About The Project

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.