Land in Second Life is your blank canvas; it is your choice what you do with it. Build a dream home, or a thunderdome. Create a dance club or a giant bathtub. Develop a small shop or a gigantic shopping center. Or plant some trees and construct a secluded retreat in the pristine virtual wilderness.” SECOND LIFE, AS DESCRIBED ON ITS WEB SITE
Facebook or MySpace, except that people who enter SL create an avatar, a virtual representation of themselves. Once a person has created an account—which is free—picked a name, and created his or her avatar, exploration of SL can begin. Avatars can walk, talk, fly, or teleport to get around. They can join communities and meet other avatars. And there are places to go, from a private loft to an international consulate. The corporate world also has quite a presence in Second Life—IBM, Pontiac, and Reuters are there, to name just a few real-world companies. But what differentiates SL from online social networks is its immersive 3-D environment. SL has a rich
graphics platform meant to draw in participants. “People say it’s just chat,” said Mennecke. “But it’s more than that. It gives you the ability to interact in a space that’s similar to the real world.” Second Life is also thought by some to be just a game, but Lesya Hassall, instructional development specialist with the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at Iowa State objects to that idea. “In a game, you have goals and objectives and you know what you’re going to do to meet them,” said Hassall, who specializes in education and emerging technologies at Iowa State. “In Second Life, it is complex and you define for yourself how and what you do in this environment. It does resemble the real world in many ways.”
BRIAN MENNECKE’S SECOND LIFE AVATAR, NAMED GUT NOEL, HAS A PONY TAIL, GOATEE, AND CAN FLY.
Second Life as a classroom Second Life is not only a place to explore business opportunities and to socialize, but also, as Hassall points out, a place of endless educational opportunities. Hassall helped Mennecke deal with the pedagogical underpinnings of his course, which can be challenging in a world of such possibility. Vassar College, for example, constructed a virtual Sistine Chapel in which to explore how SL could be used for art classes. The University of California-Davis created a place to train emergency aid workers to minimize the time it would take to unload medicines from an airplane and disperse them to victims in various locations. A professor at Texas Wesleyan University created Genome Island to teach genetics; students can perform virtual experiments that produce data to analyze. The linguistics depart-ment at Iowa State is investigating the potential uses of SL for teaching languages. Such a university-operated island can be set up to allow limited access only to those who have signed up for a course. This is how Mennecke set up Iowa State’s island. He also tried to supply everything a student would need to experience Second Life without leaving the island classroom. For instance, he built a bookstore, modeled after the university’s, with freebies such as clothes and hats that avatars would otherwise have to go to other SL locations to purchase. VOLUME 24 NUMBER 1
16
■
SPRING 2008
■
WWW.BUS.IASTATE.EDU