Island hopping: Wright State’s Second Life

At first it all looks very normal, with the red brick Wright State Alumni Tower, rows of bicycle racks and other familiar campus fixtures. But then the flying students, dinosaurs and winged, cigar-smoking monkey appear.

Such is life on Wright State Island—Second Life.

The Internet-accessible virtual world teems with students who create digital personas of themselves called avatars that learn, invent, build, socialize and even travel. Wright State and many other universities have created campuses or locations in Second Life as a teaching tool and extension of the schools.

“The virtual world is this amazing environment where you generate a separate identity,” said Shu Schiller, Ph.D., who uses Second Life to teach master’s degree classes in the Raj Soin College of Business. “From a teaching perspective, this virtual environment will change the way that we learn in the near future. You’re probably going to see more and more professors getting engaged in virtual reality.”

While Second Life and other virtual worlds have been around for years, they are starting to gain a toehold at universities.

In addition to virtual classrooms and labs, colleges have created libraries, art galleries and even wheat fields. Florida State University and the University of Edinburgh have even held virtual graduations, enabling far-flung graduates to attend by avatar.

Wright State Island is part of an educational archipelago, bumping up against the islands of Ohio State University and the University of Edinburgh. While some universities try to replicate their campuses, Wright State Island was designed to be a relatively blank canvas.

“I want a sandbox for people to do projects,” said Jeff Hiles, an instructional web designer who came up with the island layout.

In addition to a building filled with student projects, there’s one designed to help students with disabilities learn advocacy skills. There is also a treehouse that serves as a professor’s office and an art gallery based on an exhibit at Wright State.

Called the War Child Series, the oil paintings by Helen Broadfoot reveal haunting images of children from around the globe touched by the war and violence swirling about them. The gallery was created and the show set up by Victoria Chadbourne, promotions and outreach coordinator for the Department of Music.

Second Life catapults the exhibit from the local to international stage.

“People from around the world can see it,” said Chadbourne. “The audience is unlimited.”

Classes can be held in Second Life even if the teachers and students aren’t on campus.

“I tell everybody, ‘I don’t care whether you’re in Paris. I don’t care where you are, as long as you show up on the island,'” said Schiller.

Elfe Dona, Ph.D., associate professor of modern languages and teacher education, has used Second Life in her German-language classes as well as a Jewish literature class. Her students have been able to simulate trips to Israel and Germany, practice their German with Germans, visit virtual German cities and museums, and shop in virtual German stores.

“Instead of talking in the classroom about various cultural differences, we can literally travel to those sites and talk to German-native speakers,” Dona said. “In German-speaking countries, people do things differently and students are exposed to those creative styles of thinking.”

In Schiller’s class, called Information Technology and Business Transformation, students are taught how to apply new technologies in a real-world business environment. They do this by using virtual objects and materials in Second Life to create technologies out of concepts. For example, one team of students attached servers, routers and other computer equipment to a globe to create a “smart” planet.

Schiller said the course also gives students an important lesson in how to cope with the unknown in the business world.

“There are always going to be new technologies that come into your life,” she said. “The stuff will not behave; they’re going to be fuzzy; they’re going to be unmanageable to a certain extent. As a manager, you will have to deal with it.”

Anindita Sengupta took a Second Life class in the spring as part of getting her MBA. Dressed in a white, sequined gown, her avatar helped create a virtual work-friendly office environment replete with fountains and a fireplace.

“I learned a lot from it,” Sengupta said. “It gave us the satisfaction of actually creating something. I never thought I would be able to make a platform that people would come and enjoy.”

She said the biggest challenge was navigating through Second Life. Failing to make pinpoint landings can put avatars in the water surrounding the island.

“When your avatar falls off a cliff, you feel it in your gut,” Hiles said.

Dona said the sensation of flying—when avatars teleport from one site to another—can be exhilarating. She said one of her wheelchair-confined students “literally screamed out in delight when she realized that she could fly.”

Some students complain that the learning curve for mastering Second Life is too difficult, creating an avatar too time-consuming and that the workload associated with Second Life classes too heavy.

Another problem is having non-student avatars appear. One showed up for a class on Wright State Island and began acting inappropriately. Another actually tried to build a store. Both were ejected.

Dona said she is still trying to determine whether Second Life helped her students learn. Once she does that, she will decide whether to expand or reduce its use.

“It’s very much an experimental kind of thing right now,” said Hiles. “A lot of faculty are eyeballing it as a future kind of thing. They’re going in and seeing what it can do and what it can’t do.”

Schiller is convinced that Second Life helps students learn.

“It does improve learning in terms of the effectiveness of understanding certain concepts and also in terms of enjoyment,” she said. “It’s an innovative tool.”

Schiller would like to take virtual learning one step further by more fully immersing students, classrooms and labs in virtual worlds. Instead of having students sit at computers and control on-screen avatars, they would use 3-D, computer-generated images to put themselves inside a virtual emergency room, inside a human cell or on the ocean floor.

“That would give the teacher so much capability to do innovative teaching,” she said. “And students would find it much more interesting.”

Hiles believes college use of virtual worlds is here to stay, at least to some degree.

“Some educators are very fanatical about remaining in Second Life,” he said. “It’s a vast community of people doing things and provides resources you can draw upon. It’s definitely going to be a part of education and a growing part of education.”