A tweet by Jane Chandler, a speaker at the #ReLIVE11 conference today.

The PhD thesis, under a Creative Commons licence, of Dr Aleks Krotoski is available through her website; there’s some interesting wordles on there as well. Go here:

http://alekskrotoski.com/post/academic-dissertation—social-influence-in-second-life-social-n

(Shortened URL) http://is.gd/75yo9

(It was thanks to Aleks showing me around Second Life several years ago that I had the ‘Aha!’ moment, so without her there may not have been a Virtual World Watch and accompanying snapshots.)

Aleks is a media and Internet journalist for The Guardian, and a presenter on what many regard as the best TV programme on video games to date (BITS). She tweets, and is also the presenter of The Virtual Revolution, the forthcoming BBC series about the Web:

This is now open for pre-event activities, such as reading and guided tours. The conference proper runs from November 24th to 27th. Being online you can, of course, access it from anywhere; no travel, train or plane costs, required.

The conference website is at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/11/elpconference09.aspx

Note that you have to register, and there’s a small fee.

There’s two sessions on Second Life. One is by Kathryn Trinder from Glasgow Caledonian University:

The other is by Virtual World Watch:

In addition to this, there’s a number of scheduled events and guided tours in Second Life, facilitated by the JISC Regional Support Centres. So not bad – a conference that runs for several days, costs only £50 for attendance, travel and accommodation, and has hardly any climate impact. To quote James Clay …

Over at the Leeds College of Art and Design Annabeth Robinson has been experimenting with the Blue Mars virtual world:

Austin Tate from Edinburgh University describes the Virtual World of Whisky in Second Life, which is used to support tutorials about Scotch Whisky:

This time, there’s just one main question, and a few side points. The main question can be interpreted as broadly, or as narrowly, as you wish. As before, the scope is limited to UK Higher and Further Education.

The question

How are you using virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, OpenSim, Metaplace, OLIVE, Active Worlds, Playstation Home, Blue Mars, Twinity, Wonderland) in teaching, learning or research?

Things you may want to include:

• Why you are using a virtual world.
• If teaching using a virtual world, how it fits into your curriculum.
• Any evaluation of the experience of using the virtual world.
• Will you do it again next year? Why (or why not)?

A few side points

• Do you know of any other individual, group or project at your institution using virtual worlds for teaching, learning or research? If so, a contact detail would be appreciated.
• Do you have any interesting screenshots of what you’ve been doing in virtual worlds? If so, then please consider submitting them to the Virtual World use in UK Education Flickr group – thanks.

Deadline

Please send your contributions, in whatever format (e.g. email, Word, text) to john (@) virtualworldwatch.net by the end of Friday 20th November. Relevant content submitted by then is guaranteed to go into the report; content received afterwards is unlikely to make it in.

Thank you for your contribution,
Virtual World Watch

Anne is based at the University of Sunderland, and can be found on Twitter.

Her personal website contains information about her art projects in Second Life. She’s on twitter as Angrybeth.

For historical context, Virtual World Watch was a work colleague of Andy’s from the mid-1990′s at UKOLN (VWW: back row 3rd; Andy: back row 6th).

Andy is now the Head of Development of the Eduserv Research Programme, formerly the Eduserv Foundation. The Foundation funded a number of Second Life and Virtual World research and development projects, as well as Virtual World Watch, an island and several events.

Research Programme / Foundation activities with virtual worlds are described and archived on their website.

In Second Life, and also blogging, Andy is Art Fossett where he has an occasional sideline in making footwear. On twitter, Andy is andypowe11.

Jane works in the JISC-funded Regional Support Centre (RSC) for the West Midlands. As she describes in the podcast, some of her time is taken up with activities to support, and progress, the use and development of Second Life within post-16 education in this region.

Jane is also in the process of purchasing an island, then developing it, within Second Life to support these activities. Jane is also the co-maintainer of the JISCmail Virtual Worlds mailing list.

You can find Jane on LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr. She is also, of course, in Second Life as Ladyjane Plympton.

Anna is a teaching fellow at the Open University and has been involved (through her company Eygus) in Second Life developments at that institution. She is in her third year of using Second Life for tutorials with students studying T175 Networked Living: Exploring Information and Communication Technologies, and has worked with Liz Thackray to provide sample tutorials for other T175 students, as well as a 2 day course event inworld.

Anna chaired the ReLIVE08 conference in Milton Keynes, wearing a pair of wings to the event:

Anna flits between Devon, where she is usually based, and Nepal. She can be followed on Twitter.