Call for volunteers to be interviewed in Second Life

My colleague, Sheila Webber, is seeking people who are willing to be interviewed within Second Life, by her first year undergraduate students, who are taking a module called Information Literacy.

Would any MSc Elearning folks be willing to be interviewed?

If so, please contact me (marshall dot dozier at ed dot ac dot uk). Here is more information about what’s involved:

The students should be doing interviews sometime between 3^rd and 28^th November. The interviewees would be asked to think about a time they needed information for a Second Life activity. It can be a need that  they didn’t (in the end) satisfy, or one that is ongoing (examples from previous years include choosing a SL sculpture, solving a scripting problem, buying a tail, finding a home, finding out where a meeting was happening, and learning how to function in SL).

The interviewee would then be asked a series of questions about that information need and how, or whether, they satisfied it. If the interviewee wanted to ask the interviewer a couple of questions about their experience in SL, at the end, then this would be OK and students have been fine about it in the past (we can flag up that this might happen, but it is then up to the student to agree or not).

The interview would be conducted in text chat (which is logged) and they take, on average, about half an hour. The students will subsequently analyse the interview, comparing it to research models of information behaviour, for a marked assignment. The assignment also requires them to reflect on their abilities as an interviewer. The aggregated results (on information behaviour in SL) may also be written up for publication.

Sheila has written about the intervention in an article which outlines the pedagogic rationale and approach, and also gives a week-by-week account of what the students did last year.  (Webber, S. (2010) “Investigating modes of student inquiry in Second Life as part of a
blended approach.” International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments, 1 (3), 55-70.)  I can supply a copy of the paper if you’d like to read it.