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The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7.9.21
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i04/04a02401.htm

In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes 
on a new personality

Video: Take a tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus 
in Second Life, a 3-D online environment.
http://chronicle.com/media/video/v54/i04/secondlife/

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

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.

Mark 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.
--Andrea L. Foster