Archive for April, 2007

I’ve been absent longer than intended, but It’s been an extremely busy, non-SL month.

However, things have been moving forward in our institution with interest in SL potentially reaching a critical mass. Given recent events and discussions, I believe planning will move forward this Summer with the intent to begin this Fall supporting faculty efforts to develop SL-delivered instruction. I do hope that we’ll move forward confidently with informed caution.

I mentioned previously that one of my driving professional concerns, as an instructional technologist, is to avoid

another, although more literal this time around, “land grab” at the distance learning landscape that resulted in the “teach now; plan, administer, manage and evaluate later” approach that so many institutions had to, ended up or are still taking with regard to web-based instruction.

With the range and number of faculty and instructional leaders asking our instructional technology group about SL increasing, I was recently asked, “Are we ready to support SL now? If not, when? At what level? What sort of timeline is involved?”

I answered those questions with quite a few concerns and questions, and I’m wondering and planning to find out the extent to which these questions and concerns are being addressed in other institutions.

• How or when are we going to define an “Acceptable Use” of SL? by faculty? by students? What happens if a student publicly, through open text chat, berates and verbally assaults another student? I *know* what happens on campus, but what happens on the virtual campus? Is it as simple as applying all other Acceptable Use policies to SL? What unique issues exist with SL in regard to an AUP?
• Do we want to begin developing quality guidelines now? How are we going to support the development of resources by/for faculty? I’m assuming we’d prefer to do those things at the outset rather than playing catch up later in the “teach now; plan, administer, manage and evaluate later” approach. How concerned are we of having the same “rush to the new medium” issue that occurred with web-based instruction?
• If we’re funding faculty development, how different are the purchasing/expense management issues in SL? Are there any accounting guidelines that are impacted by allowing the purchase of Lindens? of virtual goods and services?
• To what extent do we need to train our users – faculty and students – about risks and issues related to SL? Identity issues? The “mixed realities” in SL? Mixed goals/objectives in SL?
• We have three campuses; what does it mean to build a SL Campus? We can’t really just build a virtual version of our existing campus, and I’m not sure that we’d want to. Do we build, rent? Do we go the official route and brand our use by purchasing an institutional last name? That opens a tremendous can of worms for the marketing department.
• If we’re going to engage SL as an institution, what about student services? Student training and support in SL? What’s the economic impact of SL on our student demographic?
  

That list only begins to scratch the surface of questions if we are to engage Second Life (a) truly as an institution – as opposed to an individual faculty member or single department, program, or disciplin and (b) in a well-organized, quality manner that offers value added instructional methods and content rather than simply replicating instruction that can be done more easily and perhaps better via other medium.