Direct quote from the NMC Observer blog below. I haven’t had a chance to look at the survey, but it is bound to be interesting.
NMC Publishes Results of Educators in SL Survey:
It was last May when we put out a call for people to complete our 42 item survey intended to profile educators involved in Second Life. It took a bit longer than we hoped to compile the results, but we have recently announced them on the NMC web site. The released documents, a summary of the data and appendix with all responses from the open ended items, are released under Creative Commons license.
There is so much to the survey, that people can really slice the results to match their own interests- the Chronicle of Higher education picked up one item as “educators are split on the viability”. Over at OLDaily, Stephen Downes cited a question to conclude “the most popular activity is ‘wandering around’ followed by ‘meeting people’. So Second Life is still in the ‘browsing’ stage of use”.
We have our own thoughts on this summary of what 200+ educators, who yes, are active in Second Life, are doing, interested in, and what kinds of experiences they have had. It was interesting when we looked at the “what was your worst experience” questions and noted the number of people who had suffered griefing, and ones who had been subjected to other forms of abuse, alluding to almost predatory acts (that works for the scare mongers). What was interesting was we did a split on this question by male and female respondents, and to our surprise, there was no significant difference, both males and females had experiences this unfortunate behavior.
There is much to pull from the data, and we are eager to see what information others glean from the results. We thanks all the folks who took the time to complete the survey! You can find the results at:
NMC 2007 Educators in Second Life Survey Results Summary [13pp, 208k PDF]
NMC 2007 Educators in Second Life Survey Results Appendix [28pp, 522k PDF]
