Second Life at Southampton University

The Spring 2009 snapshot is complete and is undergoing some final checking before going live.

Several responses to the questionnaire call for this snapshot came from the University of Southampton. They have some interesting developments in their university (especially in the Chemistry department). Most of the responses came through Fiona Grindley, who describes herself as the:

Education Developer Adviser within the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit, and coordinator for Educational Activity in Second Life at the University of Southampton. I link people together. Since the CETIS/Eduserv workshop in mid January, I have been asked to be a guest lecture at Schools that I didn’t even know were doing anything in SL. Last year I organised a Second Life seminar for anyone doing an activity within the University – this was very useful. There will be another one in September this year.

This particular role/job title is interesting; VWW will return to this issue in a later blog posting.

The main University of Southampton island is open for visits in Second Life; it formally opens on Monday. I’ve just visited and spoken to Ian Pahute from Daden, who are developing the island. He chatted:

We have designed the island to promote activity. And there is lots here to support that – subtle stuff! Oh – huge feature – you can feed the ducks! The ducks are a real RL focus on the main campus.

Fiona outlined some more activities at Southampton:

Students on the MSc Teaching and Learning Innovation have now got a Second Life module included. Many more schools and professional services should be active in-world as we are in the process of allocating funds to mini-projects through internal funding.

Steve Wilson in the School of Chemistry introduced a few of their activities:

Still in early stages of development but we are working on a molecule render and a poster presentation.

Through Fiona, Dr. Simon Coles added some more flesh to this:

We are just embarking on the Virtual Chemistry Experience (ViCE) project which is using SL as medium for public engagement and enhancing teaching/learning in the domain of Chemistry. This work will range from galleries of ‘common molecules’, through observation of real laboratory practice to visualisation and interaction with molecules. The University of Southampton island will host this material when developed. As a research project we are also developing aspects of remote laboratory monitoring and large/multi-dimensional dataset visualisation.

Part of the ViCE project is concerned with ‘virtual poster sessions’, which 1st year UG and MChem students will partake in as part of their course. This is intended to add to their training in communication & presentation skills. We are also developing the ‘window on a lab’ concept where activity in a teaching / research lab can be streamed into SL – this will allow school children and undergraduates alike to get a feel for what happens in these environments.

We will be taking part in National Science and Engineering Week (7th March) with an exhibit which allows the ‘peptide fruit machine’ to randomly construct a tri-peptide, which is then submitted to a drug docking process, a result returned and the docked molecule rendered in front of the avatar. The docked molecule will get an ‘energy score’ which will enable a league table to be constructed during the event.

Again through Fiona, Julie Watson, Senior Teaching Fellow in eLearning in Modern Languages and School of Humanities introduced the JISC-funded M3 project:

The M3 (MUVE, Moodle and Microblogging-Twitter) project was used in teaching and learning. We have now transferred M3 project outputs (interactive learning resources for international students) to the University of Southampton Second Life island.

The project is an interesting one for how it integrated Twitter into the virtual environment; as the project description says:

A key aim was to investigate effective ways of embedding synchronous online tools, which are already establishing themselves as effective for social networking, and exploring the use of others that offer a 3-dimensional opportunity for learning. A Twitter plug-in for Moodle was to be one key deliverable of the project.

Julie finished with some past and future activities:

We also ran another project in Second Life called Cardenio. The final report is available online.

In the next academic year we will develop a language café in Second Life for the Modern Languages of the University island. We will adapt more language learning resources (‘learning objects’ and vidcasts) for use in Second Life, and will carry out further exploration of its potential for language learning.