Snapshots of Second Life use in UK HE and FE

The Eduserv Foundation is funding a series of rolling reports, looking at the take-up of Second Life (SL) within the UK Higher and Further Education sector.

Note that the project has now completed.  Further snapshops will be undertaken as part of the Virtual World Watch project.

Goals

The research behind the reports has four main goals:

1. to determine the "state of play" of SL developments within the Higher and Further Education sector,
2. to discover how these developments are supported, in terms of time, funding and other resources,
3. to explore the functionality of these developments, i.e. which types of media or interactive service they incorporate,
4. to establish how "busy", or well-used, the developments have been and discover any impacts resulting from their implementation and use

Can you contribute?

We are looking for examples of where Second Life is being used within UK universities, colleges and schools i.e. the UK education sector. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Initiatives listed or described in the July 2007 or May 2008 snapshots who have progressed in some way.
• Institutions constructing their own "presence" on the grid.
• Departments also constructing their own "presence".
• Individual academics running courses within SL.
• Support centres doing "stuff" on the grid.
• Departments or academics experimenting ("Testing the water") with SL before committing.
• Academics conducting research within SL.
• Students creating course-related displays of work on the SL grid.
• Academics who have previously used SL but have since stopped for some reason. 

Note we are also interesting in developments that are not yet publicly accessible.

Please email the researcher – john (@) silversprite.com - if you are in UK Higher or Further Education and are involved in any of the aforementioned activities. Thank you.

Report Schedule

All the reports, in PDF format, will be linked from this section when they become available. Feel free to distribute copies of the reports to whoever you want.

1. July 2007: First report
2. September 2007: Updated version of first report
3. May 2008: Second report
4. October 2008: Third report

All reports are made available under a Creative Commons licence.

The project will also provide:

• short updates on his investgations on his weblog
• a set of photos on Flickr showing some of the SL spaces and resources developed by UK universities and colleges