The Open University completed its first project in Second Life in 2006-2007. Cetlment Island was established as a virtual campus with collaborative shared areas in the centre of the island and alternative teaching and learning spaces around the island. All the teaching and learning spaces had access to tools such as interactive whiteboards, chat tools, blog page links and other tools. There were laptops students could 'wear' to send emails, make blog entries, watch video material and listen to the radio.
The main plaza area housed a library and resource centre as well as some social spaces, including a very funky disco! There was an area to host tutorials to build further skills in using Second Life and sandbox areas for experimentation and practice. The centre of the island made use of real life metaphors for teaching and learning spaces, supported by other spaces that used less conventional metaphors.
Cetlment represented a pilot project for COLMSCT, specifically working with T175 students, and has now ceased to exist. A new OU island, Open Life, followed the Cetlment project and was located adjacent to SchomeBase. This island is funded by the Schome Project, which also runs Schome Park, an island on the Teen Grid. Open Life and SchomeBase were modelled together to provide an integrated and exciting immersive space, building on all the lessons we learned from Cetlment and our time investigating and observing many formal and informal education projects in Second Life. Student participation increased significantly over this period (2008-2009) and community development centred around the residential halls on the islands.
Anna Peachey, and Liz Thackray, both COLMSCT Teaching Fellows, use Second Life for tutorials with students studying T175 Networked Living: Exploring Information and Communication Technologies, and have worked on other course resources and events for this programme, partly funded by an HEA grant.
Working through the Learning Innovation Office, Anna is acting as liaison with all other interested parties in the University to converge in the development of our SL presence and capabilities, and providing an advice and reference point for those who have an interest in exploiting SL. OU staff and students can access the LIO Virtual Worlds website at http://learn.open.ac.uk/site/openlife. In November 2008 Anna chaired ReLIVE08, an international conference on researching learning in virtual environments that was hosted at our real world campus in Milton Keynes. See the conference legacy website at www.open.ac.uk/relive08 for further details.
Peachey, A and Withnail, G.(2009) Higher Education Academy Conference Poster
