Following my Second Life blog post, I entered the competition to win a few Linden Dollars in order to pilot a SL project at my university with a colleague - Martin Jones. Sadly, we didn’t win the top prize… but our runner-up status does get some free advice and guidance for developing, deploying and assessing the project!
Here’s a brief summary of what Martin and I submitted:
“The project will be based upon a successful project on property law by Elizabeth Townsend-Gard at Seattle Law School (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/04/using_second_li.html) and adapted to suit UK students and a Scots Law syllabus.
Initially, this project will be piloted in level 2 (core LLB module in Legal IT) to assess the student perspective and the future viability of an extended activity in a level 3 elective (e-law).
Student will one ‘pet’ avatar per group (approx 6 students per group) and use their experience of registering, navigating, interacting etc to define and describe the legal issues associated with their first-hand use of Second Life. An indicative list of such tasks may include:
· Task One: The Rules of the Game (what laws control and how); Design the Avatar
· Task Two: First in Time (Exploration and Orientation)
· Task Three: Provision of Legal Services & Dispute Resolution in SL
· Task Four: Property ownership
· Task Five: IP 1 Trademark
· Task Six: IP 2 Copyright
· Task Seven: Contractual Disputes
· Task Eight: Controlling Defamatory/Offensive Material
· Task Nine: Controlling ‘virtual’ offences against the person
· Task Ten: Age issues and child protection in SL
· Task Eleven: Financial Services / Money Laundering / Gambling in SL
· Task Twelve: Representatives from Each Group – final evaluation, discussion of the experience
Tasks 1-3 and 12 will be core for each group; subsequent tasks may be allocated to different groups or encountered in a different order to assess whether SL experience impacts upon their findings. Further tasks may be developed as the project matures. Tasks 1-3 will also be the small-scale pilot.
My current concerns are more about IT labs and the graphics requirements for running Second Life on campus; but, with internal ‘project support’ I’m hoping that can be cleared up.
I’ve also found a very cool blogHUD so I can blog directly from SL when this is up and running! And I thought it might be worthwhile putting some of the law-oriented SL resources that I’ve come across on a separate page – see here for photos, university departments, law firms courtrooms and more (although I don’t want to pre-empt task 3!). Read on for links etc.
Here are some random links from my del.icio.us account that I've saved under "Second Life" that might be worth visiting - covers both legal aspects and the wider education use:
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