NMC Campus Observer

Summary of Undergraduate Field Rsearch Course in SL

Professor Beliveau (aka Ed Lamoureux) : Jan 24, 2007 09:08pm

As noted in earlier writing, this series reports on MM 490: Field Research in Second Life, an online course at Bradley University conducted completely within Second Life. The course was taught during the January interim, 2007, from Jan. 2-22. Syllabus materials may be found at:
http://slane.bradley.edu/com/faculty/lamoureux/website2/490/mm490.html

Student blogs for the class are available at:
http://slane.bradley.edu/com/faculty/lamoureux/website2/490/bloglinks.html

At the time of this writing (January 24, 2007, 3 of the 4 final student papers as well as the rest of their material) are posted to the blog; in the coming weeks, paper #4 and machinima (on Jason Terhort’s blog) about the class experience will be added.

5 students enrolled in and completed the class in which they learned basic ethnographic methods as applied within virtual environments; 4 completed research within SL; one served as documentarian by making machinima rather than doing research. Some notes about the class follow.

Some of what there is to learn from this experience is more about (a) teaching in short sessions (b) teaching inexperienced students about research and (c) teaching field research in 3 weeks, than it is about teaching and learning in SL. Subsequent offerings of the course will attempt to address these issues. In particular, future offerings will be split into two parts: Bradley 3-week interims will be used to present “An Introduction to Field Research in Second Life.” That course will focus on developing student facility with basic field research methods as well as structuring early experiences in SL, culminating in a research prospectus. The following (full academic) term will then feature the second course in the series, “Field Research in Second Life” during which students will carry out a full scale research project. The first course will be prerequisite to the second. This structure will begin in May, 2007.

Sudden and serious ill health compromised my efforts a bit. On the other hand, given my situation, I could ONLY have taught a distance ed. course. Only two of the 5 students were in Peoria, so distance ed. was required. Further, I was not “up to” teaching a face-to-face course; half of the class was taught from my bed, the other from the desk in my bedroom.

Although we held a pre-meeting, required registration via application (with loads of “experience and technology” requirements), and sent lots of email, the students did not acquire and read the book I asked them to before the class started. In fact, they had not acquired/read either of the two required books until after the first week. Big problem. However, they did have most of the SL experience and technology set up that we required before the class. We held an inworld meeting Dec. 2, 2006, to set the requirements (read the book, get set up, look around, etc.) so they’d be up-to-speed by Jan. 2, 07, when the class started.

3 of the 4 researching students found projects pretty quickly. 1 struggled to locate the right sort of thing and had a lot of trouble. The risk of this happening will be reduced, a bit, by the two-course sequence (and esp. by the second being a semester-long activity).

Class sessions went generally smoothly though I did find myself sometimes moving through my lecture notes very quickly so as to not risk too much unaccounted for drop out on the other end. We held lecture and discussion and student presentation sessions via Teamspeex (in audio); although everyone used text chat, often, to supplement the interaction. Just as I would do in f-2-f, I used students names now and then, threw in a question or two as I went to assure “presence” and attention.

At each class, I handed out notecards (loaded into a clickable box) with the lecture base nightly for the students to follow and augment.

I adopted an “oral quiz in text-chat” mode so that I would have a written record of how they did with readings and lecture material. Each night I quized over the previous nights’ readings and lecture. Students generally performed well; though some nights we had to blow up a student who missed both of his questions (one of the students produced a “land mine” that blows the avatar into space when stepped on. We made students who missed two questions in a night step on the mine! We all had great fun with this).

Students spent time before class and during our two breaks “carrying on” with SL pranks and hi-jinks. They appeared to have fun with and enjoy these activities. I sometimes joined in. Every now and then, one of these broke out during class and we got a little side-tracked.

We welcomed three visitors to our class: a Ph. D. student working on a dissertation about virtual education; a theatre prof/chair from my college; a reporter from the Metaverse Messenger with whom I had already done an interview about the class. We saved a little time within the session for each to do some Q&A with the students.

A small number of people dropped in during class, uninvited. They were folks on the NMC campus/HUD tour. We were up in the air in the “Boardroom,” thereby avoiding most walk bys. They apologized and left, almost before I could explain that they were interrupting a class. We did not encounter any problems with disruption.

