NMC Campus Observer

Professor B in RL News

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Oct 17, 2006 04:34pm

Bradley University professor Dr. Ed Lamoureux (aka Professor Beliveau) continues to get some great press for the class he is preparing to hold entirely in Second Life, on NMC Campus, in January. IN today’s Peoria Journal Star, Professor B is highlighed in “A whole new world”.

For this three-week, interim communications class, Lamoureux and eight students will, from their own personal computers, all log on to secondlife.com at the same time each day and maneuver their online, video-game-looking personas – called avatars – to a virtual classroom for an hour of lecture and discussion.
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The class content is ethnography, or studying a group of people through field research. Essentially, these students will be studying interactions in the very virtual environment they’ll be exploring for the first time themselves, attempting to gather information about how people communicate in Second Life – at virtual stores, music venues, yard sales, libraries, casinos and other locales.

Students will maintain blogs to document their observations. The online field research will be safer both for students and their subjects, Lamoureux noted, because students won’t actually be knocking on doors or hanging out on the streets in a real-world environment.

FRED ZWICKY/JOURNAL STAR PHOTO ILLUSTRATION Bradley professor Dr. Ed Lamoureux meets up with with his virtual self, Professor Beliveau, in the multi-user virtual environment, Second Life, which has more than 500,000 people participating worldwide. Lamoureux will be leading Bradley students in a class that is designed to teach field research and ethnographic methods, observing and documenting behaviors in that environment.

Go Professor!

Story filed under: Campus Headlines,Teaching and Learning

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