Article published November 09, 2007
3-D CAMPUS HAS FALCONS FLYING
BGSU embraces Second Life with ‘island’ in the virtual world
A student avatar, the 3-D ‘person’ in the foreground, can fly to class on BGSU’s virtual campus in Second Life.
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By MEGHAN GILBERT
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Bowling Green State University is celebrating its newest campus, where faculty offices are on a mountainside, people from across the world routinely drop by, and students can fly to class.
Obviously, this is not in northwest Ohio.
It's in Second Life, a virtual reality community becoming increasingly popular among educational institutions.
Created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab and unveiled in 2003, Second Life has its participants create avatars - virtual 3-D "persons" - that move through the virtual world as a person would in the real world, only the avatars can fly.
BGSU's "island" on Second Life includes the mountain with faculty offices, classrooms, and a lobby with pictures of the campus throughout construction.
| LIVING A ‘SECOND LIFE’ |
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by its users,
who interact as avatars.
An avatar is a 3-D image of a person, similar to a character in a video game, that can be personalized to look however the user wants.
As avatars, people can meet and interact with other
people’s avatars, buy land, construct buildings, create
a business, shop using the Second Life currency “Linden
Dollars,” and more.
For more information, visit secondlife.com. |
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It also has a public sandbox for anybody to build what comes to mind and a vertical art gallery.
"It's more interactive, so you want to provide environments for people to get together and discuss things," said Bonnie Mitchell, co-administrator of the BGSU Second Life island and an associate professor of digital art."It's different than real life. In real life, we have rain. But we don't have to worry about rain, so do we need roofs? And we can fly in Second Life, so you don't want to box things in like you do in the real world."
Second Life is a user-created world and BGSU's campus was created by Ms. Mitchell; co-administrator Anthony Fontana, who also is an art instructor at BGSU, and student employees.
There are hundreds of universities with a presence in the virtual world and thousands of educators on the Second Life educators e-mail list.
Princeton University, for example, has an island near BGSU's, and Ohio University and Ohio State University also use Second Life.
"Linden Lab is thrilled with the enthusiasm with which Second Life has been embraced by nonprofits and educational organizations," said Catherine Smith, director of marketing and brand strategy at Linden Lab.
"The platform holds enormous potential for these groups, and it's exciting to see the unique ways in which Second Life is being used for worthy causes."
An official dedication ceremony of BGSU's Second Life island will be held today on both campuses.
The grand opening will be at 4 p.m. in the Lenhart Grand Ballroom on BGSU's main campus with a projection screen of what's going on in the virtual campus, Ms. Mitchell said.
There will be performances of student musicians and DJs, including telecommunications sophomore Brian Scavo who is also a DJ.
Mr. Scavo started using Second Life about two years ago for social networking, such as hosting DJ shows in the virtual world, and now works with the BGSU team managing the streaming audio and video content on the island.
"Anyone can jump in and do anything they want. I'm a DJ, so it works for me. I can jump into Second Life and DJ there," Mr. Scavo said.
And he does on some Friday nights with dance parties in the virtual campus' music performance center.
He said he likes that BGSU is trying out new technology to interact with students and that he's noticed it catching on with more professors creating avatars.
"They're doing what I did two years ago - going in to poke around and see what's going on," he said.
Mr. Scavo doesn't have any instructors using the technology yet, but he likes the idea.
"It would maintain my interest more," he said. "Reading a book and doing a Scantron isn't very exciting. Second Life is interesting. You can interact and see people there, and it's still personal."
Radhika Gajjala, an associate professor of interpersonal communication at BGSU, has incorporated the virtual world into a few of her graduate courses.
Her PhD students researched the avatar image possibilities and biases associated with them. The default image is a female that is young, white, and mainstream pretty, Ms. Gajjala said.
Her students researched how to add shades of color, aged skin, and other changes.
"It was very effective because it helped them look at how our everyday biases get replayed in online settings," she said.
She also was able to coordinate the classes with people from Germany, India, and the United Kingdom, so her students got a global perspective of the issues they were studying.
"I'm excited about its potential, too, but it doesn't work for everybody," Ms. Gajjala said.
Mr. Fontana got the idea for a BGSU presence in Second Life after he started using it in 2005 to exhibit art and joined a listserve where people were talking about the education potential.
A grant from the Ohio Learning Network and BGSU's office of the chief information officer made it possible for the university to buy an island, hire staff to build the campus, and create a learning community for faculty to explore ways to use virtual worlds for education.
Education and nonprofit institutions get a discount for virtual islands, Mr. Fontana said, so BGSU's island cost about $840 with a monthly "land-use fee," which is more like a server maintenance fee, of about $150 a month.
Still in the early stages, BGSU's involvement in Second Life will only increase as more educators and students find ways to use it for their own teaching and learning, Mr. Fontana said.
"We want to provide learning experiences that are difficult to mimic in the real world," he said.
"We want to utilize the social aspects of Second Life to create an environment that encourages students to collaborate with students from other campuses and people around the world."
Contact Meghan Gilbert at:
mgilbert@theblade.com
or 419-724-6134.
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