MASTER STUDENT IS RECRUITING PARTICIPANTS FOR HER THESIS RESEARCH!!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

You are wise! Thanks for the detective work, you'd have made a great um..gumshoe!

More than this, she already is a great, not merely a good, Samaritan. I wish I'd thought of reaching out to Milla. Maddy is obviously just a better person than I am.

When she's not being an arsonist.

[milla0097]

19 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Nah, Milla seems legit to me. The challenge she faces is similar to many students who are sent out into the world by faculty advisors who haven't the time to determine whether the research is even feasible.

Jasmine's legit, too. She'd not be trying to drum up business for a sim she's closing.

Thank you again for your help and support 🙏

[Jasmine Kiyori]

7 minutes ago, milla0097 said:

Thank you very much for your reply. I get your concern. To answer your questions ...the destination of Little Santorini has been chosen at the beginning by me and my supervisor due to the great touristic flow that the real destination of Santorini has per year. My intention is to find people who are willing to go through an online interview with me and talk about both their part experiences of Little Santorini and real life destination (even though now I managed to widen the destination options, including all the SL replicas) . I posted in this forum because I noticed a quite high activity among the subscribed users hoping to find someone who could help me. 

Ps: Your decision of closing Little Santorini does no affect my research in any way 

I am not just speaking for Little Santorini, but I believe this is not an easy task considering this that was mentioned earlier in the topic

On 3/21/2022 at 6:49 PM, Rowan Amore said:

I'd say a majority of people visit destination regions like this because they KNOW they will probably never visit in person.  That's one of the beautiful things about SL for me.

[milla0097]

3 minutes ago, Jasmine Kiyori said:

I am not just speaking for Little Santorini, but I believe this is not an easy task considering this that was mentioned earlier in the topic

I was aware of the difficulties. However, I also thought that since this forum counts on thousands of subscribers, finding 10-15 people who match my selection criteria wouldn't have been that great of an issue. Would you mind if we move the conversation on a private chat? I sent you a private message before. There are a couple of question that I'd like to ask you, if you have time. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

33 minutes ago, Jasmine Kiyori said:

I am not just speaking for Little Santorini, but I believe this is not an easy task considering this that was mentioned earlier in the topic

I agree, Jasmine.

I'd never heard of Santorini until Milla started this thread. I'm glad I did, but I'm still unlikely to visit in RL.

While touring your beautiful sim, I wondered if even Paris (and the long standing Paris 1900/2000 sims) would produce enough respondents for Milla's research. Traffic numbers and group sizes are unreliable metrics, but even the Paris sim doesn't rack up numbers that lead me to think you'd find a dozen people who used their exploration of SL Paris to springboard to a RL Paris vacation. As you and others note, we use SL to visit places and do things that we can't in RL. I love to hang my legs over the edge of the rings of Saturn, and I routinely set people on fire here.

The other problem with conducting SL research is that there is no grand scale broadcast communications mechanism. I think I just read that there are about 600,000 residents active in any given month. There might be a hundred or two participants in the forums over that same period of time, and we're not terribly representative of the in-world population.

The Little Santorini and Paris 1900 groups are both larger than the SL forums, but still represent only a tiny sliver of the SL population, and probably only a tiny sliver of the residents who have visited those SL spots.

Researching SL resident behavior is hard work!

 

Edited March 31, 2022 by Madelaine McMasters

[Scylla Rhiadra]

8 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Researching SL resident behavior is hard work!

Oh, I just watch you, and take notes.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Oh, I just watch you, and take notes.

Mooooooooooooommmmm, Scylla's watching meeeeeeeeeee!!!

[Rolig Loon]

24 minutes ago, milla0097 said:

However, I also thought that since this forum counts on thousands of subscribers, finding 10-15 people who match my selection criteria wouldn't have been that great of an issue.

