Second education

Sean Rosner

Published on Thu., November 13th, 2008

Stacey Fox soars through the air over a body of water, scanning the unfamiliar islands below. When she sees an island she knows, she swoops down to ground level. Finding a couple friends, she chats for a few minutes and then decides to go back home, this time choosing to teleport instead of fly. All the while, Fox is sitting in front of her laptop in her office on the top floor of the Art and Design building. She is exploring the 3-D virtual world of Second Life.

From home, Fox, a visiting assistant professor of art, flies to a pair of islands with no buildings or people, just flat grasslands from coast to coast. But the islands won’t be bare for long. They belong to the Spencer Museum of Art and the KU Department of Art, and soon they will be full of artwork and interactive exhibits. Launching in the spring 2009 semester, the two properties will make the Spencer and the Department of Art accessible to people worldwide, and open doors for new teaching, socializing and marketing techniques.

Launched in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, Second Life is a 3-D virtual world populated by more than 15 million people. Second Life’s look is similar to that of a video game. Think The Sims, except online and enormous. The Second Life world spans more than 65,000 acres of virtual land.

After downloading the Second Life computer software, users create their own customizable characters called avatars. Skin, hair and eye color, body build, facial features and clothing are all up to the user’s discretion. Users can even choose whether they want their avatar to be human or something else. Fox’s avatar, Sage Duncan, is actually a fox.

Once users create an avatar, they can then maneuver the avatar around the Second Life world by walking, flying or teleporting. Second Life is more than 90 percent user-generated, and contains everything from churches to theaters to shopping malls.

“Everything you have in first life, you can have in Second Life,” Fox says.

Avatars communicate with each other by typing, similar to instant messaging, or if both users have computers equipped with microphones, they can communicate simply by talking. Second Life is a world in which physical distance is not an issue.

Second Life even has its own economy. Users exchange their real money for the currency used in Second Life, called Linden dollars. From there they can buy land to build a house or start a business. Users pay each other for goods and services just as they would in the real world. At LindeX exchange stations, users can cash in their Linden dollars for real-life currency. In September, 236 Second Life users made profits of more than $5,000.

In addition to being a place for people to interact and conduct business, Second Life has proven to be a useful venue for higher education. More than 200 colleges and universities own property in Second Life, including prestigious educational institutions like Harvard University, Princeton University and Stanford University. And starting next semester, KU will join this group.

Fox says Second Life is an effective educational tool because it allows for the use of convergent media, meaning that it blends different media such as audio, video and text into one educational experience. Students can meet at any time to discuss class topics, listen to sound clips and watch videos together, all while sitting at their computer desks. Second Life also gives students from all over the world the opportunity to take classes at American colleges and universities.

During classes, the virtual environment frees users from the physical boundaries of the real world. If a professor wants to show students a top-view of a statue they have recreated in Second Life, they can simply fly up above it. Because Second Life is almost completely user-generated, professors can customize their classrooms and teaching materials to their liking.

“The beauty of it is that teachers can construct their own teaching environments,” Fox says.

Just like all other land in Second Life, the two KU properties are islands. They will neighbor each other, and share the water with nearby Shakespeare Island, Virtual Africa, the University of Iowa’s island and, yes, the University of North Carolina’s island.

Before Fox builds any structures on the islands, she will first go through a process called terraforming, in which she uses a Second Life program to manipulate the land and create the islands’ landscapes.

“I’m literally raising and lowering mountains, which is kind of fun,” Fox says.

Once the islands have been shaped, Fox will add the buildings and other structures. These, like all objects in Second Life, will be created from basic geometric shapes called prims. Fox can manipulate the shape, texture and color of the prims to make them more useful for building the structures.

Though the Department of Art and the Spencer Museum of Art properties are being built by the same person, the idea to use Second Life came to the two groups separately.

Robert Hickerson, technology manager at the Spencer, says the museum’s interest in using the Internet for social networking sparked three years ago after posting a video of a Spencer art exhibit opening on YouTube. From there, museum employees began to think about potential audiences they could reach through the Internet. Hickerson says the museum experimented with Facebook and MySpace before deciding that Second Life was the best option for the museum. He says that although the museum has about 100,000 visitors every year, it could potentially reach millions of people through the Internet.

“We want to deliver our content where our audience is playing, and that playground is YouTube and Second Life,” Hickerson says.

Carolyn Chinn Lewis, assistant director of the Spencer, says the island gives the museum an opportunity to reach out to younger audiences who, because of the growing prevalence of things like video games and the Internet, have become more visual learners. Lewis says the project fits with the museum’s commitment to innovation and questioning established thought.

