Scenario: MappingIdentitiesfromSLtoRL

Summary	How do you maintain identites across SL and RL activities?
Group / workshop	Digital Identities	Status	seed
Project details...	Rhizome

Situation

What is the setting for this scenario? Describe the educational, technological and institutional setup.

Real-life identity in Second Life is masked. SL names are visible above the avatar head but these do not match people's real identities. In SL the family name choices are given and the social norm of this virtual world is to choose a name that identifies your avatar not 'you'. Educational uses of SL within the institution are part of the bigger picture of learning and teaching. Educational activity spans both real and virtual domains.

Task

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

How as a teacher can we maintain some kind of link between a student's educational activity inside a virtual space and their activity outside of that space - so that we can build a coherent picture of the student's capabilities and performance? The effect of mismatching VW and RL activity will impact on assessment and adapting suitable in-world tasks to the correct participants? There is of course an issue of scale here. For small classes it is likely one can do this from memory, but for larger classes … how do we solve this?

Forces in play: anonymity, tracking, individual, institution, immersion, augmentation, RL and SL norms.

Patterns

Identify patterns appropriate for the situation and the task. How would they inform the solution?

Solution

Describe a possible solution derived from the patterns you selected.

Solutions that have been suggested/tried:

• Create a link between SL and the LDAP directory of the organisation
• Use Sloodle (a connect between the Moodle VLE and SL) to map names
• Use Excel spreadsheets and having them physically in front of you
• Run a script that let's you write your real name above your avatar's name in SL
• Make notes in the 1st Life profile tab for each of your students
• Switch to a different environment such as OpenSim (see comment below from Leon on OpenSim)

None are perfect - they break arguably one of the key features of why we might use SL … immersion.

Another solution is to acknowledge that by using an e-portfolio tool that links RL to SL then needing to know RL names in SL is not needed. Assessment occurs at the e-Portfolio level. This is a solution successfully adopted by Leeds Met.

Expected Results

Concrete, measurable criteria for success.

Lessons Learned

what have you learnt from writing this scenario?

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.