Roundtable on Immersive Environments
Friday, 11/20, 12-1:30 pm, McKenzie 175
Bring your lunch & questions
Info: Robert Long RFD 6-2293 rohilong@uoregon.edu , Sean Sharp IS 6-8099 ssharp@uoregon.edu
The Female Avatar: Understanding the Ontology of Gender and Technology
SOJC Ph.D. candidate Alina Padilla-Miller
Alina Padilla-Miller’s dissertation examines the nature of social construction within the digital world, specifically in the grid of Second Life in order to better understand the role of gender in the creation and performance of the female avatar.
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Showcases of 3D Education and Productive Collaboration in Virtual Worlds Jonathon Richter, Research Associate, Center for Electronic Studying, College of Education
Dr. Richter is currently working on two projects of interest to Digital Scholars: (1) the MERLOT Project that he directs – The Center for Learning in Virtual Environments (CLIVE) http://clive.merlot.org/index.html, which is a project to identify and vet 3D learning assets (simulations, role playing, immersive experiences, etc.) by disciplinary content experts across the metaverse. His presentation will feature an overview/peek at locations in Second Life and Project Wonderland dedicated to showcase the capabilities and educational showcases developing in each platform. The second part of this whirlwind performance will be (2) an introduction to the Collaboratory — a parallel construction (i.e. also in Second Life and Wonderland) designed to investigate and gather the various routines that virtual teams have developed to effectively collaborate in these virtual spaces.
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Tanking Like a Girl: Gender and the Study of Online Gaming
Carol Stabile, Professor, Department of English/SOJC
Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society
Dr. Stabile is currently working on a project that focuses on the role of gender in game play in the massively-multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. The virtual environments of MMOs offer repeatable experiences for girls and women that differ in significant ways from the majority of commercial media content in the US. And the nature of the immersive experiences in MM0s challenge the methodologies and analytic tools that humanist scholars have used to study media. For today’s presentation, Dr. Stabile will speak specifically about the peculiar nature of these objects of study and the difficulties they present for feminist media scholarship.