That's where you may have miscalculated.  The SL forums include a rather large set of subforums, some of which (like this General Discussion forum) are much more active than others.  If you add up all the people who have contributed at one time or another, that is a rather impressive number.  However, most of those are people who have posted only a few times and never returned.  The number of regular posters is rather small -- in the low hundreds.  (As a rough indicator, it is now the middle of the day in the U.S. and there have been 33 posts in all of the subforums during the past hour -- many of them right here in this thread.)

It's impossible to say how many people have logged in to read posts, but my guess is that it's some low multiple of that number. And a lot of them are probably coming not to follow a conversation but to look for property to buy or rent, or because they are searching for a specific answer to a question about Second Life.  All in all, it's much fewer than the "thousands of subscribers" that you are counting on.

Edited March 31, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[milla0097]

2 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's where you may have miscalculated.  The SL forums include a rather large set of subforums, some of which (like this General Discussion forum) are much more active than others.  If you add up all the people who have contributed at one time or another, that *is* a rather impressive number.  However, most of those are people who have posted only a few times and never returned.  The number of regular posters is rather small -- in the low hundreds.  (As a rough indicator, it is now the middle of the day in the U.S. and there have been 33 posts in **all** of the subforums during the past hour -- many of them right here in this thread.)

It's impossible to say how many people have logged in to read posts, but my guess is that it's some low multiple of that number. And a lot of them are probably coming not to follow a conversation but to look for property to buy or rent, or because they are searching for a specific answer to a question about Second Life.  All in all, it's much fewer than the "thousands of subscribers" that you are counting on.

Yeah, unfortunately I figure that out too late. Can I then ask you what would be the best way to contact as many active SL users as possible? 🙏

[Silent Mistwalker]

16 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Mooooooooooooommmmm, Scylla's watching meeeeeeeeeee!!!

Don't make me pull this car over!

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, milla0097 said:

Yeah, unfortunately I figure that out too late. Can I then ask you what would be the best way to contact as many active SL users as possible? 🙏

I wish I could suggest something, but really... no. There is no way to send a message to everyone, or to post a note that everyone will see. (That's not quite true, because Linden Lab can send a blanket e-mail to all residents and they can post items on their blog that many people will see.  They hesitate to do that often, though, because system-wide messages get to be annoying very fast. And nobody but Linden Lab can do even that much.)  Residents can use group chat to reach members of their own groups, but those are severely limited because of the strain they place on the servers.  With a few exceptions, the larger groups are mostly run by SL merchants and by roleplay communities, most of whom I suspect would resist having an outsider send a message to their members.

The bottom line is that SL is a widely distributed community.  We don't have a central meeting place or a commonly shared set of interests that draw us to a community billboard. We cross paths with each other in small interest groups, like people in small towns all over the world in RL, and we generally don't have a lot to say to people in other small towns.  We like it that way.

[Madelaine McMasters]

11 minutes ago, milla0097 said:

Yeah, unfortunately I figure that out too late. Can I then ask you what would be the best way to contact as many active SL users as possible? 🙏

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way, Milla. The forums are not well known to the SL population. In-world, there are thousands of groups. The Little Santorini group has 370 members. There seem to be several groups related to the Paris 1900/2000 regions, but they might total 2000 people in all. The largest group I've ever seen has maybe 150,000 members and is hosted by an avatar maker in support of their customers. You'd get ejected in a millisecond if you tried to use that group for anything unrelated to the product.

This tremendous fragmentation makes it virtually impossible to reach a substantial portion of the SL community.

[Kathlen Onyx]

29 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

This tremendous fragmentation makes it virtually impossible to reach a substantial portion of the SL community.

Thank GOD for that.

