Project description

The purpose of this project is to establish and pilot a Second Life (SL) learning environment for faculty and students in the Duke School of Nursing (DUSON). Constance Johnson and her colleagues will explore student perceptions of learning using three different environments; build a virtual classroom structure on the DUSON’s parcel on the Duke University SL Island. In addition to building a virtual classroom they also seek to identify, collate, and develop orientation resources and procedures that could be provided to students and faculty for DUSON and SL community. They plan to develop and test with the students policies and procedures that could serve as suggested ground rules for DUSON to adopt in their SL learning activities, to ensure that students are able to focus on the educational components of the activities, rather than the novelty of the application and the overwhelming social aspects of SL.

The short-term outcomes of this project are development of a DUSON infrastructure for faculty and student participation in SL, and the participation of students from at least two different nursing specialty areas and programs to assist with evaluation and tailoring of the infrastructure.

The expected long-term outcomes of this project are facilitated participation of faculty and students from across DUSON, the University, and practice, service, and educational partners with DUSON, in innovative, 3D learning activities.

Project start date: 6/16/2008
Funding awarded: $2,000

Additional information

There is a short overview on the Duke School of Nursing’s website about the work Constance Johnson is doing in Second Life.

Share This

Project Description:

Vicki Russell, Director of the University Writing Program, is investigating innovative ways that tutors can work with students on writing assignments, and students can collaborate on writing projects. Russell, using 3d virtual worlds software such as Second Life as a model, is seeking to create a virtual Writing Studio - an online, 3d “space” where students, faculty and writing tutors can collaborate in real time.

Promoting a larger “culture of writing” on the Duke campus, the resource will include spaces for exploring writing resources in non-linear ways to help students during the writing process. The online presence will be a meeting place where writing tutors can assist students with writing assignments and spaces where student organizations can collaborate on writing projects for publication.

Russell has been awarded a CIT Strategic Initiative Grant to facilitate the early stages of her project. Working with Writing Studio tutors and graduate students Richard Musselwhite and Jen Walsh, Russell will use funding from the CIT grant to learn more about Second Life and other virtual worlds applications, investigate virtual worlds tools such as Second Life, Croquet and Protosphere to determine technical suitability for the project, survey students about current and potential virtual worlds interest and use, and develop a plan and paper-prototype that can be used as a blueprint for implementing the future development of a virtual Writing Studio.

The goals of the project are to use the extensive resources for writers available on the Writing Studio Web site as a foundation for creating an interactive virtual learning environment, demonstrating for writers that writing is a dynamic rather than static process. Allowing access to these resources during a tutoring session with students in a real-time virtual environment will provide interactive ways to facilitate writing as recursive rather than linear process. In addition, by creating a virtual environment space for collaborative writing that is expandable and reproducible for other units at Duke, the project will focus on helping writers improve individual written texts and become more self-reflective better writers and provide faculty with tools to help their students become more effective writers and critical thinkers.

Project start date: 5/13/2008
Funding awarded: $4,000

Share This

Project description
ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) explored Second Life for teaching and learning. Students studied virtual worlds as social phenomena and “texts” as well as technical aspects like 3d modeling, scripting, and virtual space design. Projects included: construction of a student project gallery and virtual labyrinth for the ISIS Focus cluster; research assignments in Gender and Digital Culture; developing virtual world content in ISIS 140 and 240; a “getting started” script garden; a Next Newsroom prototype, and a virtual economics experiment (co-funded by VSI).

ISIS is currently consulting with faculty in several departments: in Education, to create the English Café, in Nursing, to provide an online classroom environment; in Writing, to launch a Virtual Writing Center and with the Office of Institutional Equity to launch a virtual diversity training center. In addition, ISIS explored Croquet, Qwaq, and Project Wonderland to assess appropriate applications.

“We came into this project with some experience with Second Life, but also with the broader goal of understanding how virtual world environments can benefit our curriculum as well as be a rewarding object of inquiry. Second Life’s strengths are in its sociability, the ease in getting started, and the support resources available for it. Its limits are in house-only tool, the time it takes for users to get up to speed for construction activities and scripting (as opposed to just participating), and the challenges in integrating it into other systems.”

–Victoria Szabo

Find out more about these virtual world explorations, consider using Second Life in your class,  or learn how to get started with Second Life.

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 2,500

More information:
Focus Cluster on Virtual Realities
Course descriptions
Project wiki
Second Life at Duke

Share This