In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes on a new personality
Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Ill., home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it’s a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley’s multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second Life.
This fall he is teaching his second ethnography class online in a computer-created environment featuring buildings, lakes, and avatars — digital characters who fly from place to place, chat, and form communities. The program is Bradley’s first foray into using Second Life as a platform for education. Students have analyzed, among other topics, online hackers (known as “griefers” in Second Life) and avatar fans of musicians who perform in Second Life.
“This is clearly the most culturally diverse area I’ve ever been to,” Mr. Lamoureux says of Second Life. “Anytime I’m in-world, I’m almost always talking with somebody” outside the United States.
Flying avatars, virtual fan clubs, and computer-drawn lakes seem, at first glance, to be of little educational value.
But ever since Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company, unveiled Second Life in 2003, professors and college students have flocked to it.
People can visit Second Life free by logging in to its Web site and creating an avatar, but educators usually spend about $1,000 to own virtual “land,” and many shell out hundreds of dollars more buying virtual goods like furniture and clothing.
Professors use Second Life to hold distance-education classes, saying that communication among students actually gets livelier when they assume digital personae. Anthropologists and sociologists see the virtual world as a laboratory for studying human behavior. University architects use it as a canvas on which to explore design. Business professors see it as a testing ground for budding entrepreneurs. Although their pursuits are serious, scholars often have fancifully named avatars, such as Radar Radio and Intellagirl Tully, to reflect their personalities and interests.
More than 150 colleges in the United States and 13 other countries have a presence in Second Life. Although some faculty and staff members are skeptical of the digital world’s value (see related article, Page A25), the number of virtual campuses keeps growing. Often it’s just one person at a college — a faculty member, librarian, or technology guru — who prods officials to consider Second Life’s educational possibilities and inspires others on campus to enter the virtual world.
Here are six of their stories.
The Ethnographer
The trickiest part to starting his ethnography class in Second Life, says Mr. Lamoureux, was getting the nod from Bradley’s human-subjects-protection committee. Initially, the committee asked students to submit a lengthy proposal for each research project since the real people behind the avatars observed by the students could be identified. After prodding from Mr. Lamoureux, though, the committee allowed him to file just one application for the class.
The New Media Consortium, a nonprofit higher-education technology group, has been providing the technical support and space in Second Life for Bradley, as it does for many colleges. Mr. Lamoureux’s students, represented by their avatars, regularly meet in a boardroom in the sky. Bradley is now in the process of building its own digital campus, or “island,” as many college installations are called in Second Life. And Bradley’s library director is on the board of a group working to build a library in Second Life.
Mr. Lamoureux has become so enthusiastic about Second Life that every Saturday night for an hour he strums the guitar and sings folk and rock songs before an online audience as the avatar Professor Beliveau.
The Writing Coach
Perhaps one of the most recognizable avatars in Second Life is Intellagirl. Her pink hair and outgoing personality mirror the person behind the digital character: Sarah B. Robbins, a 32-year-old doctoral student in rhetoric and composition at Ball State University.
Since the fall of 2006 she has led a freshman English-composition class on the university’s Second Life campus, Middletown Island. Drawing from her teaching experience, she encourages other educators to use the virtual world for instruction, arguing that the platform makes many students more enthusiastic about learning. Just as Netscape brought the Internet to a wide audience, she says, so Second Life introduces virtual worlds to people who might otherwise never have explored them.
Professors preparing to teach in Second Life for the first time should be ready to cede some control over their courses to students, allowing them to, for example, build and design digital classroom spaces, Ms. Robbins suggests.
“If we let the students create the space, then they make the space that’s best for them,” she says. “And that gives us insight into how they learn and makes them more engaged and more responsible for their learning.”
Her students’ writings are based on their research and observations in Second Life. Composition topics have included how avatars form communities and online identities versus real-life identities.
Ms. Robbins designed the buildings and open spaces on Middletown Island herself. Convincing Ball State colleagues that she could actually teach a class there was more difficult. The key was to impress on them that she could achieve the goals of the university’s core composition class in the virtual world.
She let other professors, whether at Ball State or not, sit in on the class and offer feedback, and she invited students to make suggestions to improve the class as it progressed. The owners of digital land in Second Life can limit access to their islands.
“There was an agreement that we would be constantly aware of how it was going, and that we would make adjustments accordingly,” she says.
