Monroe Community College and Finger Lakes Community College are leading a six-month-long, SUNY-wide initiative to explore the educational potential of Second Life. Second Life is a "virtual world" that can be used merely as a chat room, where you are represented in a 3-D space by a 3-D character, or can be used as an environment to create 3-D art and architecture, stream video presentations, create simulations, and a lot more.

Around the world, universities and other educational institutions are looking at the application of virtual worlds for teaching.  They're experimenting with what the appropriate content and applications might be and what types of learning might be best served. Do virtual classrooms build identical, stronger, or weaker student teams and collaborations than a traditional classroom-based experience does?

Technology-related courses aren't the only ones that appear in Second Life. Courses in composition, rhetoric, psychology, marketing, and art are being held in the virtual environment. In some cases, students merely attend a lecture or do an exercise or two in the virtual world, logging in and interacting with the avatars of their professors and fellow students. In other cases, students and professors meet in a classroom face to face one day a week and in the virtual world for the second meeting of the week. Or the students may be scattered around the world, never meeting their peers except in the virtual world, just as they do in distance-education courses without a virtual-world component.

SUNY's effort began when Larry Dugan, coordinator of learning environments at FLCC, began exploring Second Life and then got Terry Keys, director of instructional technologies for MCC, to become a Second Life resident as well. Both were excited by the potential for instruction and professional development and for building stronger links among the class members in Second Life, and they decided to spread the word to their colleagues.

Together they conceived of "Project Live," a pair of day-long conferences set six months apart. The first would introduce SUNY faculty and staff to Second Life, and the second would allow them to report their experiences and results. The conference organizers would also create a virtual island based campus in Second Life for the six months of the project. This was important, because much of Second Life's utility (such as the ability to create lasting structures and environments of your own) requires owning land, just as it does in the real world. Even Kevin Costner couldn't follow the "If you build it, they will come" directive without having the spare farmland to do it on.

"We quickly realized that without a ‘home,' many new users are lost in SL and have a difficult time getting oriented to this new world," says Terry Keys. "Also, we observed that while many campuses are interested in SL, not everyone has access to funds to support the purchase of land." Second Life Islands cost $1,675 for about 16 acres of virtual land. Monthly land fees for maintenance are $295. Verified educators, academic institutions, or non-profit organizations that will be using the Second Life sites to support their real world work get a 50 percent discount.

Two weeks ago, MCC hosted the kick-off conference for "Project Live: Learning in a Virtual Environment - An Exploration of Second Life." During the conference, the virtual island and its first draft educational environment were introduced for SUNY personnel so they could begin their experiments. That island will be SUNY's experimental beachhead in the virtual world. People who attended the one-day conference - more than 50 of them, from 22 campuses across the state - and their colleagues and students will experiment with the Second Life platform to try new educational strategies.

Other universities have built virtual museums, had media theory students create movies within Second Life by recording their session in the virtual world, and had business students create virtual products to brand and market in the virtual world. What will happen in SUNY Live is up to the faculty and students; nothing is pre-determined, and the program is all about experimentation for now. In November, a second one-day conference will be held, where participants will share experiences.

"Participant responses were excellent," says Terry Keys, "and activity on the island is growing. The first in-world get together last Tuesday was well attended."

"The plan for the next six months is to hold a series of events, including guest speakers sharing their in-world teaching experiences, training sessions, music events, and whatever else evolves from the group," says Keys. "Participants can use their plot of land to experiment. Next fall, we will gather again in the real world to learn from this experience. The library on our island will be used to collect anything we find useful."

IMHO, another great effort for this initiative would be for faculty and staff at other local colleges to get in touch with Dugan and Keys to aggregate information about Second Life and education on their campuses. Perhaps a local educational Second Life group across colleges could also share their experiences as well. Just a suggestion, guys.

To reach Dugan and Keys try: Duganls@flcc.edu or in Second Life as "Marcius Dowding"; tkeys@monroecc.edu or in Second Life as "Crash Thibaud."

For more background on Virtual Worlds try this column's "Intro to Virtual Worlds."

Steve Jacobs was one of two speakers for the first SUNY Live conference.