Second Life: Second Campus

We have a devel­op­ment group under the Apollo Group umbrella called Apollo Pub­lish­ing. The team there has mutated over the years a num­ber of times from pub­lish­ing house to licens­ing house to dev cen­ter. Today, it serves pieces of all of those, and more. The most inter­est­ing: it’s a skunkworks for projects in edu­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy that may — or may not — make it into the class­room.

I was there yes­ter­day vis­it­ing Colin Smith, one of the devel­op­ers there work­ing on a side RSS project for me. We got to talk­ing about Sec­ond Life, one of my all-time favorite time sinks, and he intro­duced me to Sec­ond life: Sec­ond Cam­pus. It’s the Apollo Group foray into avatar based learn­ing.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Sec­ond Life, Tech­nol­ogy, Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix

New to Sec­ond Life? Imag­ine The Matrix.

You con­trol your avatar, the vir­tual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your­self in the world, that you can con­trol to inter­act with other users’ avatars. It’s rudi­men­tary at best right now, but stay tuned. With every iter­a­tion of the SL soft­ware, the world becomes more robust, more clean, more effi­cient, allow­ing even more oppor­tu­nity to com­plete inte­gra­tion with the world.

You can visit SecondLife.com for more. It’s free, so log in and see it for your­self. Once you’ve done that, you’ll appre­ci­ate the fol­low­ing vir­tual tour all the more.

See, we’ve pur­chased an island in Sec­ond Life. It’s our very own play­ground to test a next gen­er­a­tion online learn­ing model. I was given access for a spell and thought I’d run through a few of the key loca­tions that Colin and friends have been work­ing on.

We start at the Apollo Main build­ing. This is our own inter­nal cul­tural land­mark; it’s a repro­duc­tion of our main admin­is­tra­tion build­ing in Phoenix and has been for many years. In SL, it will most likely be our main land­ing space for new res­i­dence of our island. There are tuto­ri­als and instruc­tions through­out the space to help accli­mate new users.

As an exam­ple of a poten­tial class­room envi­ron­ment the devel­op­ers built out cus­tom locales. This is an old west cour­t­house designed for law courses. Of course, the avatars in here will be encour­aged to dress the part, includ­ing fac­ulty mem­bers who will be adorned in either judges vest­ments or chaps and a six-shooter.

Sec­ond Life objects are scripted ani­ma­tions. This one, for exam­ple, is a proof of con­cept stock that the devel­op­ers dropped in to the cam­pus to take care of stu­dents who act up in that west­ern law class. Send them out front for a sun baked pun­ish­ment in front of all the towns­folk. In an ear­lier ver­sion, appar­ently there was a hangman’s noose with this stock, and when you were hoisted up into it, your feet twitched. The noose is gone, but the sen­ti­ment remains.

Here’s another stab at the learn­ing stage con­cept — this time, it’s a Socratic Gar­den. Instruc­tors should be fully equipped with togas.

In this space, the his­tor­i­cal objects are scripted with sup­port­ing his­to­ries; click on a Gre­cian Urn and up pops the Ode, right there on it, for exam­ple. It’s a won­der­ful vir­tual museum space that can serve as either self-guided, or per­sonal and interactive.

Here’s some addi­tional Socratic-themed space. It’s a large pub­lic amphithe­ater designed to host lec­tures and such. Beau­ti­ful ocean view, no annoy­ing sandy breeze, and no need to worry about your butt falling asleep on the hard con­crete benches. It’s my def­i­n­i­tion of a dream teach­ing experience.

Out­side the media lab…

And inside the media lab. Each of these screens is a passthrough for a web hosted media file. Stu­dents can come in and choose from a menu of course related sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­ial and sit right in front of a vir­tual screen to take it in.

Here’s the meet­ing room of the Library, in case you have any high-powered pow-wows to nail down when in-world. It’s sur­pris­ing how effec­tive in-world meet­ings around dig­i­tal office fur­ni­ture can be — par­tic­u­larly when you get the hang of the “cam­era”. You can break the metaphor of the real-world by mov­ing your eyes around a room, through walls, and even track other avatars up to a cer­tain dis­tance by lock­ing onto them. That makes zoom­ing in on oth­ers around the table an effec­tive social tool and actu­ally makes these things use­ful.

Finally, the clock tower. Since you can fly in most envi­ron­ments in-world, you can zoom right up to the top of the impos­si­bly tall clock tower and get all sorts of won­der­ful scenic shots from there. Colin tells me the devs have a base jump­ing set up on the Sec­ond Cam­pus island. Oh, and since you can’t actu­ally die in most set­tings in Sec­ond Life, falling from 50,000 vir­tual feet isn’t as much of a rush as you might think.

It still looks like a game. And for those trans­plants who haven’t spent much time in the worlds of mas­sively mul­ti­player online games, those who don’t know the implicit cul­ture that emerges, it looks less like the future of dis­tance edu­ca­tion and more like just another thing their kids are doing that they’ll never under­stand. But I think that misses the point.

The impor­tant point here is that there are peo­ple who are try­ing new things, try­ing to build envi­ron­ments that con­nect with learn­ers in new ways, try­ing to find the tools that mete out chal­lenges of con­tent acqui­si­tion and inte­gra­tion in old class­rooms to improve reten­tion in the new ones. The binary ones. This is a big deal.

We’re not the first to try these vir­tual world class­rooms. As a mat­ter of fact, we’re going to be chal­lenged more, I think, from the ele­men­tary edu­ca­tion ranks to drive tech­nol­ogy than we are our own com­pe­ti­tion. Take 3dLearn.com — they’ve been doing this for 7–12 grade kids for six years now. From a recent CNET arti­cle, even Har­vard is on board:

Chris Dede, Har­vard pro­fes­sor and cre­ator of “River City,” has researched the effects of MUVEs in schools for the last six years. “Based on our results thus far, we’re excited about how MUVEs can pro­vide immer­sive, engag­ing sim­u­la­tions that com­ple­ment lec­tures, text­books, labs and field trips as part of an effec­tive sci­ence cur­ricu­lum,” Dede says in a video pro­mot­ing the project.

“As a (teach­ing) sup­ple­ment, this is the wave of the future,” said Numedeon’s Sun.

“Are vir­tual worlds the future of the classroom?”

The guys work­ing on our Sec­ond Cam­pus infra­struc­ture are blog­ging some­what actively. You can check in with them on progress here: http://secondcampus.blogspot.com/. There are some great links there to more resources on Sec­ond Life that are worth catch­ing up on, and of course, check us out in-world!