Second Life
No discussion of new media would be complete without a mention of Second Life.
Second Life is a multi-user environment that has elements that make it much like an
online game, a chat room and a public space. There has been a lot of attention on second
life including appearances in real a situation such as television shows and in numerous
magazine and newspaper pieces. Second Life functions as an alternative reality, if you
will, where a user enters and can be whoever or whatever they want to be. Users are
represented by avatars, which are graphical images that may or may not represent the
reality of what an individual looks like. Users can interact with each other and with the
Second Life spaces via these avatars. To interact with each other text-based chat and
voice chat are most commonly used. Users can interact with the Second Life
environment, which is represented as a very large geography with features such as land
masses and islands, by moving or flying around, viewing objects and in some cases
selecting objects to initiate a pre-programmed action.
One of the things that make Second Life an engaging space is the ability to structure
those spaces to suit the needs or the mood of the users. Most users in Second Life find a
pre-existing space to call home from which they launch their explorations of other spaces
or their interactions with other users. More advanced users, who are willing to pay for the
privilege, can purchase their own space and can modify it to suit their needs, including
building buildings and putting up advertising and other types of monuments. Another
thing that makes Second Life powerful is the ability to program additional elements and
in this way, Second life is becoming interesting to educators.
It should be noted that there is a fairly strict age limit with no users under the age of 18
being allowed in the main area of Second Life. This is good because there is a lot of
activity in Second Life that would get you fired at most public schools in the United
States! There is a teen only area of Second Life and while educators can get approval to
enter this version of Second Life, there are strict controls on the way adults can use this
area. All of this combined together means that Second Life is typically not used for
educational applications other than in higher education. Despite this, or perhaps because
of this, Second Life has attracted the attention of educators with many universities
opening spaces in the second life world, partially as a marketing attempt and partially as a
way to serve their student populations. In some cases these Universities process some
parts of the application process via Second Life and provide guidance counseling to
current or prospective students.
Second life has also been used for teaching classes. As you might suspect, the use classes
tend to be online classes, although there are face-to-face classes, which include Second
Life elements. Educational users of second life, tend to think of it as a way to create
greater experiences of presence in online classes or to create engaging environments that
students will use outside of the time and space of the normal class. Online educators who
look to technologies like Second Life tend to do so as way to create greater level of
presence for their students. This is done by creating more social interactions or learning
interactions that are more like face-to-face interactions than can be achieved with other
technologies.
Second Life is by no means the first multi-user online environment that has ever been
created. As far back as the mid 1990’s multi-user online environments like The Palace
existed and were touted as being the next great thing in education. For many reasons the
promises of these virtual worlds seem to fall flat. Taking a step back and looking at
online communication there are four basic forms, text, graphical, audio, video. Of course
various combinations of these four basic forms of communication exist. Of these four
types of communication channels, text is the densest. That is you can pack more
information into text than in any other form. This is why books are so successful! But as
text viewers, these multi-user environments are poor interfaces compared to even a basic
web page. They function fine as synchronous text-based chat environments but are not
much better than any other text-based chat client. Second Life does allow graphical
representations as a form of communication, but these can be prone to software glitches
that cause them to behave unexpectedly. Despite this, Second Life has been successfully
used as a way to create engaging graphical representations that might be useful. Second
Life has enabled audio communication between users. This is a relatively recent addition
to Second Life and as might be expected with such a massive system may or may not
work reliably. As it exists now it is certainly no better than Skype or other synchronous
voice-based chat environments. Currently Second Life does not feature video
communication, although the graphical nature of the Second Life environment can seem
like an animation. This is often touted as one of its more engaging features, the ability to
move around in the environment.
Perhaps there is something to being able to interact with a graphical environment that can
make a tool like Second Life a better choice for online learning and/or communication,
but this remains to be seen. There are many technical and social problems that will have
to be resolved before the promise of this sort of technology is realized. I remain skeptical
because until the interface becomes more transparent, less distracting, it seems to me that
software like Second Life really doesn’t create a greater sense of presence in online
classes. Instead, environments like second life tend to rely on individual users’ desire to
interact with each other than they serve to create the interaction that might be desired in
online learning.