Second Life Part 3

Based on my previous experience on college campuses late at night, I was apprehensive about going to another university site but I was required to visit UC Davis' Hallucination Island for our assignment.  It turns out, that this visit was more objective and impersonal, yet educational and effective.  It helped me to understand how the hallucinations might cause erratic or violent behavior in schizophrenic patients. I was not disturbed by this as I was disturbed by “real people” in other worlds whom without inhibition expressed violence and indecency.  

After visits to various sites in Second Life, and interacting with my teammates and with strangers, I'm concluding that Second Life has fairly high level of social presence.  What is social presence?

Social presence theory was first founded by Short, Williams, and Christie in 1976,¹ and has since come to mean "the perception that one is communicating with real people rather than with inanimate object."  Since the emergence of digital learning environment, social presence is also seen as "the ability of individuals to collaborate effectively through technology, even when they are located in different locations and time frames."²  Steve Wheeler of University of Plymouth states that "...social presence is an important feature of any successful learning activity, particularly within digital learning environments... when social presence is low, group members feel disconnected and group dynamics suffer.  Conversely, when social presence is high, members should feel more engaged and involved in group processes."³ 

For this assignment, our primary objective was to explore and gain some sense of the level of social presence in Second Life.  The secondary objective was to compare Second Life to the more traditional online experience such as Elluminate, Blackboard, and Laulima with respect to the level of social presence.   

I'm guessing that it's the social presence in Second Life that made me feel connected to my teammates as well as feeling apprehensive of strange strangers.

 

As a digital learning environment (DLE), Second Life offers visual layer and virtual reality which other traditional DLE tools do not.  With the presence of virtual world landscape, structures, objects, and people, the illusion of reality allows human minds to "manufacture feelings of connection and interaction, even when separated by distance." That is a remarkably powerful aspect of virtual world such as Second Life.

So why isn't Second Life used more as a teaching tool or as a digital classroom?  I venture to guess that it must be due to the challenges of building a virtual world tailored to each lesson, as well as the challenges of becoming an adept user.  It took me some time to become a functional citizen of Second Life, and I'm still not moving around with ease.  I can't even imagine how long it might take me to learn to build a world.  I also noticed that my quad-core processor occasionally warns of Second Life's high CPU usage.  This might mean that participants need to have powerful machines to make the SL experience relatively comfortable.  That could be a serious limitation.

¹Short, J.A., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

²Sarbaugh-Thompson, Marjorie and Martha Feldman 1998. “Electronic Mail and Organizational Communication:  Does Saying ‘Hi’ Really Matter, Organization Sciences, 9(6), pp. 685-698.  

³Wheeler, Steve (November 2005), "Creating Social Presence in Digital Learning Environments: A Presence of Mind?", TAFE Conference, Queensland, Australia