[Persephone Emerald]

2 hours ago, milla0097 said:

Yeah, unfortunately I figure that out too late. Can I then ask you what would be the best way to contact as many active SL users as possible? 🙏

Your best option might be to go inworld as an avatar (one of the default starter avatars). Look for the names of popular RL tourist Destinations by using the Search function for Places and Groups. (The Firestorm viewer works better than the SL one does for Search and in other ways.) Write down the names of the busiest places and biggest groups that fit your RL tourist destination criteria. You might want to avoid some of the Adult locations and groups. Go to the places yourself to see what they're like. (For instance, beaches are a popular sort of SL location for Adult pick-up places, and the names of these beaches may have little to do with the RL locations.) Contact the owners of these sims (SL speak for locations) and ask them if you may send a request to their group members to be surveyed. You're probably not going to get much feedback, but your chances will be better if a notice is sent through each group to its members than if you try to interview random people in a sim. I think you'll also understand SL better and have more "street cred" with it's users if you're exploring SL yourself as well. It's kind of like the difference between being embedded with an indigenous tribe for months vs. parachuting in and expecting to get a reliable understanding of the local society and its beliefs.  

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Persephone Emerald said:

It's kind of like the difference between being embedded with an indigenous tribe for months vs. parachuting in and expecting to get a reliable understanding of the local society and its beliefs.  

This right here and what every poster doing a research project fails to grasp or they wouldn't come here to begin with.

[Madelaine McMasters]

40 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

This right here and what every poster doing a research project fails to grasp or they wouldn't come here to begin with.

I’m with Scylla on this, thinking that faculty bears some responsibility here. Most students do only one senior/grad research project, but the faculty puts students up to the same things year after year and must know what kind of responses they’ll get from places like SL. Even if the ideas come from the students, faculties will have experience with previous year’s results.

I temper my annoyance at the spring onslaught of student researchers by remembering my first wobbly weeks in SL. I shudder to think of my final grade depending on learning even just how to dress myself.

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

being embedded with an indigenous tribe for months

Yeah, no. I don't think my tribe wants to get into bed with anyone. 🤭

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I’m with Scylla on this, thinking that faculty bears some responsibility here. Most students do only one senior/grad research project, but the faculty puts students up to the same things year after year and must know what kind of responses they’ll get from places like SL. Even if the ideas come from the students, faculties will have experience with previous year’s results.

I temper my annoyance at the spring onslaught of student researchers by remembering my first wobbly weeks in SL. I shudder to think of my final grade depending on learning even just how to dress myself.

Yes, this.

It's also important to bear in mind the limitations that are built into research projects at different post-secondary levels.

We get very impatient with undergraduate students who blunder into SL without a clue. But most undergraduates are likely to be producing upwards of 10 essays or research projects a year, for a variety of courses. With a full-time course load of 5 courses a term, they simply don't have the time to do the kind of in-depth immersive research we are demanding of them. And so, again, the onus has to be on the prof who has assigned the project to prepare them, and to ensure that the project is focused enough to be doable. That so many profs clearly don't do this is, I think, outrageous.

Undergrads aren't expected to become "experts" in any of the subjects they are studying: that is literally what a PhD is for. A piece of undergraduate work will very very rarely produce brand new insights, or generate truly "new knowledge": that's actually not the function of undergraduate education. The point is to train the student, not produce earth shattering new ideas or knowledge. So while one obviously wants the student to walk away from their project with as full a knowledge of it as possible, the most important point is to ensure that they are learning how to do such research.

It's a bit different at the graduate level -- PhD students certainly are expected to produce new knowledge. That's what a doctoral thesis is. An MA student is also expected to be doing more than retreading ideas and knowledge that is already out there, but to a lesser extent. Most MA programs are one or two years (full-time), may or may not involve an MA thesis and/or independent research project, but will also involve course work. So, again, there are limits as to how much can be accomplished.

Boellstorff's book on SL is excellent and, although dated, still relevant because he had that most precious of commodities -- time. When he wrote Coming of Age in Second Life, he was already a tenured professor at UC Irvine. He had the leisure and resources to embed himself into SL fully.

Your average student -- even an MA student -- simply doesn't.

Edited April 1, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra
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