Minerva 65/83/31

Ellie and I spent some timetogether today in our interview in Second Life. Very pleasant and informative. Ellie developed the idea of this washing line in RL and succeeded well in making a nice replica. Every item relates to a subject. An excellent example on how form follows function, or is it the other way around?

Testing the interview - protocol

Last night I had a session with two in-world colleagues to test the interview - technique I have developed for my research. The result was better than expected and the combination of chat and notecards works fine. In a 30 minutes walk-through we had all 6 questions covered and time for a short reflection. Nice side - effect is the availability of a logfile with the exact copy of our conversation.

Fontys 240/242/70

Fontys, a Dutch College for Higher Education has developed an island in SL. They have created a pleasant atmosphere and some interesting educational experiments. Nine of their schools have some presence on the island and all occupy students in in-world tasks related to their curriculum. The presence of a Nabaztag in the educational centre facilitates contact with real life which is, in any way, intriging enough for further research!!

P is for Power

P is for power. What is the perceived added value of Second Life as a environment for learning and personal development? Is Second Life to be valued as a supplementary world and/or is it also a world that enables us to develop new qualities and work on traditional skills in Real Life. These and other questions will be the subject of our research soon and we need you to help us to find an answer to them.

'What is the perceived added value of Second Life for education?"

As a follow - up to the Aggiornamento II - project the Dutch Ministry of Education, more specific her agent Kennisnet (www.kennisnet.nl, the national educational portal for K16 and vocational education) has asked me to investigate the perceived added value of Second Life for education by interviewing educators and researchers within the SL - community.

In the absence of any formal or certain evidence that the use of Second Life will be totally effective within the current teaching/learning system, we assume that educational users will judge its likely effectiveness expertly in terms of a combination of (a) SL's potential to be effective, (b) the perceived costs of achieving that potential, and the (c) perceived rewards or fringe benefits in applying that effort to achieve the potential.

To assess SL's power for learning we will use the Bernie Dodge - equation P = A x D x E. More information on this equation can be found here. I would like to invite you for this interview, preferably in - world. The interview itself will take about 30 minutes. You will obtain a transcript of your contribution to evaluate or comment and a full summary of the results in English. The transcripts will not be shared with third parties.

Please leave a note of your interest below and your SL avatar- name, I will contact you for an interview as soon as I can.