, and the inevitable possibility of living next to an escort, griefer, anatomically correct avatar, or other SL deviant. I have enjoyed meeting educators, librarians, and researchers in Second Life but the visits always seemed short-lived. I wanted more than a chance run-in or a weekly meeting.

These are some of the reasons why a trio of avatars in Second Life have created the Educators Coop. The Educators Coop is a residential community for educators. One sim has been sectioned of into 64 parcels of land each 1024m plots. We are offering 60 of these plots to educators/researchers/librarians interested in forming a community in Second Life. Our plots are available at below market value $80 a year and include access to large communal sandboxes, meeting spaces, auditoriums, and free houses. This concept is the first of its kind in Second Life. If you want to become a part of a community of educators in Second Life, come take a look at our site Educators Coop

Continuing the series of post from a foucs group of 19 students in an undergraduate English course using Second Life for building activites.

Affinity = World expectations
When students first learned they were going to be using Second Life in their class many developed preconceived notations of what they were going to do. Students were excited by the marketing pictures of Second Life that they viewed on the Internet, “On the website they made it all look fun and interesting and you get into the real thing and its not all”. Students also expected to “play” something similar to a popular computer game called “The Sims”.

Because of the island’s private status and restricted user accounts, students were not allowed to leave the virtual campus.  Students were disappointed with their lack of interaction with other Second Life residents, “It would have been more fun in the real SL rather than the UT island, the actual second Life game, there is more stuff to do, its not just a campus, it’s a whole world”.

One of the affinities students described during a focus group about the Second Life learning experience was titled Time Consuming.

Working in Second Life is very time consuming. Students were surprised and burdened by the amount of time they needed to spend in order to complete their assignments. A student commented about the extraordinary amount of time needed to build in Second Life, “it took hours and hours to do anything but things didn’t turn out at all”. Another student described the tedious attention to detail required in Second Life in order to perfect a building, “After creating a building, I noticed there were a lot of little spaces between the walls and roof and I just couldn’t figure out how to get it right”.

The last year I've been teaching and conducting research in Second Life at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to share some of the feedback I've received from students regarding their experience. The information is coming directly from 19 students that participated in a focus group where they created 214 note cards in a five-minute period after being led through a mental imagery exercise. Students were asked to "tell me about your experience in Second Life"; they were instructed to write one thought or phrase per card. Each card was then defined by the author and taped on the walls. Students then sorted the cards into similar clusters, named the clusters, and further defined each cluster in order to create a final affinity. The sorted note cards looked like this

The focus group was conducted in November of 2006 from students in a World Literature course. Second Life activites included building and roleplay on a private island owned by the University if Texas at austin. More later...

Hey Now. If anyone will be attending SXSW in Austin this weekend please let me know. I will be putting together an informal gathering of Second LIfe educators on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Email me at joesanchez@mail.utexas.edu or joe@sanchezsocialmedia.com for more information.

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So i'm almost at the midterm of a new class i'm teaching called Social Issues in a Networked Society
I must admit that i am impressed with some of the thought provoking pieces created by my students in their blogs. Each week my students are required to blog about their use of networked technologies and then to analyze their use of the tools from three different paradigms. At first the students were merely writing about the tools they used such as email, ebay, evites, goolge and so forth without any reflection or evidence of critical thinking. What has worked really well with the blog format is that i comment about each of their post every week.

The comments allow me to give personalized feedback to each student and helps me to shape their writing so that they are now able to write deeply reflective blog entries. In class on tuesday one of the students mentioned that he was surprised at how well he is learning the material in this class because he is forced to sit down and write about it every week. The rest of the class nodded their heads and several others made similar comments. The blogs are due on sunday afternoon at 2pm and i have made the blog worth 20% of their grade, equivalent to their midterm exam. I honestly believe the students are engaging in a deeper learning practice by blogging rather than cramming for next weeks midterm.

My last post I mentioned that a student had contacted me through a Myspace account I created for Blackboard at UT.
We had a very productive meeting lasting over an hour. During our conversation the student expressed his interest in seeing a Social Software package available for student use on campus. Currently UT Austin allows student groups to use the Blackboard Community function to create spaces for clubs and students associations to post documents, use discussion forums, and make announcements.  While the functionality of a Blackboard community is decent for groups, most students have become accustomed to interfaces and the functionality of publicly available commercial products such as Myspace and Facebook. The student basically told me that his peers feel Blackboard is too text heavy and lacks the "fun" aspects of social software.

The student had gone so far as to contact Small World Labs, a Social Software startup located in Austin to see if he could initiate a dialogue between them and the university.  I went to visit with Small world Labs  a week later. This is yet another long story that I will get to next time...

A few months ago during a “I wonder what would happen” moment I decided
to set a Myspace account for Blackboard at the University of Texas. I created a user named UT_Blackboard and
invited students to add me as a friend. I was curious to see if
students would use the “friend” access to ask for technical support or
if they would communicate with me at all. Currently UT_Blackboard has
21 friends. While little communication has occurred through Myspace, I
have been able to get an authentic view of how undergrads are using the
tool, plus, I have been invited to several keggers : )

The reason I bring this up is because last week I met with one of
Blackboard’s Myspace friends.  The student sent me a Myspace
message concluding with  “So tell me why blackboard doesn’t suck”.
I sent a reply explaining how some instructors are utilizing
features such as discussion boards and group pages and they are getting