Electronic Classroom, Electronic Community - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 101

Trying to understand where students of the
future will “live” online will be significant in the
medium-to-long term as we move towards a more
integrated idea of online life. However, the more
short-term areas of interest, likely to directly ef-
fect the development of CMS, is the work being
done by many universities in developing student
portals, and the use of online environments such
as SecondLife by more and more educators.
Many Australian universities have developed
student portals in an attempt to provide 'more
complete, holistic online environments for stu-
dents and staff by converging a number of tech-
nologies' (Kennedy et al 2002, p. 24). A student
portal attempts to provide an electronic entry point
for students from which all the online services
a student will use are available. This password
protected environment includes everything from
library access, to the course management system,
student administration and student supports - usu-
ally with some capacity for students to provide
some identity information about themselves which
fellow students can access. While there has been
the development of portals designed to improve
student literacy skills (Hiscock and Marriott 2003),
and other portals designed to improve critical
aspects of the student's experience, such as tran-
sition (Nelson et al 2005), more universities are
now looking towards portals as a way of providing
a seamless administrative, communication and
learning environment for students. While there is
evidence of extensive use of these facilities (with
sites like My.monash reporting 95% of students
accessing the portal on a weekly basis (Kennedy
et al 2002), there is little evidence appearing in
the literature on the capacity of these environ-
ments to support the development of community
for students in the form of SLSN's. This may be
because this type of research is underway but just
not reported yet or, more worryingly, that there
are assumptions that the high usage of these envi-
ronments will automatically translate to students
developing communities. While most Australian
universities work on their student portals, many

educators, particularly in the US, Europe and UK
are starting to explore virtual environments such
as SecondLife.
SecondLife, developed in 2003 by the Linden
Corporation, is evolving into a rich virtual world
capable of sustaining its own economy and de-
veloping its own culture. The use of SecondLife
for education has been supported by the Linden
Corporation but has, until recently, been charac-
terised mainly by individual academics venturing
into the environment to teach individual courses
(Kirriemuir 2007). The SecondLife environment
has similar characteristics to that of the MOO used
in this research and, as such, it should provide
students with similar opportunities to develop
SLSN's. Many higher education institutions are
starting to commit resources into SecondLife,
develop their own islands, replicate their cam-
puses and run courses “in-world” - a term used
to describe being logged in to a virtual world.
These institutions have included universities such
as Harvard University, New York University,
Stanford University (SimTeach 2007) and Ox-
ford University (Kirriemuir 2007). There is also
significant research occurring in SecondLife with
a view to understanding how the environment
might be used in higher education. Kirriemuir
(2007) details several projects including: work
by Krotoski exploring social network; work by
Childs on the learners' experience; work from the
University of Portsmouth examining the strengths
and weaknesses of virtual environments; and
work by Imperial College London comparing two
groups of students' experiences - one completing
a module SecondLife and the other in WebCT.
Recent research is also making the links between
educators experience in MOO environments and
what implication this might have for the use of
SecondLife for tertiary education (Mazar and
Nolan 2008)
Certainly many of the institutions building
campuses within SecondLife are including the
type of social spaces in which students are likely
to “bump” into each other, and there is some evi-