Case Story: Seducedbythevirtual

Summary	The difficulties of setting a collaborative activity in Second Life
Group / workshop	Making stuff together	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Designing an evening social event in Second Life, post an online conference, that would be both collaborative and fun.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The social activity involved setting a simple task - to build the tallest and most aesthetic tower in 15 minutes with the physics switched on. The participants were asked to work in pairs to make this a collaborative building exercise.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

• We started in the social area on Emerge island and participants were added to the Emerge group.
• The instructions notecard and landmark were then sent to the group.
• The instructions outlined the rules and provided a few building tips
• The participants organised themselves into small groups
• Everyone teleported (or flew) over to the next door island
• There was an attempt to provide an ad hoc tutorial before the start
• Building commenced for 15 minutes and then the competition was ended

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

• Participants got lost on the way over to the building area
• On arrival everyone dispersed and some became distracted by objects on the nearby Leeds Met campus island
• The communication channels were not used effectively i.e. an unordered use of IM, Group chat, and Local chat
• Only two collaborative teams survived and the rest built individually
• One team did not know how to create objects, it was a completely new skill
• The tallest towers were built by experienced individuals working alone
• The other collaborative group struggled despite being formed from two experienced builders

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

The overall lesson was that designing and facilitating collaborative activity inside Second Life is difficult.

• dealing with a range of competencies in the participants is tough. The instructions (and supporting resources) need to be given well in advance to allow the less experienced participants time to brush up on the skills that will be needed. A few Torley Linden tutorials would have been handy here. There is more than one solution to dealing with this problem e.g. having a warm-up task would potentially work well;
• time must be allowed for thinking and communicating strategy and possible approaches to the problem;
• stay in one place - do not shift everyone from one venue to another and breakup

the natural conversational flows that are developing, in this case moving people from the social area to the building area;

• if possible everyone is assigned to groups in advance and are not

distracted by what can be a tortuous process of forming teams.

Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel.

Licensing

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