Paper called “Is there no life in Second Life?’ Presented by Moon Eggplant.

Paul Hollins – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/pah1/- asked to give this paper in world, but the CAL conference organisers wouldn’t let him. Wonder why?

Describing briefly some work in progress.

Refers to Synthetic World (Castranova 1994) and to
Metaverse (Stephenson 1992)

participation observarion as an active resident. Structured interviews, unstructured interviews and a participant and sometime lurker in the SLED group.

Showed us the Second Life Hype Curve – see eg http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2006/12/second_lifes_ri.html – which is fun.

Shows us video of Ohio University Second Life campus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA Why do we replicate the real-world classroom rather than build something new?

The affordances are very different to those of VLEs.

Informal experiences are better than the formal learning experiences.

About Identity, Space, Activity and Tools. These are the affordances of this environment.

Effective, but challenges existing assessment conventions
Engagin and motivating – Yes, but this is not a given
Empowering – Yes, but this is challenging.

Someone raised the idea of an avatar as an eportfolio. In that case, it is a problem that you cannot move your avatar from one virtual world to another.