Second Life would work well for social gatherings or interactions that are crucial to the performance of group projects. It is said that face-to-face interactions are helpful to establishing trust between distributed collaborators. Second Life enables users to “perceive himself or herself as being present or having ‘presence’ in the virtual environment (Boellstorff, 2008)”. Buildings and objects can work to “create a space between the individual and the environment” that are authentic places for users in which virtual become real (Boellstorff, 2008). Collaborators who are far from each other can learn more about each other in intimate, immersive settings that they create.
Also, Second Life can be useful for groups that are not co-located to learn new software or programs that they are not familiar with. The virtual space allows users to inhabit the same space and look at same objects without spending too much time and effort. This common grounding they establish in space would be beneficial in experimenting learning space and helping each other to learn better through questions and sharing observations.
However, Second Life can set a major drawback to users who are not familiar with the program because of the knowledge and social norms one needs to know to navigate and interact in the virtual space. For example, Professor McLeod and others had difficulty creating a couch. The technical aspects can distract users from focusing on collaborating with others. During that time, other classmates performed silly acts such as jumping up and down frantically and whirling around in circles. Second Life can be better used for collaboration once users are more comfortable with the program.
Last but not least, having too many people collaborate on Second Life can create lags. This can hinder collaboration performance since Second Life is depended on synchronic interactions. Lags such as incomplete landscape and delay in the appearance of text chat can “disrupt the feeling of shared space” that are crucial to Second Life (Boellstorff, 2008). This limits the number of people and scripts that can be run on the server to encourage collaboration in Second Life.
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I agree that Second Life could be useful for the performance of group tasks, since members can inhabit the same virtual space. This enables the group members to get the same perspective, which may reduce grounding required to inform any remote members. In addition to lags as a result of too many collaborators, there may be the issue of people going "afk" or away from keyboard. By going away without informing other group members or signing out, this could create confusion in how much information needs to be reviewed and grounding will be necessary.
ReplyDeleteI entirely agree with the points you have made in your post. I also touched base on the fact that Second Life can be useful in certain instances and not in other instances. It can specifically be helpful in collaboration with other groups. I think the reasoning you gave behind that is a good one. Second Life takes face to face to a different level by giving each person an actual representation in the virtual world when they are not able to be in the same room in the real world. Also, I agree with the fact that a negative aspect of Second Life is that if you do not have a good knowledge of the program it can slow you down.
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