We did not experience any serious disruptions in SL service over the course of the class, though there were a couple of days when alerts had been issued just prior to class time. There were a couple of “outages” during “after class times” when students were technically still in class, but were out in the field doing research. The outages were not often or long enough to block student work, overall.

I had intended to show two documentaries illustrating ethnography during the course (as optional experiences). I had wanted to get students together informally/socially, as an attempt at group cohesion in SL. I also wanted them to see the material. Though we had good support from techs at NMC and BU, the movie showings in SL didn’t work (neither technically, nor as a class experience). (a) The students didn’t want to make time on Sat. nights to watch them; (b) display of long form films (in this case, 45 minute documentaries) challenges SL display modalities. Instead, we loaded the pieces to the web and watched them there, separately, then came back to class to discuss them later.

As a technical note to this aspect: we used password protection to “lock down” those movies on the web, in order to comply with the Teach Act/DMCA. However, one can only keep students from download/duplicating such materials (in violation of the acts) via instruction. Showing video in this circumstances remains somewhat problematic.

One student had trouble getting permission for research from the land owners. After listening to the student story, I contacted each of the owners of this particular sim, discovered the issues, and spoke by cell phone with the one who was troubled. We established full trust and permission by explaining how very careful we were being with confidentiality and informed consent.

Many residents are unhappy with so called “reporters” and bloggers taking pictures, writing stories, using names and images without proper notification and permission. Further, these owners have a music venue and had experienced IP theft when folks came in and recorded performances and took them out of SL without asking. Once we talked, they said that they were “very happy with what we were doing and that we should be proud of the integrity we brought to our work in SL.”

A week into class Linden Lab announced (a) open sourcing of the viewer and (b) the end of Linden Lab’s supervision/approval process for doing research (other than the TOS and Privacy policies).

• glad we already got their permission.
• no one else will have to get that permission in the future.
• they are trying to pull back to ISP status, therebyqualifying for the DMCA safe harbor protections
• good thing we wrote our “doomsday” policies (what would happen to student credit and payments in the case that SL became unavailable during the class run). Though we didn’t need them, announcements like these two are BIG and could have been “we’re selling and the new guys are shutting down for a week,” in which case our policies might have been needed.

Two of the student projects were on “active” communities that lent lots of data. One was in a place that was pretty calm and perhaps didn’t lend enough material in this short a time. The forth had great difficulty with topic, starting way too broad and not really being able to focus down on meaningful stuff.

Interim terms are supposed to offer concentrated time to focus on single topics presenting seeming advantages to something like field research projects. However, students do not constrain themselves to class enrollments and activities, thereby leaving (in some cases) even less time than one normally would (during a full term).

Supervision of student field researchers is always problematic for instructors. Time in the field with fledgling researchers is crucial; however, it is painfully time consuming. SL “helps” with that feature in that instructors can transport to multiple locations quickly. However, SL is a 24/7 environment that lends itself to increased “time in supervision” responsibilities.

Perhaps the central challenge to field researchers in SL is the frequency with which avatars/people communicate with each other via IM. That interaction can be the most important communication ongoing in a setting, yet is totally out of the ability of a researcher to monitor. One can begin to “get at” some of the issues raised via interviewing. But field work is problematized by this feature.

Due to the time constraints of the short session, I decided to focus students on data collection and analysis via observational techniques, rather than interviewing. Interviewing is, of course, one of the primary tools of the field researcher. In this case, I only required students to do a single interview of an informant. Some did more. But past the readings about interviewing in the books, I did not provide training. The new format will change that: students will enter the field with trained experience in interviewing and will be expected to carry out as many interviews as required by their circumstances.

Given that this experience was a “first run,” I focused on preparing and teaching the class, rather than on assessment/evaluating the experience or outcome. I have since contacted our Department of Education and will incorporate assessment procedures tailored to virtual online teaching the next time that I teach the course.

In conversations with the students, I learned that they came away with a generally positive impression of the course and its activities and that they were intrigued by what they learned both about Second Life and about field research methods/ethnography. I found the experience to be quite engaging on many levels. I look forward to the next effort.

Questions? Write me at ell@bradley.edu

Story filed under: Teaching and Learning

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