Personal Blogs

Terra Incognita project

Introduction

“A current example of an attempt to harness the power of study groups in a virtual environment is the Terra Incognita project of the University of Southern Queensland (Australia), which has built a classroom in Second Life, the online virtual world that has attracted millions of users. In addition to supporting lecture-style teaching, Terra Incognita includes the capability for small groups of students who want to work together to easily “break off” from the central classroom before rejoining the entire class” (Seely Brown and Adler, 2008 p. 20).

Historical context

According to Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life, as of November 6, 2007, more than 10.5 million people had signed up for accounts in the virtual world. In the thirty days prior to that date, just over 980,000 unique individuals had logged in to Second Life, and nearly 500,000 people had logged in during the previous week (Second Life, 2014a).

Current situation

However this popular social learning recently closed. Dean (2014) used to run the project but due to personal circumstances could no longer do so and closed it on 09.01.2014. Second Life (2014b) confirmed Terra Incognita’s status change as being inactive and offline on 12.01.2014. Although there is a way forward, “Virtual World Web” has been used previously as a method for moving from the online Second Life website to effective offline participation (Bryan, 2014).

Other published work or research on this project - relating to PROMPT

The Seely Brown and Adler (2008) research was published in January 2008. Work by WikiEducator (2013) discusses the Terra Incognita project five years later.  However WikiEducator is associated with Wikipedia which is not considered a reputable academic source due to its multi-editing function. Therefore it would not meet the PROMPT criteria. Additionally there is a piece by Rozen and Leonhart (2008) on the Terra Incognita project written in December 2008. Although 11 months after the Seely Brown and Adler work, with sufficient time for a brief review, the item appears only to be in draft format. Moreover it is not being particularly current so there would have likely been considerable change during that time. For the purpose of PROMPT it demonstrates that is insufficiently recent.  However there are some recent and reputable sources that have discussed this project, Corder (2011) and the University of Texas (2012).

Summary

Although the Terra Incognita project has recently ended, this blog aims to demonstrate how it could continue and uses PROMPT criteria in discussing appropriate evidencing of academic work.

All comments and ideas are appreciated.

References

Bryan (2014) http://sled.577505.n2.nabble.com/Terra-incognita-will-go-offline-tomorrow-9th-Jan-td7582536.html

Corder (2011) http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/world-widehorizons/Second_Life_Corder_presentation_part_2.pdf

Dean (2014) http://sled.577505.n2.nabble.com/Terra-incognita-will-go-offline-tomorrow-9th-Jan-td7582536.html

Rozen and Leonhart (2008) http://www.usu.edu/ust/pdf/2008/december/itn1229087.pdf

Second Life (2014a) http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

Second Life (2014b) http://gridsurvey.com/display.php?id=9917

WikiEducator (2013) http://wikieducator.org/Minds_On_Fire