"Whatever happened to Second Life?"
quinta-feira, 11 outubro 2012 19h00m (GMT)
From all the fads that educators have witnessed – and there have been many - Second Life seems to have some unique characteristics. In this presentation, I’ll make the case that in the case of Second Life, the ‘yawn’ may have followed the hype a little too closely.
When mentioned in an educational setting approximately half of the educators have never heard of it and the other half thinks it’s over. the year 2009 seems to constitute a landmark. The recession, along with Linden Lab new fee system (implemented that year), led several universities to abandon their Second Life strategy. In some cases that I know well in the US, years of work by prominent scholars in the field was irreversibly lost. From a technological perspective, Linden Lab’s strategies (or lack of) for *integration* may be responsible for a vision of Second Life as an embedded or embedding technology.
Aside from this financial and technological landscape, Second Life continues to live in part sustained by the ‘die hard’ - those educators who seems to have never lost faith in SL. This short presentation will cover some of the Linden Lab decisions on the financial and the technological sides, and the consequences they had for the use of SL in Education and nonprofits. It then identifies a number of areas where SL still seems to excel as working space in those areas: behavior change interventions benefitting from anonymity and the ‘feeling of presence’, participation in social life of people with disabilities, and the exploration of complex scientific concepts.
Atenção: A sessão será em inglês (oradores convidados estão nos EUA)
- Jenna Ball e Martin Keltz (StartledCat - immersive storytelling environments, California)
In SL: Jenaia Morane e Marty Snowpaw
- Dr. Margaret (Peg) Nosek (Center for Research on Women with Disabilities - Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Medical Center)
in SL: Dhira Giha
Ana Boa-Ventura | University of Texas at Austin | National University, S. Diego
- Ana Boa-Ventura trabalha em humanidades digitais e em novos media na área de intervenção social. Aterrou nos EUA há anos atrás através de uma bolsa Fulbright. Desde então, tem coordenado e colaborado em diversos programas internacionais envolvendo os temas acima mencionados, no Brasil, México, Venezuela, Portugal, Espanha, França, Reino Unido, Estados Unidos e Tanzânia. Este trabalho levou-a a desenvolver um fascínio por comunicação intercultural em comunidades profissionais online, Second Life e “real life”.
- Trabalha com narrativas digitais ou “digital storytelling” (DST) em vários contextos de investigação prática. Para a Universidade Nacional (San Diego, EUA), desenhou um currículo de DST no Second Life. Com Joe Lambert (CDS, Berkeley) organizou uma conferência de narrativa Digital no SL. A sua pesquisa académica sobre comunidades virtuais para a cessação tabágica interseta o DST na medida em que as histórias estão na base da construção comunitária e da confiança.
- Como empresária, co-fundou recentemente uma empresa composta por 3 mulheres - Media Shots (www.mediashots.org | www.mediashots.org/blog) – a qual propõe, num momento de recessão profunda na Europa, soluções criativas destinadas a empresas portuguesas que desejam renovar/repensar o seu marketing corporativo integrando estratégias low-cost de media sociais e narrativas digitais.