To those in academe who tell her that Second Life only entertains, she responds: “This method works well for me. And it might not work for you, and it won’t work for every student, either. But neither does a learning-management system or a lecture class.”
The Architect
Summer at Vassar College, just as at many higher-education institutions, is a lazy season. But since June, when Steve Taylor unveiled his re-creation of the Sistine Chapel on Second Life’s Vassar Island, the online buzz it generated has been growing.
Mr. Taylor, who is Vassar’s director of academic computing services, digitally duplicated the ornate interior of the famed cathedral, from the barrel-vaulted ceiling, adorned with Michelangelo’s frescoes, to the Renaissance pilasters. He completed the project in about eight weeks.
Unlike visitors to the real chapel, in Vatican City, those to the digital version can fly to the ceiling to inspect the depiction of nine stories from the Book of Genesis. And they can view tapestries that Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design for the walls in the early 16th century.
Mr. Taylor, who has never visited the actual 15th-century chapel, says he put it online to inspire other professors to build educationally in Second Life. Perhaps an environmental-studies scholar will consider creating an outdoor environment to teach ecology, or a scholar of Gothic architecture will recreate a notable Gothic building, he says.
To build the digital chapel, he used mostly electronic images already available on the Internet. He found it nearly impossible, however, to get images of the chapel’s floor.
“No books about the Sistine Chapel feature pictures of the floor,” says Mr. Taylor, whose avatar is Stan Frangible. “It would be hard to even get a camera in a good place for that, so I just had to take lots of pictures that had a little bit of floor in them and piece them together.”
Vassar keeps track of visitors to the site because they must agree to conduct themselves in a respectful manner — this is a church, after all — before proceeding into the building. To date, about 1,000 avatars have agreed and gone inside.
The Literature Scholar
If the students of Beth L. Ritter-Guth are racke d by nightmares about burning in hell, they can be excused. They immersed themselves in Dante’s Inferno by exploring a three-dimensional model of the abyss.
Ms. Ritter-Guth, an English instructor at Lehigh Carbon Community College and an adjunct at DeSales University, both in Pennsylvania, is the creator of Literature Alive, a Second Life project that engages students and other visitors in reading by guiding their avatars on tours of pixilated versions of famous literary spots.
She created the locations with help from a seasoned British builder in Second Life and Laura M. Nicosia, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University. Various colleges play host to different literary scenes on their virtual campuses.
The Inferno, from The Divine Comedy, is stored on a computer and is presently in search of a permanent home. But when the New Media Consortium played host to it for 10 days on its digital island, hell was hugely popular.
Ms. Ritter-Guth depicted the Inferno as a half-fiery, half-frozen pit lined with steps. In a contemporary-fiction class this summer at DeSales, she had students place photographs of well-known figures on the Inferno steps based on what level of hell they thought the figures represented. President Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Donald Trump were among those whose photographs the students posted.
“Dante’s version of the Inferno is very politically drawn,” she explains, “and the students did the same thing, where they picked political figures for the different layers.”
She also had students compare the Inferno with another novel, Linden Hills, which imagines Dante’s Inferno as a middle-class neighborhood. Her students built in Second Life their renditions of hellish houses on a virtual Linden Hills.
The Literature Alive project relies on donations and volunteers, and Ms. Ritter-Guth pays for many of the digital objects herself. In Second Life she is known as Desideria Stockton, a brainy, sexy blonde.
The Campus Planner
Meander around the Second Life island of Montclair State University, created largely by AJ Kelton, and experience how he imagines the ideal college campus. Mr. Kelton is director of technology services at Montclair State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Faculty members can sunbathe on chaises longues by a lake and listen to birds chirping. Or they can head over to an adjacent covered deck, sit on some cushions, and have an intimate conversation around a fire.
The side of a mountain is embedded with stones that describe the syllabus of a freshman course about getting acclimated to university life that Mr. Kelton teaches. Nearby spheres describe the deadlines for each week of the course.
Visitors can also immerse themselves in literature at some Literature Alive spots.
They can walk around the island of Willow Springs, ancestral home of the protagonist in Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day, or take a stroll along the forest trail where the title character confronts evil in Young Goodman Brown, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mr. Kelton encouraged the professors who designed the environments to include them in Montclair’s island.
“The thing about these learning areas is that the knowledge is already there,” he says “In a traditional classroom, it’s an empty classroom with students in it until the teacher walks in.”
Mr. Kelton, who runs a blog about educational sites in Second Life, also uses the virtual world to teach a course in beginning writing. He says several faculty members plan to use the island in their classes.
