Assignment 9 - Tom Ternquist

One of the major challenges of non-collocated collaboration is establishing a simultaneous presence in the virtual environment that the collaboration is taking place in. This presence helps to ground the collaborative processes to create a greater context as well as to minimize the effects remote collaboration.

Second Life provides a unique solution to some of these issues through its virtual world. Tom Boellstorff’s fieldwork in Second Life provides some interesting insight into how collaboration works in a virtual world.
Boellstorff’s discussion of virtual landscapes gives us an idea of what a simultaneous presence in a virtual world can afford. Boellstorff describes how virtual landscapes can provide a level of “personal control over the external world.” This control over of an external environment provides a sense of efficacy to the user, which can help to give a greater significance to the collaborative process in the context of virtual world.

The use of sandboxes in Second Life is a very interesting feature that highlights some of the potential for collaboration. Boellstorff notes that, “sandboxes were significant locations for social interaction; they acted as a commons where persons could without shared interests or social networks could interact as they learned how to use the building function of the Second Life program or experiment with a new idea.” This functionality seems to provide an ideal environment for collaborators to work, given that their goals are well suited to the tools available, i.e., modeling that can be handled through Second Life’s programming language.

That said, while Second Life seems to have the potential to be very helpful in simulating a collocated environment for experimentation, the tools available in Second Life are not likely have the functionality that specialized collaborative tools offer. To use Second Life for collaboration would likely require the use of additional tools to handle much of the specialized processes that are required by the task.

When Kraut’s input-process-output model is considered and we look into the group maintenance aspect of collaboration, Second Life has the potential to provide some real benefits. Simultaneous presence in a virtual world can help to create stronger relationships by simulating much of what face-to-face collaboration offers. Moreover, Second Life can help maintain group satisfaction in that the virtual world is persistent, and objects in the game as well as avatars can remain in the game even when the collaborative task is complete. This can serve as an incentive to maintain relationships as to not disrupt the community formed by the social network of Second Life.