Terra Vita: LIFE’s New Private Island for Learning & Learning Research in Multi-User Virtual Environments
The LIFE Center has recently purchased an island in the Second Life (SL) 3-D virtual world created in 2003 by San Francisco based Linden Lab Research, Inc. Linden Lab rents virtual land in their virtual world and almost everything else is built and owned by its users (who are called residents). Since opening to the public in 2003, SL has grown explosively and today is inhabited by over 100,000 people from around the planet.
The LIFE Center’s private island is called Terra Vita (Earth Life in Latin), a name chosen via a survey of LIFE Center members. There is room for many of LIFE’s research, education, and outreach goals to be addressed in SL. John Bransford, Drue Gawel, and Baba Kofi Weusijana of the University of Washington’s College of Education have a research project underway to investigate the relationship between learning and interactivity in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs). Participants will experience a variety of problem solving environments, build learning theories based upon their experiences, and then relate their theories to the research literature (compared to the more typical procedure of learning simply by reading about these kinds of studies). There are many types of learning environments LIFE Center members and collaborators might build in order to help people learn more about learning, transfer and assessment and to conduct research on these topics.
Examples include….
- Environments that teach about theories of learning
- Constructivist environments for synchronous group learning
- Constructionist environments for asynchronous and individual learning
- Environments for just-in-time learning and knowledge management
- Environments for assessing peoples’ preparation for future learning
- Environments for virtual LIFE Center meetings or events
With Terra Vita, the LIFE Center members are able to build permanent learning environments that can be visited by others. Having the island allows LIFE to control other options (like scripting rules, land formation, etc.) and it provides an easy to find place where we can invite students, researchers, and research participants from around the world. Most importantly, the island will allow us to collaboratively design IRB-approved experiments that protect the rights and privacy of human participants and let them learn from their activities.
Second Life purposefully resembles the “Metaverse” in the Science Fiction book “Snow Crash” (Neal Stephenson, 1992). Linden Lab’s goal was to create a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. SL is not a game, it is a platform where you build environments including games. SL works under both Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP. SL residents retain the intellectual property rights to the objects they create, although they are required to offer the game’s creators an open license to it. SL residents can radically change their appearance, stream in media, design, buy and sell objects, buildings, vehicles, clothing, etc. SL also allows residents to write scripts with its own Java/C-like language.
The LIFE Center is in the process of setting up a center-wide zoning board to administer the island. If you want to do a research project on Terra Vita, you will need approval from your local IRB. Individuals with a credit card (for identification purposes) can get a free account and the client software from http://SecondLife.com. We hope to see you online!
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