DUKE ISIS OASIS IN SECOND LIFE

In summer 2007 ISIS purchased an Education Island in Second Life, The Duke ISIS Oasis. Access is by invitation; contact Ouida Basevi in-world, or Victoria Szabo via email at ves4 at duke.edu to get access. The space includes sandbox spaces where you can making stuff, as well as dedicated project work spaces for groups wanting to explore further. We ask that if you have a project in SL on ISIS land that you join our community mailing list at secondlife-education@duke.edu and share what you have learned with the wider community via the ISIS Project Wiki. Update: we have expanded our holdings to include the adjacent Duke Metaverse, which is adjacent to the Duke ISIS Oasis. Projects for which you want to provide public access can be developed here.

We are exploring how this virtual space can add to teaching and learning practices, as well as research its effectiveness and impact as a new communications medium and social phenomenon. ISIS received a CIT Visualization Grant to help support these efforts. We have produced the following documents to help report back to the community on our work:

• Teaching in Second Life: Getting Started at Duke
• Thinking About Second Life for Your Course? Here's What to Consider...

In 2007-08 Second Life featured in our Virtual Realities Focus Cluster, ISIS 100, ISIS 120S: Gender and Digital Culture, ISIS 140 and 240 and in other projects. In addition to course based exploration, ISIS and ISIS partner projects incorporating Second Life elements for 2007-08 include:

• The Second Life English Cafe (based on the von der Heyden pavilion): Lucy Hagen's ESL class
• The Next Newsroom in Second Life
• A virtual economics experiment in collaboration with the Visual Studies Initiative
• Expansion of the virtual student project archives
• Possible input of the ISIS 200 East Campus Sketchup Models into SL
• Exploration of a Virtual Writing Studio in collaboration with the Writing Program
• a Nursing Education space
• Diversity training spaces (to be developed 2008-09)

We are also looking into other Metaverse options, including the Croquet platform, Project Wonderland, and more casual, web-based environments.

ISIS will be offering a new course, ISIS 170S "Constructing Immersive Virtual Worlds" in Fall 2008. The course will be team taught by Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill, two of the original Croquet developers, and will be cross-listed in Computer Science. The course is in JHFC 230/232 on MW evenings 7:15-8:30 and will webcast interactively with Professor Shan Tung and students from East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai.

We are also exploring the closely related field of game-based learning. In collaboration with the Duke-UNC Rotary Center and the computer game company Virtual Heroes, ISIS recently won an award from the MacArthur foundation to develop a "Virtual Conflict Resolution" online environment.

Second Life Presentations (PDFs; Duke-only):

• Hugh Crumley, Patrick Herron, Richard Lucic, and Victoria Szabo, "Digital Media Writing as Academic Authorship," New Media Consortium Summer Conference, Princeton NJ, June 13, 2008
• Richard Lucic, Victoria Szabo and Clare Woods, "Second Life in Undergraduate Education: An ISIS-centric Perspective," Duke CIT Showcase, April 24, 2008
• Victoria Szabo, "Creating and Sharing Digital Media in Second Life and Croquet: Current Possibilties and Future Directions," Visualization Friday Forum, Duke University, February 22, 2008 | Video Demo (see below)
• Victoria Szabo, "Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3D Environments," MLA Conference, December 28, 2007 | Video demo
• Victoria Szabo, "Gendered Avatars in Virtual Worlds," ARTHIST 108D Guest Lecture, November 13, 2007 | Video Extras: 3D Mailbox, Game Girls, K-Humans, SL Customize, Panda, WOW Character Creation
• Victoria Szabo, "Second Life Economies: Living in a Virtual World," ISIS 100 Guest Lecture, November 7, 2007
• Victoria Szabo,"Teaching and Learning in Second Life", ITAC Meeting, June 14, 2007
• Victoria Szabo, "Introduction to Second Life," CIT Lunch Briefing, May 11, 2007
• Victoria Szabo and Zach Pogue, "The Virtual Gnasher," CIT Showcase, April 26, 2007