OpenHabitat
Overview
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 an MUVE.
Aims and objectives
OpenHabitat hopes to encourage students to use MUVEs as an integrated part of their learning. The project is focused on designing activities which are relevant to the discipline in question and will therefore generate useful outputs which can be applied more widely.
Project methodology
The project is split into two phases each with hands-on pilots. The underlying approach is to arrange ‘situated learning’ scenarios within MUVEs and to learn from both student and tutors experiences. This will be done using a series of evaluation techniques with which we hope to understand the motivation of the participants and well their relationship with the technology.
Anticipated outputs and outcomes
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.
Technology / Standards used
We will predominantly be using the Second Life MUVE but will also be experimenting with the open source MUVE OpenSim and Darkstar-MPK20 provided by SUN Microsystems.
Lead Institution
Project partners
Project Staff
Project Manager & Team
University of Oxford, Continuing Education
Fax: 01865 280982
Project Team