July 2007 — News

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Second Life: Do You Need One? (Part 2)

by Patricia Deubel, Ph.D.

Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (June 5, 2007), which was hosted by Elluminate Live. Their SL Medical Center is used for role playing (person-person), allowing students to see patient encounters from the perspectives of the doctor, nurse, patient, or patient spouse. They demonstrated how students in an urban planning class might build a park on donated land and then have its builder sit on a park bench (person-object). Imagine this for any subject area where creativity is involved, such as architecture, interior and fashion design, and engineering. They demonstrated satellite orbiting (object-object) to illustrate how SL might be used in the simulation of procedural and physical processes.

I found the Campus: Second Life program to also be a good central location to learn about education in SL (Figure 2).

Fig. 2

Educational institutions and non-profit organizations can buy private islands to set up secure intranets for only their students and faculty, or opt to make accessible spaces for all SL residents. University projects underway deal with such topics as artificial intelligence, linguistics, product design, web publishing, motion arts, creative and technical writing, life in the universe, contemporary performance, business studies, and more. There are special interest groups, such as "Real Life Education in Second Life," and you can get on a mailing list to be notified of education opportunities and events in SL. The Second Life Library on Info Island is another good place (Figure 3).

Fig. 3

Inside, you might see Yoda Bartender (like the character of the Star Wars series), who'll give you a notecard on good books (Figure 4).

Fig. 4

Various blogs explore the educational possibilities of SL and offer resources to make the learning curve shorter, such as MUVE Forward, The Story of My Second Life by Kevin Jarrett of Walden University, and Puritan's Guide to Second Life by Dembe Wellman. Linden Lab also has its