School of Health and Life Sciences – Virtual Worlds

GCU’s School of Health and Life Sciences has joined up with the University of Richmond’s Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, in an exciting new collaboration which is set within GCUs land in the 3D virtual World Second Life.  Dr Joe Essid Director of the Writing Centre explains his use of virtual worlds “The Virtual House of Usher began as a faculty-student partnership sponsored by the University of Richmond’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology in the summer of 2009.  The project uses virtual-world technology to create an interactive story, with faculty actors in the roles of Richmond native Edgar Allan Poe’s characters Roderick and Madeline Usher. Students, in the role of Poe’s narrator, try to avoid the dreadful fate that overcomes the Usher family in the original tale. Using the original story as both springboard for interactive learning and questions about the nature of literary narrative, four courses in literature or Rhetoric and Communications Studies have used the online House. The experience is that of improvisational acting in a game-like space where students must find clues, resolve conflicting stories, and pursue personal goals while staying as guests in a dreary mansion just off the Yorkshire coast in the year 1847. The explorations of Poe’s obsessions and obsessed characters, in the words of one recent participant, “was in my opinion the most privileged opportunity of the entire interactive experience because it allowed me to not only become a part of the story, but to resolve the characters’ problems in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story that traditionally remained unresolved.”
 
It is hoped that this will lead to further collaboration between GCU and University of Richmond in other disciplines. For further information or a tour of the House of Usher please email Evelyn.McElhinney@gcu.ac.uk , Lecturer in the Department of Health and Community Sciences or Instant Message her in Second Life – Kali Pizzaro.