He has two avatars: AJ Brooks, who can be found piloting a helicopter around Montclair State’s island, and Wealthy Mizser, who runs a gallery and invests in real estate elsewhere in the virtual world.
The Technologist
Campuses created by many colleges in Second Life mirror their real campuses. But Phillip D. Long, associate director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions the virtual campus as a student-led laboratory.
Only about one-quarter of MIT’S island resembles the university’s actual campus. The rest is dedicated to student projects. Mr. Long designed the space, and the New Media Consortium did the construction.
MIT “wants to do this in strong collaboration with students,” he says. “And we don’t want to get ahead of them or project whatever idealized notions we might have, as people who work here, onto what we think the cultural practices and interaction styles of our students might be.”
In one part of the island, speakers can mount a dais and address a crowd through a megaphone. When a speaker talks, listeners move to the right or left of a line that divides the platform, depending on whether they agree or disagree.
The placement of the line represents the average viewpoint of all of the avatars within earshot. Drew Harry, an MIT graduate student who studies how virtual environments can help consensus building, established the platform.
The island also includes dormitories. Incoming students might get a better sense of what dormitory is best for them — be it the one for jocks, indie-rock fans, or computer geeks — by touring three-dimensional models of the dormitories’ interiors, Mr. Long says. MIT sponsored a contest for students to design the exteriors.
MIT officials plan to ask some students in residence halls to decorate the interiors of the virtual dorms to see if the project has traction. “Maybe we’ll learn that the idea is out to lunch,” says Mr. Long, whose avatar is Radar Radio.
In the part of the island that resembles the real campus, a theater opens onto a grassy quad, and a movie screen stands on the roof of a nearby building; both can be retracted to appear invisible. They are for classes and other gatherings. In virtual worlds, “outside spaces are much more comfortable than interiors,” says Mr. Long, because viewing a classroom on a computer screen can feel claustrophobic.
SECOND LIFE: SECOND THOUGHTS AND DOUBTS
Not every educator who has explored Second Life has come away impressed. Many complain that the virtual world is beset by technical problems, is a waste of time, or is largely a playground for sexual experimentation.
Mark Y. Herring, dean of library services at Winthrop University, in South Carolina, asked younger, tech-savvy librarians to immerse themselves in Second Life for three months to see if they could discover new ways to serve the library’s clientele. They came up empty-handed, says Mr. Herring, who wrote an article for the May 15 issue of Library Journal describing his disillusionment with the virtual world.
The academic-library sites he has seen in Second Life generally accomplish nothing more than regular Web sites do, he says, adding that the three-dimensional environment is much harder to use. Some educators leave the virtual world frustrated that they cannot easily move around, communicate, or find regions populated with avatars. Second Life has several million members, but only about 430,000 of them log into the site over a given week. So at any one time, many regions are deserted.
“We would all be better served by working in the world we live in,” says Mr. Herring.
Even those who believe Second Life has great educational potential worry that it is being used in the wrong way. Nicholas Adams, an art historian at Vassar College, says the re-creation of the Sistine Chapel on Vassar’s virtual campus looks cartoonish because the frescoes’ colors and textures are off. “Art historians can’t take this seriously,” he says.
Michael Stoner, a Chicago-based consultant who advises colleges on Internet strategy and Web design, counsels them against using Second Life for student recruitment and alumni relations, arguing that the effort and money spent to understand the virtual world may not be worth it.
Colleges have enough trouble just creating and maintaining a Web presence, he says, without the added challenge of becoming fluent in a virtual world.
Some professors are wary of promoting Second Life to their students, noting that sexually oriented regions, such as a nude beach and “free sex-orgy room,” are among the most popular places in Second Life.
“Second Life is primarily a platform for adults to explore their sexual identity,” wrote Sylvia K. Martinez in a July posting to the blog of Generation YES, an organization that helps schools use new technology. Ms. Martinez is the group’s president. “Ignoring the overtly sexual nature of Second Life,” she wrote, “is like going to a strip club and then wondering why there are naked people there,”
She and other critics also complain that the virtual world’s software frequently crashes, and that it requires a lot of bandwidth. Indeed, technical problems are so frequent that Linden Lab, operator of Second Life, maintains a blog with almost daily warnings about snafus. The posts often close with “Thank you for your patience.” For many users, patience is wearing thin.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 54, Issue 4, Page A24