“That’s what the Spencer is all about. We don’t just put pretty pictures on the wall. It’s about thinking in different ways,” Lewis says.

The museum applied for a grant to pick up the $1,500 price tag for the 16-acre island of virtual property in August 2007, and was approved for the grant in August 2008.

The Spencer Second Life island will launch with the museum’s exhibit “Climate Change at the Poles” on Jan. 24. The works from the exhibit will be recreated and available to view on the Second Life island. In addition to the works, part of the island will be made to resemble the South Pole. Visitors will be able to ride around the area on a snow mobile, as well as learn more about the changes occurring in the poles from information provided by KU’s Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS), which conducts research on the South Pole.

The Spencer island will not hold one giant building like its real-life counterpart. Instead, the island will contain multiple interactive exhibits. In addition to the gallery space and the South Pole area, the island will have a public “sandbox,” where people can create their own art.

Like the Spencer island, the art department’s island will contain multiple exhibits instead of one large building. The island will hold a welcome center, a gallery for student and faculty work, studios where faculty can work with students and a performance space for music and dance. Also, floating above the island will be a space that showcases works of art that are known throughout the Midwest. Dawn Marie Guernsey, professor and chair of the department of art, says the first thing to be showcased above the island will be the Lucas, Kan., Garden of Eden, which is famous for its concrete sculptures.

The department of art will also be using Second Life in future courses. It will offer one class in the spring, titled “Build Your World,” which will be taught by Fox. Students will spend class time in a blank section of the department of art island called “The World,” and will have to build structures there. Fox says the class will meet in person only once—when students create their avatars—and the rest of the course will be solely taught through Second Life. Guernsey says that the Department of Art will also be holding Second Life workshops during the spring semester, and eventually more courses will be developed to use Second Life.

The workshops will help students become more comfortable with using Second Life, which will be a big help to less tech-savvy students. Seattle freshman Daniel Held, who is helping Fox build the KU islands, says not everyone will immediately be a Second Life pro.

“If you’ve never played a video game, it could be a little overwhelming. But once you spend a few hours and get all the commands down, it’s easy,” Held says.

One of the biggest perks of the Second Life classroom, Guernsey says, is that the department of art can easily arrange for famous artists from all over the world to hold guest lectures there. Also, instead of sending students to different areas of the country to see art, the department of art can now instruct students to see the art’s representation in Second Life, allowing students to see more art without the expense of travel.

Fox is already laying the groundwork for KU to use the Second Life islands as an international communication tool. Earlier this semester, Joff Chafer, senior lecturer in theater at Coventry Universtiy in Coventry, England, visited Lawrence to share ideas with Fox about possible collaborations between the two universities. The two expect to work together on future projects, such as having KU students build online sets for Coventry theater students.

“Right now, my students are working with two or three students in the room with them. Next year, I want them to work with two or three people who are not in the room with them,” Chafer says.

Universities worldwide have had success using Second Life as an educational tool. Ohio University launched its Second Life island in December 2006. Now, about 10 courses use Second Life as part of the curriculum, and the university holds orientations every Friday to try to get more students on the island. Christopher Keesey, project manager for Ohio University Without Boundaries, which oversees the island, says the island designers tried to make the island’s uses as broad as possible so multiple areas of the university could use it. Keesey says the engineering, fine arts, communications and education departments all use the island.

Jeff Lovett, a graduate student in art at Ohio University, has taken full advantage of the opportunities Second Life has presented. Last year, Lovett took pictures of one of his real-life works and recreated the piece in the arts and music building on Ohio’s Second Life island. Lovett now gets feedback on the piece from visiting artists as well as Ohio students. Lovett also created a movie theater on the island where visitors can gather to watch streaming YouTube videos.

Having used Second Life for about five years, Lovett views it as a useful tool for communicating abstract ideas to someone who is far away. He gives the example of a seminar on brain mapping that he recently attended in Second Life. While discussing the difficult subject matter, the presenter was able to display a 3-D model of a human brain so that the audience members could see exactly what they were learning about.

With Second Life still being relatively new for colleges and universities, KU has the opportunity to be a national leader in the innovative use of this technology. In August, three KU representatives, Fox, journalism lecturer Simran Sethi and Provost Richard Lariviere, led a panel on the uses of social networking tools such as Second Life at a meeting of the chief academic officers of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, which includes most public universities.

Lariviere, who has his own avatar and occasionally explores Second Life to see how other educational institutions are using it, says the main goal of the presentation was to show other institutions what opportunities are available.

“I think Second Life has great potential, but I don’t think it’s been realized yet by the higher education community,” Lariviere says.

Discussion

The Kansan.com staff reviews comments regularly. Please be respectful of your peers. For our full user policy, click here.

Headlines

Video