Gamertell

Is this national Universities Celebrate Using Second Life Month and someone didn’t tell me or something?

Granted, I only went to colleges, but both have featured professors’ use of Second Life in alumni magazines this past month. The most recent is John Carroll University, a Catholic college in University Heights, OH (near Cleveland), which features the use of Second Life in an article titled “John Carroll Gets a Second Life” (John Carroll University Magazine, Vol. 13, Issue 1, Spring, 2009, pp. 18-21). The other was Kent Sate University, a state school in Kent, OH.

Much like Kent State, JCU utilizes the 3D virtual world Second Life as a virtual classroom, bringing together distant professors and students. In this case, a professor working on a novel that included Second Life (Black Market Truth by Sharon Kaye, October 2008) included it in a proposal for a social justice seminal series called First Year Seminar. Other professors caught on to the idea and passed it along to students, using SL in 2008 as a base for discussing and generating ideas in implementing Utopian ideas.

Another professor a the university uses SL for ethics simulations including making medical decisions about suffering loved ones represented by an avatar. A computer science professor has students create and script in-world objects which have included transportation portals and board games. In some cases, SL also allowed a professor to grade assignments outside of office hours. The end of the article mentions that professors are also toying with ideas for the military science, math and foreign language departments.

Photos in the article feature students and professors gathering in front of a 3D representation of the school’s trademark Administration Building, complete with clock and bell tower.

It’s yet another instance of universities taking a social tool - or virtual game depending on how you look at it - that might be losing a little popularity and attention and turning it into a viable educational tool.

If you get wind of other colleges and universities utilizing Second Life, pass the word and post it in the Comments section below. Who knows, maybe someone can coordinate a massive international student and professor gathering. Then heads could virtually explode with the amount of information being traded.

Read [John Carroll Magazine] Read [Gamertell]