Campus 2.0 | Second Life allows educators to interact with students through virtual world as program's popularity rises across academia

By: Allison Polster

Posted: 10/5/07

Professor Beliveau of Bradley University chatted with one of his students in a dark, floating conference room on the New Media Consortium campus. Then, another student magically dropped into the room and took a seat in a comfy armchair next to the professor.

Class began with a quiz. The students took it and received their scores almost instantly.

After a brief lecture, Beliveau disappeared with a whirl of white dots and said he would "grab" the students when he reappeared in an alternate location. These alternate locations included the U.K.'s Education Island, Diegoland - which resembles San Diego - and Silicon Island, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's former headquarters.

Obviously, this is not real life. This is Second Life.

While most students are familiar with Facebook, Blackboard and MTV's Virtual Newport Harbor, few have heard of - let alone have used - the virtual community known as Second Life. This technology, which launched in 2003, is growing in popularity among students while many professors - including some at Syracuse University - already know all about it.

Second Life is a massive and constantly growing virtual community created almost entirely by its users. Professors across the nation use Second Life as a location for classes and as a uniquely diverse world for their students to explore.

Numerous businesses also use it as a testing ground for new products and as a meeting place for conferences and interviews.

Second Life made its debut as an educational tool at SU this semester in professor Marcie Sonneborn's entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises course, entitled Imagination, in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

Sonneborn sends her students to different places within the world and encourages them to look for creative things that can be explained as "novel, appropriate and open-ended," Sonneborn said.

Unlike Beliveau's class, Sonneborn also meets with her students in a real classroom. At the beginning of the semester, Sonneborn took her students on a tour of Second Life and went from island to island to introduce them to the virtual world.

"People have said that it's just a game," she said, "but there's some serious teaching going on here."

And in an entrepreneurship class, students should know how Second Life works because many businesses are using it, Sonneborn said.

By 2010, about 70 percent of all businesses will use some sort of virtual community. Toyota's Prius was introduced in Second Life before becoming available in the real world. IBM even does job interviews in Second Life.

Though there are benefits of using Second Life as an educational tool, one flaw with the system is that students sometimes encounter computer problems, Sonneborn said. Students with either low-end game cards or high-end game cards are not able to use Second Life on their computers.

While about 50 U.S. colleges have campuses in Second Life, SU does not. Purchasing land in Second Life allows a university to design a campus that will fulfill its specific needs.

However, there are dangers in buying land because users must maintain it.

Universities should not buy islands just to buy them, said Paul Gandel, vice president for information technology at SU. He added that they must be sure their choice makes sense and is well reasoned.

Still, purchasing Second Life land is not out of the question at SU because it may eventually become desirable for the university's purposes, Gandel said.

Thus, the future of Second Life at SU is uncertain, said Michael Morrison, manager of Faculty Academic Computing Support Services. There are no immediate plans for extensive use of the program. It really depends on professors' comfort levels with technology and interest in trying something new.

Beth Ritter-Guth, English instructor at Lehigh Carbon Community College and DeSales University, built various literary areas in Second Life in conjunction with her group, Literature Alive. Ritter-Guth, with the help of a Second Life scripter from the U.K., created Edgar Allen Poe's "House of Usher," Dante's "Inferno," Gloria Naylor's "Bailey's Café" and other adaptations of literature. Turning stories into interactive virtual areas adds to the reading experience for students, Ritter-Guth said.

But the first time Ritter-Guth entered Second Life, she said a naked man - one of the many computer-generated personas known as an avatar - chased her around.

"I thought, 'There's no way my school was going to approve this,'" Ritter-Guth said.

Ritter-Guth had trouble adapting to Second Life at first because she did not know anyone in the program at the time and gave up on it for some time. Now, she said, there are more than 300 colleges in Second Life.

Ritter-Guth teaches classes both in the virtual world and in the classroom. Her students come up with ideas for things to build in Second Life in relation to their studies, and they write up all the information that will appear in their design, Ritter-Guth said. Then, she and her scripter make the idea a reality.

Colleges, in general, still do not have a good understanding of how to make use of space in Second Life, Ritter-Guth said. Many skeptics criticize Second Life for failing to add value to the learning experience. While in some cases this may be true, it depends on how Second Life is used.

Builders in Second Life must think outside the box, Ritter-Guth said. Her ultimate mission in teaching and use of Second Life is to get people to love literature.

"Some sacrifice content for technology," said Ritter-Guth, who makes a point to keep content as the focus.

Yet Ritter-Guth does not underestimate the importance of Second Life's technology.

"Students need to know how to use virtual worlds to be marketable after graduation," Ritter-Guth said.

Professor Ed Lamoureux of Bradley University is the man behind avatar Professor Beliveau. He holds his class entirely in-world. For the purpose of his class, he said, Second Life offers many opportunities that real life does not.

"Most of the residents are members of the creative class," Lamoureux said in an e-mail. "Almost everyone who stays will code, build or have some special creative skill, ability or insight."

Second Life is beneficial because of its diversity, Lamoureux said. Students can explore places that are replicas of areas across the globe and communicate with people who live in these real-life locations that speak from actual experience rather than virtual experience.

While in Lamoureux's class, the students briefly explored various islands with different purposes. Beliveau pointed things out about the islands to prepare his students to do field research in Second Life.

Lamoureux uses voice chat to communicate in his classroom on the NMC campus. During his short lecture at the beginning of the class, his voice cut out a few times and one of the students often had to ask him to repeat his instructions.

Also, a student's microphone was not working properly, so part of the class was spent trying to fix it. The student eventually started participating solely through text chat - similar to a chat room or instant messenger.

At another point in the class, Beliveau had to log off because he went to an island with too many animations. He soon returned and teleported his students back to the NMC campus conference room.

One of Beliveau's students, avatar Zerodividedby Infinity, said he missed half of the class last week because his system kept crashing.

"It doesn't like Macs," Infinity said.

The other student in the class, avatar Lando Dragonash, said he found Second Life to be a valuable educational tool for field research.

"I prefer this kind of work in a virtual world than in the real world," Dragonash said.

What is Second Life?

Second Life, created in 2003 by Linden Labs in California, is a downloadable virtual world from the Internet either for free or priced between $6 and $9.95 a month for premium accounts.
In Second Life, each member has an avatar - figures similar to those in the computer game The Sims or in Virtual Newport Harbor - with a unique name and an alterable appearance. Each avatar can explore countless lands, join groups, attend concerts, make friends, communicate through either instant messaging or voice chat and create almost anything.

The seemingly endless virtual world is made up of a multitude islands that are defined by the landowners. There are islands for different organizations, various places in the real world or other creative endeavors.

"Second Life is a 3D digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents," according to its Web site.

There are nearly 10 million Second Life residents from more than 200 different countries. Second Life is currently made up of more than 65,000 acres of virtual land and will continue to grow as more users purchase land. Since its small beginnings in 2003, Second Life has taken off since late 2006.

Second Life functions similarly to real life in its circulation of money and its land ownership. Instead of U.S. dollars, Second Life runs on its own currency, Linden dollars. Landowners must purchase land in these Linden dollars and pay a tax to keep the property.

Premium account holders can own land and build on it. They start off with 1,250 Linden dollars and receive a weekly allowance of 300 Linden dollars.

The exchange rate between Linden dollars and U.S. dollars has remained fairly constant during the past few years at about 250 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar. The rate changes slightly based on supply and demand.

Residents can purchase Linden dollars with U.S. dollars or earn money through various activities "in-world," such as filling out a survey or dancing for a certain amount of time to promote a nightclub.

-compiled by Allison Polster, contributing writer