Seminar: Sam Joseph and Diane Nahl, "Second Life Research in ICS/LIS/CIS" (3/19/2009)

Second Life (SL) is a Virtual World where residents (via their avatars) can explore, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another.

This Thursday March 19th from 4:30-5:30 PM in POST 127, we will have two related presentations of research being conducted in Second Life by faculty and researchers in ICS and LIS. The presentation is part of our ongoing CIS seminar series.

A discussion period will follow in which others are invited to comment or briefly share work they may be conducting in Second Life. We rent a virtual island in Second Life, and invite other researchers at UH Manoa to use it.

Second Life (SL) is a Virtual World where residents can explore, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another. Second Life includes three dimensional modeling tools that allow residents to build scriptable virtual objects which can be bought and sold in the Second Life currency (Linden dollars). This currency can also be used to buy, sell, rent or trade land and services with other users. As of September 2008 there were just over 15 million registered Second Life users and although there are no reliable figures for actual long term consistent usage, on average, 38,000 residents were logged in at any particular moment. At least 300 universities around the world now teach courses or conduct research in SL.

Second Life Manoa is an SL island purchased by the Department of Information and Computer Science (ICS), that has been re-modelled as a replica of part of the UH Manoa campus.  The island is available for use by all UH staff student and faculty for use as a home base, for virtual world projects and as a teaching space. Currently two ICS research laboratories and one Library Science laboratories have been set up there and this semester it is also being used for teaching Library Science classes as well as for individual projects by a number of ICS students.

Expanding participation in virtual environments is a significant trend in libraries, education, and the corporate world, so it is critical to understand how professionals integrate their work and research in virtual worlds and how it impacts colleagues, institutions, students, clients, and users. I have been conducting immersive participant-observation field research in Second Life, working with groups of professional avatar-librarians and avatar-educators from around the globe who have been creating and working in virtual communities since 2006. Avatar-librarians provide inworld resources, services, instruction, and programs for SL residents. Avatar-mediated professional collaboration affords greater access to colleagues and experts, providing venues and spaces for meeting and expanded opportunities for interacting, working on collaborative projects, planning, mentoring, professional development, creating new information affordances, and new communication, research, and pedagogical methods.

Acquiring virtual social skills in Second Life involves participating in professional information grounds. Both formal and informal information grounds contribute to orienting individuals and integrating them into professional colleague groups. Synchronous collaborative effort creates an avatar-mediated organic induction process to incorporate a new avatar-colleague into the group as a member. Members are able to appropriate affordances by participating in collaborative efforts, thereby forming affective bonds through joint accomplishments, ensuring continuous participation in long-range projects. Chat and video analysis demonstrate consistent patterns utilized by professional librarians and educators to integrate colleagues into virtual working environments.