The Open Habitat Project
Click here for the latest on Open Habitat or Click here to watch a 3 minute video of our activity so far.
The JISC-funded Open Habitat project is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan University, King’s College London, the University of Essex and Dave Cormier, based at the University of Prince Edward Island. It will take an innovative approach to encouraging creative online collaboration in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) - the online 3D spaces in which each user is represented by an ‘avatar’ or 3D character.
The project will generate solutions to the challenges of teaching, learning and collaboration in MUVEs. These solutions will be primarily in the form of guidelines, models and exemplars but will also be supported by the development/appropriation of software tools and services in and around the MUVEs themselves.
During discussions with members of the Emerge community, teaching staff and students, it became clear the MUVEs offer a number of interesting opportunities for teaching and learning. These include the ability to collaboratively design and build objects/structures and the sense of presence or ‘being there’ that comes across when interacting in a MUVE. The Open Habitat project will build on these principles by running a number of pilots which are integrated into the teaching of Art & Design and philosophy.
A competition to build a structure in the Second Life MUVE which reflects their current practice will be set as part of the first year art & design undergraduate degree based at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Parallel to this, the project will facilitate discussions in a MUVE with students who have attended one of the University of Oxford’s online short courses in philosophy. The art & design students will have the opportunity to meet face-to-face during the pilot in contrast to the philosophy students who are distributed around the world.
The pilots are designed to explore the effects of working in a MUVE on collaborative group work and on the effects of being represented as an avatar over and above using text, sound or video to communicate. In addition to this, the pilots are designed to encourage communication between the two disciplines to assess the potential of MUVEs to bring together diverse student groups.
The Open Habitat project will predominantly be using the Second Life MUVE because of its ubiquity and relative stability. The project will also be experimenting with OpenSim, an open source MUVE, and a MUVE provided by Sun Microsystems. These are representative of the widening range of 3D collaborative environments which are emerging across theweb and which afford intriguing opportunities for teaching and learning.
Contact david.white at conted.ox.ac.uk for more information.
