Professor Avatar

This morning's daily email from the Chronicle of Higher Education has this article on "Professor Avatar." It includes several case studies as well as comments from a critic.

Professor Avatar

In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes on a new personality

Video: Take a tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus in Second Life, a 3-D online environment.

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Ill., home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it's a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley's multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second Life.

This fall he is teaching his second ethnography class online in a computer-created environment featuring buildings, lakes, and avatars — digital characters who fly from place to place, chat, and form communities. The program is Bradley's first foray into using Second Life as a platform for education. Students have analyzed, among other topics, online hackers (known as "griefers" in Second Life) and avatar fans of musicians who perform in Second Life.

"This is clearly the most culturally diverse area I've ever been to," Mr. Lamoureux says of Second Life. "Anytime I'm in-world, I'm almost always talking with somebody" outside the United States.

Flying avatars, virtual fan clubs, and computer-drawn lakes seem, at first glance, to be of little educational value.

But ever since Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company, unveiled Second Life in 2003, professors and college students have flocked to it.

People can visit Second Life free by logging in to its Web site and creating an avatar, but educators usually spend about $1,000 to own virtual "land," and many shell out hundreds of dollars more buying virtual goods like furniture and clothing.

Professors use Second Life to hold distance-education classes, saying that communication among students actually gets livelier when they assume digital personae. Anthropologists and sociologists see the virtual world as a laboratory for studying human behavior. University architects use it as a canvas on which to explore design. Business professors see it as a testing ground for budding entrepreneurs. Although their pursuits are serious, scholars often have fancifully named avatars, such as Radar Radio and Intellagirl Tully, to reflect their personalities and interests.

More than 150 colleges in the United States and 13 other countries have a presence in Second Life. Although some faculty and staff members are skeptical of the digital world's value (see related article, Page A25), the number of virtual campuses keeps growing. Often it's just one person at a college — a faculty member, librarian, or technology guru — who prods officials to consider Second Life's educational possibilities and inspires others on campus to enter the virtual world.

I hit bumps as to my Second Life exploration. I think I'm not yet finding the college professors doing the same thing. The geographically close folks are concentrating on building a physical presence. Like computer programming, I don't see a reason to learn everything about it - primarily because time is a factor. There are numerous reputable RL people whom you can hire to build your SL presence and I will satisfy myself with that. Right now, I'm still primarily using SL for networking. I'm introducing it to pre-service and in-service teachers but am not requiring it until they are a bit more ready for it. Our university just switched from Blackboard to Angel and that is enough "technology push" for one semester.