Thanks for the response, Iggy.
I'll have to dig a bit a bit for the conduct guide, which is buried in my in-world inventory somewhere, but what I've been using as a sort of online guide to safety and culture is the Newbie Woman's SL Survival Kit. It's better on the former than the latter, unfortunately, but still useful. One or two of my male students looked at me a bit askance for recommending this, but it's pretty comprehensive and applicable, I think, to anyone in SL. I've previously used the version on Ellie Brewster's Woman's Resource Hub in Second Life:
http://womensresourcehub.wetpaint.com/page/Newbie+Woman%27s+SL+Survival+KitBut there is a slightly expanded version here now:
http://feministos.wetpaint.com/page/The+Newbie+Woman%27s+SL+Survival+KitIf anyone knows of anything more comprehensive, or geared perhaps more directly to students, I'd love to know about it.
I agree entirely that you can "overdo" the preparation and "warnings" to students about SL. One problem is that which you mention: you don't want students so terrified of what they might encounter that they are afraid to venture anywhere. The other is, frankly, a question of PR: I want my students to take SL seriously, and they are less likely to do that if one leaves them with the impression that it is populated largely by sex addicts and antisocial troublemakers. Too many of my students as it is have "heard" that SL is "all about" sex.
At the same time, I tend to think that our students are actually much less "web smart" than we give them credit for: the amount of personal information that goes into the average Facebook or MySpace page is an index of how trusting (or heedless) some of them are.
A great deal I suppose depends on the nature of the activities that the students are to undertake. I teach two courses that venture into SL, although neither is taught anything like completely in-world. One group will spend almost their entire time in-world on our virtual campus, at my purpose-built facility there. I felt the need to be much less detailed in my introduction of SL culture to this group, giving them not much more than a quick overview of a few of the subcultures (and not just the "scary" ones), and directing them to review the pertinent sections of the Survival Kit.
My second course will be spending the majority of their time off the virtual campus, touring (with me) sims of literary, historical, or artistic interest. This group I prepared somewhat more extensively, with a particular focus on dealing with griefers.
Both groups were warned that venturing beyond the virtual campus, or exploring when I was not supervising, meant that they were responsible both for their own safety and their own conduct. And the main point that I stressed, as clearly did you, was that their chief safety lay in not disclosing details about their RL identities.
I hadn't thought of a waiver, I will confess. I think, given that I am not sending my students in-world unsupervised, that I can probably dispense without this myself, but it's an interesting idea.
None of my students has thus far been hit on (to my knowledge, anyway), but one or two of them have been "approached" by strangers. And a few were mildly bemused to run across a group of half naked dancers at Burning Life. But I've received no complaints so far.
Ephraim Dalglish
RL: Mark McDayter
Department of English
The University of Western Ontario
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