Universities are racing to
create virtual campuses on the web, providing
mind-boggling opportunities for teaching, research and
simulations. Stephen Phillips reports.
Bryan Carter's undergraduate classes on cyberculture
and literature at the University of Central Missouri are
convening at the Black Sun this semester, but the
associate professor of literature has not repaired to
the pub in search of a suitably offbeat location. With a
dark Blade Runner-style aesthetic culled from
the pages of seminal cyberpunk novel Snowcrash,
the venue offers a futuristic setting in keeping with
the subject matter. Carter (or "Bryan Mnemonic", as he
is called in the Black Sun) and many of his students
wear cyberpunk or "Goth" attire.
In fact, Carter and his students do not meet
physically at all. The thrice-weekly hour-long classes
take place in Second Life, the online parallel universe
that has in four years gone from cult hit to mainstream
phenomenon, capturing the attention of many educators
along the way.
Carter and his students manoeuvre their alter egos,
or "avatars", around a virtual classroom from wherever
they happen to be. In a typical class, Carter says, his
avatar might screen a PowerPoint slide show, movie short
or live streaming video of a real-life lecture on the
Black Sun's television, before dishing out assignments
to students, who can mouse-click on banks of information
kiosks linked to web pages for more details. They are
then free to venture into the field to conduct
ethnographic research on the "subcultures" to be found
in Second Life, says Carter, while his avatar reclines
on a couch to field any queries (via instant messaging
or text entered into a "talk" window on the "client"
interface, downloaded to users' computers, which serves
as their portal into Second Life) - the virtual
equivalent of office hours.
Carter tapped a modest grant to give his students an
allowance of 20,000 Linden dollars, the coin of the
realm (less than £5), to buy "digital content". These
include clothing items or algorithms governing avatar
movements developed by enterprising Second Lifers (who
retain intellectual property rights over their
creations) using the virtual world's scripting language,
so students can accessorise their avatars and augment
their stock gestures. The Black Sun's TV was scrounged
for free from its charitable Second Life creator.
On May 8, Second Life counted more than 6.19 million
registered "residents" (although the number actually
logged in hovered around a more modest 40,000 or fewer),
and denizens had transacted more than $1.5 million worth
of business over the preceding 24 hours, according to
Linden Lab, the venture-capital-backed San Francisco
start-up behind it. Firms such as Adidas and Toyota have
been snapping up parcels of the pixelated land to gain a
marketing perch in the rapidly populating virtual world.
Last October, Reuters opened a Second Life bureau,
stationing a correspondent there to track fast-moving
developments.
Educators have found Second Life particularly
inviting. In the vanguard of the land grab is a growing
influx of campuses for which the virtual environment
opens potential new learning modalities, research
possibilities and opportunities to enrich distance
learning. Some 250 education institutions have a
presence in Second Life, says John Lester, academic
programmes manager at Linden Lab. These include Harvard,
Stanford, California, Berkeley, Edinburgh, Lancaster and
Sheffield Hallam universities. The site is also home to
a vibrant community of teaching staff and postgraduate
researchers who congregate on list servers to swap
pedagogical and research tips.
To demonstrate its educational utility, the New Media
Consortium, which comprises more than 200 campuses and
other educational organisations, has created 30
simulated "islands" in the virtual world - collectively
dubbed NMC Campus - purpose-built for universities, with
virtual libraries, museums, planetariums, classroom
space and a science centre. Linden Lab offers campuses
single-acre plots free for one semester.
Ultimately, many institutions create a discrete
island (for which there is an educator's discount) and
set their own protocols governing access to it.
They can run it as an intranet for designated users
only or open it to all comers with the attendant risk of
non-students crashing classes.
In March, the NMC's annual Horizon Report
identified virtual worlds among the six most promising
emergent higher education technologies, farther out than
"user-created content" (blogs, wikis and YouTube, for
example) and social networking websites such as MySpace
and Facebook, but "likely to have a large impact on
teaching, learning and creative expression" within three
years.
Educators drawn to Second Life cite its scope for
modelling concepts, testing hypotheses, running
simulations and historical re-creation that would be
prohibitively expensive or wildly impractical in real
life.
