Some of our staff went to a presentation by Clare Atkins on MUVEs at NMIT a short time ago.  These include such environments as Second Life, poptropica.com; Habbo Hotel, Neopets, Star Dolls, Club Penguin and World of Warcraft.  These environments are usually:

  • immersive, engaging
  • social
  • collaborative
  • include synchronous & asynchronous communication i.e. voice chat, text chat, public chat with anyone else in 20 metre radius
  • converging with other forms of computer mediated social networking e.g. facebook & twitter
  • remove many barriers inherent in real world communication
  • are not games or  a passing fad
  • are a growing phenomenon
  • take a lot of bandwidth
  • traditional internet is called the flatweb

Second Life

Create an avatar (alter ego in digital space) and enter another world in real time.  Your avatar is totally customisable – you could represent yourself as a box, dragon, elf, etc.  Clare’s avatar is called ‘Arwenna Stardust’.  Buy or make Linden ‘dollars’ to spend on buying real estate, houses, clothes etc. ‘Res day’ is the day you entered Second Life.  Cost: Costs US$900 to buy in (you get server space represented by an empty area, and $150 per month.  The Alliance Library Group in Illinois co-ordinates the admin.  There are separate areas for age verified 18+ and PG, Adult and Mature sections. Scripting is in 3D.

How are people using Second Life to make a difference?

  • NMIT got a $500,000 grant and worked with a developer up North to create two NZ ‘islands’ in Second Life – Koru and Kowhai.  People are able to come in to rooms set aside for interviewing skills, and role play interviews.  A second place has been created to teach the Bachelor of Midwivery online.
  • World of Warcraft has had learning activities integrated into it
  • Book discussion islands have been created e.g.  a Harry Potter world discussing how the books would end; islands populated with characters from an authors books, islands where one can visit historical figures such as Henry VIII, islands created to represent a genre such as Gothic literature with a Gothic manor, Literature alive which creates environments from books such as Dante’s Inferno
  • Conferences with realworld video streaming in, you can chat about the speaker’s topic with the people sitting next to you
  • Libraries have EduIsland and InfoIsland
  • Events such as themed dance parties, bookchats around a bonfire, author visits and so on
  • Classes and seminars e.g. on MySpace, How to do more to your avatar

Try searching for and visiting:

 healthinfoisland; http://infoisland.org ; Catherine Greenhill’s blog http://librariansmatter.com/blog ; germando.com (music downloads)