Facilitating Art Education

Author(s):  
Merle Hearns ◽  
Jegatheva (Jay Jay) Jegathesan

Art and design students in SL experience the advantages of a visually rich environment where they can take a leading role in their own learning, have the opportunity to create objects that defy real world limitations, are immersive and interactive, and where they are able to collaborate with a community of global art practitioners. The 3D Art Challenges started at the University of Western Australia in Second Life in 2009. Since that time, UWA has rapidly emerged as a central hub of art activity in SL. The story of UWA’s journey into Second Life and a recent survey of past and present participants of the UWA Art Challenges indicate that the environment of a virtual world is well suited to the teaching of art and design skills. The UWA Art Challenges have the potential to be valuable resources for educators and students.

Author(s):  
Gulnur Tumbat ◽  
Lisa M. Bennett

Second Life (SL) established itself in 2003 as a virtual world where people can create an alternate life as an avatar (www.secondlife.com). It provides a fertile ground for real-world businesses to market their products to a tech-savvy and brand-conscious group of potential consumers. The goal of this exploratory chapter is to gain an understanding about the SL experience for these consumers and provide examples of some of the marketing practices. The authors conclude that while SL does provide an alternative for businesses for building, maintaining, and extending their real world brand presence, it remains primarily as a 3-dimension (3-D) virtual social space for people to connect and communicate with like-minded others.


Proceedings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Juan M. Alonso-Martinez ◽  
Shaghayegh Ravaei ◽  
Teodoro Rudolphi-Solero ◽  
Francisco Sendra-Portero

Nine professors of radiology from six different cities were invited to give a 1-hour seminar in the virtual world Second Life® to 154 third-year medical students from the University of Málaga. Students and teachers performed a questionnaire about the cognitive load that implies receiving/teaching seminars inside Second Life@ and several characteristics involving the experience. This experience was considered remarkably enriching by teachers and learners and opens new interesting pathways for educational contact between students and teachers from different universities, with the advantages of reducing costs and travel time.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Renato P. Dos Santos

Science teaching detached itself from Reality and became restricted to the classrooms and textbooks with their abundance of standardized and repetitive exercises, while students keep their own alternative conceptions. Papert, displeased with this inefficient learning process, as early as 1980 championed physics microworlds, where students could experience a variety of laws of motion, from Aristotle to Newton and Einstein or even “new” laws invented by the students themselves. While often mistakenly seen as a game, Second Life (SL), the online 3D virtual world hosted by Linden Lab, imposes essentially no rules on the residents beyond reasonable restrictions on improper behavior and the physical rules that guarantee its similitude to the real world. As a consequence SL qualifies itself as an environment for personal discovery and exploration as proposed by constructivist theories. The physical laws are implemented through the well-known physics engine Havok, whose design aims to provide game-players a consistent, “realistic” environment. Going beyond Reality limits, however, the Havok User Guide explicitly encourages developers to use several tricks to cheat the simulator in order to make games funnier or easier to play. As it is shown in this study, SL Physics is unexpectedly neither the Galilean/Newtonian “idealized” Physics nor a real world Physics virtualization, intentionally diverging from reality in such a way that it could be called hyper-real. As a matter of fact, if some of its features make objects behave “more realistically than real” ones, certain quantities, e.g. energy, have a totally different meaning in SL as compared to Physics. Far from considering it as a problem, however, the author argues that its hyper-reality may be a golden teaching opportunity, allowing surreal Physics simulations and epistemologically rich classroom discussions around the “what is a physical law?” issue, in good accordance with Papert’s never-implemented proposal.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Lucke ◽  
Raphael Zender

Virtual worlds became an appealing and fascinating component of today's internet. In particular, the number of educational providers that see a potential for E-Learning in such new platforms increases. Unfortunately, most of the environments and processes implemented up to now do not exceed a virtual modelling of real-world scenarios. In particular, this paper shows that Second Life can be more than just another learning platform. A flexible and bidirectional link between the reality and the virtual world enables synchronous and seamless interaction between users and devices across both worlds. The primary advantages of this interconnection are a spatial extension of face-to-face and online learning scenarios and a closer relationship between virtual learners and the real world.


Author(s):  
Megan J McPherson

Art and design students' transitions in the university studio and their careers are now a significant issue in higher education. There is a more explicit articulation of the graduate capabilities that students now need to cultivate to become artist and designers. The author focuses on the transition into the university setting and the pedagogic relationship with the graduate capabilities of artists and designers and their portfolio careers as a way to contextualize art pedagogies and technology use in K-12 education. The author argues that supporting students' expectations and aspirations in their desires to become artists and designers is relational to graduate capabilities and the notion of a portfolio career. The author concludes by suggesting that the use of arts education and technology have a pivotal role in helping students develop transitioning skills, graduate capabilities and portfolio careers.


Author(s):  
Russell Fewster ◽  
Denise Wood ◽  
Joff Chafer

Over a four-week period students enrolled in a second-year visual theatre course at the University of South Australia attempted to stage the online virtual world Second Life in a conventional proscenium arch theatre. The Staging Second Life project played upon the liminal space between ‘real’ and digital, and gave the students the opportunity to transpose a virtual world into a theatrical setting. The students actively played between these two media in turn becoming intermedialists. Within the hypermedium of the theatre they were able to remediate the conventions of Second Life via their bodies and manipulation of objects. The project reflects a growing trend in performance pedagogy where technology and new ways of thinking about its applications are increasingly integrated into the curriculum. This chapter describes the practical aspects of the course as well as the emergent theory of intermediality underpinning the Staging Second Life project.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Loureiro ◽  
Teresa Bettencourt

This paper intends to present a preliminary PhD research that is being developed by the authors, with the intention to determine how to improve teaching and learning situations, at the university level, based on experiences in immersive virtual worlds. The authors have realized that, nowadays, courses don’t fulfill our students’ needs. They belong to a networked and multitasking generation, and what they get from today’s teaching strategy does not, in many situations, fulfill students’ needs and perspectives. They need to gather competences in order to become motivated citizens, communicative and knowledge builders. It is our belief that we can take advantage from the immersive virtual worlds’ resources to overcome this situation and therefore to transfer it to real life. In order to achieve this we need, at the first instance, to understand how social interactions occur in these environments (in particular at Second Life®), how they grow and how they are developed. What we present here is a preliminary sample of our intended research.


1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R Messinger ◽  
Xin Ge ◽  
Eleni Stroulia ◽  
Kelly Lyons ◽  
Kristen Smirnov ◽  
...  

What is the relationship between avatars and the people they represent in terms of appearance and behavior? In this paper, we hypothesize that people (balancing motives of self-verification and self-enhancement) customize the image of their avatars to bear similarity to their real selves, but with moderate enhancements. We also hypothesize that virtual-world behavior (due to deindividuation in computer-mediated communication environments) is less restrained by normal inhibitions than real-world behavior. Lastly, we hypothesize that people with more attractive avatars than their real selves will be somewhat more confident and extraverted in virtual worlds than they are in the real world. We examine these issues using data collected from Second Life residents using an in-world intercept method that involved recruiting respondents’ avatars from a representative sample of locations. Our quantitative data indicate that, on average, people report making their avatars similar to themselves, but somewhat more attractive. And, compared to real-world behavior, respondents indicate that their virtual-world behavior is more outgoing and risk-taking and less thoughtful/more superficial. Finally, people with avatars more attractive than their real selves state that they are more outgoing, extraverted, risk-taking, and loud than their real selves (particularly if they reported being relatively low on these traits in the real world). Qualitative data from open-ended questions corroborate our hypotheses.


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