"Because it's virtual you can play with scale - for
instance, a lesson on Einstein's theory of relativity
where the scale is at the level of a photon," says
NMCchief executive officer Larry Johnson.
"It affords students the tools to make their
environment," says Dmitri Williams, assistant professor
of speech communication at the University of Illinois.
"I know instructors in English, physics, social
sciences, the arts and planning who've found ways to
adapt lessons to Second Life; it's so malleable."
Sarah Robbins, a PhD candidate at Ball State
University, Indiana, has customised the Second Life
classroom where she teaches undergraduate writing with
"breakout spaces" for group work, student dormitory and
coffee shop. In the same anything-goes vein - with
gravity no object - the Black Sun floats 600 metres
above Glidden Campus, a virtual representation of
Northern Illinois University, of which Carter is a
sort-of cyber tenant.
The rarefied altitude reduces non-student intrusions,
says Aline Click, assistant director of e-learning
services at Northern Illinois, who developed the Black
Sun with Carter. "People have to figure out how to get
up there."
At ground level and a little more down-to-earth,
Glidden replicates aspects of Northern Illinois's
campus, rendered by Click from topographical maps.
Exercising her creator's prerogative, Click says her
real-life office is not as well appointed as her
quarters in Glidden, while the actual campus bus stop
does not double as a "teleportation pad" to the Black
Sun.
Like Northern Illinois, many other institutions have
replicated iconic features from their physical campuses
in Second Life. Providing familiar features helps
students feel more comfortable, says Click. The
University of Illinois envisages a planned Second Life
annex to its Global Campus online degree initiative, to
be launched in 2008, as a touchstone for far-flung
students. "One challenge is to get these students to
feel they're part of the University of Illinois," says
Chester Gardner, a professor of electrical and computer
engineering who is spearheading Global Campus. "We feel
Second Life might allow us to construct a virtual
presence that will give them a feeling they're part of
the university."
Others eye Second Life's potential to offer more
engaging forms of distance learning. "How many times do
we hear about the maths teacher who changed people's
lives? This effect can be achieved in traditional online
learning environments, but it's harder, the visual
social presence is missing - something you can at least
simulate in virtual environments," Click says.
Meanwhile, one particularly fascinating research
application of virtual world-related technology lies
with so-called massively multiplayer online games
(MMOs). Distinct from "open-ended" Second Life (that is,
it has no particular purpose), "educational MMOs combine
a carefully crafted setting with specific educational
objectives," says NMC's Horizon Report, which
puts their wider institutional adoption at four to five
years away.
Edward Castronova, associate professor of
telecommunications and director of the Synthetic Worlds
Initiative (SWI) at Indiana University, first realised
the academic possibilities of MMOs after observing that
minor changes in rules governing games he played
recreationally resulted in profound behavioural shifts
among participants. In 2001, he found one variant of the
game EverQuest in which players could "use combat spells
to attack other players" and another in which this was
forbidden.
"The social atmospheres were dramatically different.
The world where you could not attack was much more
peaceful, but people grouped together far more for
protection in the more dangerous world," he says. "You
could write a paper on violence and social capital, but
here is a case where people relinquished individual
rights and liberties to be in groups because it was a
matter of life or death."
In a paper on SWI's website, Castronova elaborates on
the potential of synthetic worlds to function as
"social-science Petri dishes: controlled environments
for studying the evolution of macro-level forces of
government, law economics, sociality, learning and
culture". Attempting such exercises in real life is
fraught with "horrible causation problems", but
"causation is obvious" in carefully controlled games
settings, he says.
SWI's first initiative, Arden, to be made available
later this year, will immerse Indiana University
students in a simulation of Shakespearian England using
characters from the Bard's plays - as an educational
exercise in its own right, but also as a laboratory for
social experiment.
Castronova plans to test a hypothesis that has been
proven empirically, such as the price elasticity of
demand for certain goods, "to validate the research
environment", before proceeding to more speculative
hypotheses about the impact of variables on social
behaviour.
In the ongoing social experiment of Second Life,
meanwhile, crystal-ball-gazing is difficult. "In ten
years' time we'll look at what people are doing and say,
'Wow, no one ever saw that coming,'" Lester predicts.
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