We have built a Second Life® infrastructure that allows faculty and students experiential learning and promotes social interaction, in a collaborative environment in our distance education program. It furthermore supports immersion and presence, allowing real-time teaching and discussion. In the School of Nursing, the use of virtual environments for distance education has been piloted for one year. We built a virtual School of Nursing using Second Life as the infrastructure. A Summer theory course was taught using this medium as well as Blackboard and Elluminate (a webinar). A self-administered survey instrument was completed by students following each of the three instructional modalities (Blackboard, Elluminate, and Second Life). The survey instrument included perceptions of learning from a variety of components of the instructional technology, such as pace of class, quality of discussions, integration of technology, and fit between assignments and classroom environment. Significant differences occurred in both overall perceptions of the effect of the instructional modality on individual learning, as well as of the quality of instruction provided to understand the fit between instructional modality and coursework. Student rated experience of Second Life was significantly higher than that of Blackboard for both overall perceptions and quality of instruction (post-hoc Tukey; p<.10). Evaluative feedback from the students suggests that 3D learning environments have the potential to bridge barriers such as isolation, foster interactivity, clarify information, support spontaneous discussions, and facilitate learning experiences.

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Richard Lucic, ISIS and Computer Science

Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares brings together digital learning technologies and international humanitarian assistance efforts. Students and educators enter an immersive, multi-sensory game-based environment that simulates real disaster relief and conflict resolution conditions in order to learn first-hand the necessary tools for sensitive and timely crisis response.

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With support from a CIT Strategic Initiative grant, this Spring students in the Undergraduate Certificate Capstone for the Information Science + Information Studies Program put together a multimedia mapping toolkit to be used by DukeEngage students, the WISER program, and Global Health researchers in Muhuru Bay, Kenya beginning in Summer 2009. Students researched and tested GPS-enabled cameras and trackers, developed map development templates for Google Earth layers, documented best practices for research activities and media capture projects, explored information visualization strategies to combine top-down data with bottom-up observations, created an infrastructure back end for content management, and built a prototype for the location-based, media rich mapping environment based on Duke campus and the surrounding community. DukeEngage students traveling to Kenya will use the toolkit this summer, and then continue their work with the content when they return, developing maps as research and discovery tools and creating new resources for the Muhuru Bay community. We plan to make this a multi-year project into which students from various backgrounds and with various skillsets can participate. The project itself is part of a larger ongoing mapping and hybrid world theme within the ISIS program and the broader interdisciplinary Visual Studies Initiative at Duke.