Using Social Image Sets to Explore Virtual Embodiment in Second Life® as Indicators of Formal, Nonformal, and Informal Learning

Abstract

Capturing Second Life® imagery sets from Yahoo's Flickr and Google Images enables indirect and backwards analysis (in a decontextualized way) to better understand the role of SL in people's virtual self-identities and online practices. Through manual bottom-up coding, based on grounded theory, such analyses can provide empirical-based understandings of how people are using SL for formal, nonformal, and informal learning. This chapter involves a review of the literature and then a light and iterated analysis of 1,550 randomly batch-downloaded screenshots from SL (including stills from machinima) to explore the potential of social image analysis to make inferences about human learning in SL in the present.