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Second Life As an Emerging Platform for Intercultural Education

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Second Life As an Emerging Platform for Intercultural Education Freie Universität Berlin Fachbereich Erziehungswissenschaften European Master in Intercultural Education Second Life as an Emerging Platform for Intercultural Education Master Thesis by Annette Pohlke Engadiner Weg 4 12207 Berlin Tel.: 8174529 [email protected] handed in on the 31st of August 2007 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Bernd Overwien Zweitgutachter: Dr. Antje Dohrn Table of Contents 1. Introduction...................................................................................................................................1 2. Virtual realities an their use in education................................................................................2 3. An introduction to Second Life...................................................................................................6 3.1 The language of Second Life.............................................................................................6 3.2 What is Second Life?...........................................................................................................8 3.3 Education in Second Life..................................................................................................11 3.3.1 Resources................................................................................................................11 3.3.1.1 Staff members specialised in education..............................................11 3.3.1.2 Mailinglist....................................................................................................12 3.3.1.3 Land for educators....................................................................................12 3.3.1.4 Other resources.........................................................................................12 3.4 A typology of existing educational projects in Second Life.........................................13 3.5 Specific advantages and disadvantages of Second Life as a platform for educational projects..........................................................................................................16 4. Second Life and intercultural education...............................................................................25 4.1 What is intercultural education?......................................................................................25 4.2 Selected Projects...............................................................................................................32 4.2.1 The Pacific Rim Exchange.....................................................................................32 4.2.2 Verum's Place and Charles Benjamin Center..................................................35 4.2.3 Virtual Halluzination................................................................................................39 4.3 What can be learned from the examples?....................................................................43 4.4 Do skills learned in a virtual reality transfer to real life?............................................44 5. Conclusions and perspectives...............................................................................................46 6. References.................................................................................................................................48 - 1 - 1. Introduction Howard Rheingold, the man who coined the term "virtual community"1, made an interesting observation: "In computer technology, playgrounds often are where real innovation emerge."2 Second Life is often seen as a game from outsiders and casual users. Rheingold's stament should make us aware that all the game like qualities that this virtual world has should not prompt us to easily dismiss it as irrelevant. Furthermore educational theories from the earliest beginning have often stressed the importance of play in the field of learning. This seems to be even more true for the field of intercultural education where it is quite common to use various forms of play to educate3. The most likely reason for the popularity of interactivity and play in intercultural education may be that social and communication skills play a key role for the desired intercultural competence that interculturale education tries to create and improve. This alone makes Second Life potentially useful. But there is more to Second Life that may make it a useful tool for intercultural education. Before teacher and learner even entered it, it is already a place ripe with different cultural contexts that can be explored. The user community is an international one and the various ethnic, religious and social cultures those users present can also be found in Second Life. On top of this, users even created cultures of their own within the virtual world. This can make Second Life an unusual rich environment to produce an interactive learning experience where it is possible to explore ones own cultural background and learn about other cultures through the encounter with other users and their creations. I decided to write this thesis in English instead of my first language, German, because it will help me to share my results with those people who made it possible for me to write 1 Cole p. XXVI. 2 Rheingold, The Virtual Community, p.185. 3 At least this can be concluded from the large number of titles that deal primarily or even excusively with games and other forms of play in intercutural education. Examples are: Helmolt Rademacher, Maria Wilhelm, Spiele und Übungen zum interkulturellen Lernen, Frankfurt a.M. 1991; Kompass. Handbuch zur Menschenrechtbildung für die schulische und außerschulische Bildungsarbeit, Berlin 2005; Helga Lösche, Interkulrturelle Kommunikation. Sammlung prkatischer Spiele und Übungen, Augsburg 42005 - 2 - it in the first place: The creators, organizers, teachers who created and work for the projects I will discuss in section 4.2 and the members of the very active and international group of educators in Second Life. For some chapters of my thesis this helped, as my literature was mostly in English, especially everything on the development of virtual worlds and their use for education and training. Yet for other chapters, nameley the one on intercultural education, most of the literature I used was written in German making it rather more difficult to translate the ideas and concepts to another language. I am aware that not just the language, but also the discussion about intercultural issues in Germany is slightly different from the one in, for example, the US. Therefor this will also be covered in chapter 4.1. There are no printed works of a scholarly nature out on Second Life yet. The first book ever to appear on Second Life was the official guide that was published in English in December 2006. The first books on the German market appeared in March 2007. By now there must be one to two dozens of titles in those two languages. I know many of them and used those that I considered the best, most reliable and best researched for my thesis, yet I don't know of any book on Second Life of a truly scholarly nature. Still a lot of reserach is done on Second Life at this very moment, but as far as results have been published, they can rather be found on the internet. Aside of the resources I will list in the following chapter the "Annotated Bibliography of Second LIfe - Educational Online Resources" maintained by Mark Pepper and hosted by Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana)4. I included screenshots from Second Life to illustrate my thesis. Where I talk about some example projects in part 4.2 of my thesis they are supposed to illustrate the text, but I included some more throughout the text that are more loosely linked to it. The experience of Second Life is a very visual one, so there are some things that are hard to explain with words alone. I added the pictures, hoping they will be able to better explain some details that I couldn't explain in the text in a concise way. I give the source for all pictures I took from other sources, so if there is no source given to any of them, it is one of my own screenshots. 2. Virtual realities and their use in education Second Life is sometimes called a game, but this label is usually refuted by more 4 http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib. - 3 - experienced players and the developers of Second Life alike. Instead they insist that Second Life is a virtual world. What does this mean and where does it put Second Life? A virtual world is usually defined by two things: The user has some character or persona to represent them in this world. If this representation is graphical, it is called an avatar. Second, the world must be persistent, which means it is permanently stored and usually available on the computer it resides on. While these two criteria are widely accepted, a third one could be named, even if it is rarely recognized: Virtual worlds use the metaphor of space and the user can „move around“ in them. A virtual world can be completely text based, as in the case of MUDs and MUSHes, but more typically it is used when referring to a graphical environment. The earliest virtual worlds in the form of MUDs were created in the 1970s5, followed by 2D graphical virtual worlds. The first one was „Habitat“ that was released for a public beta in 1986. Although it didn‘t survive the pilot stage, it became influential not only by coining the term „Avatar“, but by eventually providing the core A screenshot from "Habitat". We see one of the technology to the much more avatars and his home. successful and more widely known (From the internet: http://www.dsgames.net/qlink/habitat/images/habitat-
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