PRINTWhere virtual meets reality
Professors transform Second Life from fantasy game to educational tool
Courtesy of Secondlife.com
Second Life players from around the world meet at a bumpin’ club called Ultra Violet Moon, where they boogie to Euro, disco and techno music. The site offers every genre of music. Players can even become nightclub owners.
July 24, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
The Stardust Café is lively tonight and crawling with decked-out groupies, rocker chicks and vampires. A young guy with an acoustic guitar is playing a cover of Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Let Her Cry.”
This is all real — but only in Second Life, a virtual reality platform simulator launched five years ago. It gives people a chance to meet other users from around the world. Their avatars, personalized virtual characters, live a life away from the 9-to-5 grind as rock stars, models or even private detectives.
Related Articles- Gaming issue glossary
- A new grip on rehab
- Rated ‘E’ for exercise
- It’s my turn to play
- Kings and queens of strategy
- Girls who game
- Doc hunt
- Tabled obsessions
- For every age
- On the job with a pinball wizard
- Off-screen games
- What’s next?
- Bent on experimentation
- Guess who games?
- Table-Top Gamer: Patrick Nolan, 38
- Negin Rising
But it’s not just a game, says Bryan Carter, an associate professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. “It’s an environment that allows users to build that environment,” Carter says, “so unlike role-playing games like World of Warcraft, the users within Second Life do a majority of the building.”
Carter has been using Second Life for two and a half years as a way to teach literature, composition and cyberculture classes at UCM. According to the Second Life Web site, the world of Second Life is inhabited by 14 million residents. Software developer Linden Labs has even created a functioning economic system where users can make real money through the site at an exchange rate of 250 Linden Dollars for one U.S. dollar.
“You’re able to cash in those Linden Dollars for real dollars,” Carter says. “It’s tied inherently to the whole system with growth, economic benefits, how people can find employment within this environment and make real money.”
Carter says that notion of an extended reality has helped advance and open the minds of his students at UCM. Each student has his or her own avatar with a job and an entirely different life.
Real-Life Experiences
As a way to supplement the educational environments offered in Second Life, Carter is developing a project called Virtual Harlem. In this, Second Life users can interact in an environment based on 1920s Harlem, which incorporates music and literature of the time. The program also teaches students such skills as 3-D modeling and video recording.
“There is literally every example of every discipline found in the real world,” Carter says. “There are medical simulations, psychological simulation, the hard and soft sciences as well as history, religion and sociology.”
As a teacher at UCM, Carter shapes his composition classes around the program. MU professor James Laffey and doctoral student Matthew Schmidt are also working to bring avatar programs to the classroom. Their project, called iSocial, is similar to Second Life and is designed to help children with autism spectrum disorders develop social skills.
Schmidt says the iSocial program will also help develop the imaginations of the participants involved. “The nice thing about a virtual environment is in a classroom you say, ‘Imagine you’re on a cruise ship,’” Schmidt says. “But put them in a virtual environment, and you can put them on a cruise ship.”
Although Second Life did not play a specific role in how the program was developed, the team considered using it as the platform for the project. They eventually rejected it because Second Life is too chaotic for a program such as iSocial. Schmidt’s program, on the other hand, is only open to the children and program facilitators.
Schmidt says the online environment offers a way for children ages 11-14 with ASDs to have safer, more controlled learning experiences. The program functions on a set curriculum for social interaction that the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders has used for the past three years. As one part of the lesson, kids complete a puzzle together to teach turn-taking and basic conversation. Each participant is required to talk to the other participants on his or her turn.
“What they’re working on is really exciting because they are approaching learning from a social perspective and looking at the way technology is taking a social presence,” says John Wedman, director of the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at MU. “People think of learning as simply a cognitive process, but it’s also a social process. People learn from each other.”
Worth the Switch?
Wedman says virtual reality programs are likely to increase their presence in the educational realm and notes their importance in certain adult education fields, including commercial piloting and the military.
But Schmidt remains reluctant about 3-D learning environments as the future of education. He says it could be an example of educators jumping on a technology bandwagon. “I think it’s premature to put all that effort into it,” he says. “We do not know if these environments are going to be as useful as we theorize. We need to be taking baby steps.”
For now, the programs look promising. And the greatest advantage, Carter says, is the global experience his students receive without leaving the classroom. “My students that I have in several of my classes regularly interact with students in Sweden, in Norway, in Paris,” he says. “That opportunity would not be as easily accomplished not in this 3-D environment.”
