Michigan Library Consortium's Grand Opening in Second Life

"MLC invites you to the grand opening of our new virtual building in the 3-D virtual reality, Second Life (Cybrary City II 167,51,21)! The celebration is on Thursday, July 12, 2007 from 4:00-6:00pm SL time (NOTE! That’s 7:00pm-9:00pm EDT). Please join us in Second Life for virtual music, dancing and refreshments!" (the rest)

Woodbury University Island Deleted by Linden Labs

On Saturday, Woodbury University's Second Life campus was vaporized. Not by mis-behaving Second Lifers, not by technical difficulties or incompetence, but by Linden Labs as a disciplinary action for Terms of Service (TOS) violations. In March Dr. Edward Clift paid Linden Labs for a six month lease and built Woodbury Island. In early April the region was suspended for 3 days for various abuses. Later in April Linden Labs contacted him by telephone to warn him that the island would be discontinued if the problems continued. According to Dr. Clift, that was the last communication he received from Linden Labs. "There was never any communication from Linden until the disconnection as to whether they thought we were doing a good job or not and certainly no chance to take corrective measures in any kind of cooperative fashion."

The island was yanked on July 1 with no further warning. From the Linden Labs notice:

Many members of the Woodbury University group (which controls the region) have been detected before and after that date causing severe problems in Second Life, in violation of the terms of service. These problems include incidents of grid attacks, racism and intolerance, persistent harassment of other residents, and crashing the Woodbury University region itself while testing their abusive scripts. Due to the ongoing problems, Linden Lab has no option but to immediately close the Woodbury University region.

The main events have been covered by the Second Life tabloid The Second Life Herald, and has now been picked up by The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Herald's article comments are full of the bickering back and forth between the (ir)responsible parties, and illustrate what can happen if an organization does not take a firm hand in policing itself.

After reading the articles, interviews and comments, I gather that Woodbury U. was naive and negligent in monitoring the island it provided, and that Linden Labs is very bad at communicating to its customers about problems. Anyone who has land where avatars are allowed to build or script could face the same situation, including the Info Islands, Cybrary Cities, EduIslands, or Harvard. An educational sim designed to expose its students to the tools of Second Life must allow its members to build and script, but that also makes it a magnet for SL jokesters and griefers. You may not like it, but those are the facts. It appears that Woodbury U took a hands-off approach to management of their sim. It appears that the lack of communication by LL led them to believe the problem was under control. And it appears that LL has no clear protocol or progressive process in place to warn its institutional customers about terminal violations.

There are at least 150 colleges and universities with a presence in SL, many with their own islands. Perhaps they have assumed that their status as educational and non-profit institutions gives them a protected status and more latitude for students who are pushing the limits. Evidently they are wrong. I would suggest that there are some steps each institution should take if they want to protect their SL assets:

• Restrict building and scripting to their own groups
• Restrict the groups to their own students, and require that student accounts be verified
  
• Require anyone who joins their group to agree to a code of ethics and behavior
  
• Have an administrator available at all times to enforce the code
• Form an association of SL educational institutions and demand from Linden Labs a protocol for communicating about and resolving problems

Griefer U (April 22, 2007) The Second Life Herald
Woodbury University Island Destroyed (July 1, 2007) The Second Life Herald
Interview with Woodbury University's Edward Clift (July 6, 2007)
The Death of a Virtual Campus Illustrates How Real-World Problems Can Disrupt Online Islands (July 6, 2007) The Chronicle of Higher Education

Library Journal: SLIS Program at San Jose prototyping virtual graduate school?

San Jose SLIS Embraces Second Life
Last year SLIS San Jose received a grant from the Souros Foundation to purchase and create an information island in SL. Several of its classes now include labs in using Second Life.

Info Island this week

Alliance Second Life Libary one of six Sirsi-Dynix Building Better Communities Award at ALA
Alliance Library System was one of 6 winners of Sirsi-Dynix's Building Better Communities award for its Second Life Library.

Seminar: Self Esteem and Empowerment Seminar at Health Info Island.
For all SL educators and helping professionals
June 29, 1 & 3 PM PST
HealthInfo Island 130, 140, 22

Virtual Classrooms at Harvard

I'm both intrigued by and skeptical about using SL as a virtual classroom. There are certainly a significant and growing number institutions holding classes partly or entirely in SL. Several of the Library and Information Science classes I have taken at Wayne have had a significant online component, using Blackboard, as well as synchronous and asynchronous broadcasts of lectures. While grateful for the convenience, it's difficult for me to develop a sense of involvement with either the instructor or the students, and for me, that's central to a good class. So a well conducted class in SL could create a compelling online classroom. What would that look like?

Harvard Law School has boldly pioneered in this area. The Harvard Extension School is offering a class in SL this fall, Virtual Worlds, and here's the course description. Wish I could take it!

The instructor is Rebecca Nesson, who was one of the instructors for Harvard Law School's first SL based class, Cyberone. Ian Lamont publishes an interview about teaching in SL on Terranova (Teaching in SecondLife). Several things she mentioned didn't surprise me; at first the environment was chaotic. There was "culture shock" at first for those new to the environment.

The surprises? "a text-based environment has a whole lot of advantages over the face-to-face environment that I just hadn't anticipated." Rebecca found that "problem of students not participating in class discussions just totally disappeared". And that "we didn't have any trouble with students who dominate the discussion". Chaos was not a lasting condition as people developed new classroom norms. Who had the hardest time? Those who were "comfortable writing traditional response papers" who were not comfortable with the spontaneity of the SL classroom. She actually says "So for me the idea that I would actually end up almost preferring to run a class in a text-based environment to a voice-based environment, that was a huge surprise."

Read the interview here.

Indiana University's Synthetic World's Initiative

Indiana University has a research center devoted to the study and development of virtual worlds; The Synthetic World’s Initiative. Their purpose is to “promote innovative thinking on synthetic worlds ". They hold bi-annual conferences (the “Ludium”) and are developing Arden, a virtual world based on the life and works of William Shakespeare. At the Ludium II Conference “Attendees were charged with hammering out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy.” The result is:

A Declaration of Virtual World Policy

made by representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.

Among the ten clauses in the declaration are calls for a player’s bill of rights, universal age verification, net neutrality and the statement that “fair use may apply in virtual worlds”. The declaration can be read here at TerraNova SWI's Declaration of Virtual World Policy:

Today’s Chronicle of Education’s Wired Campus makes note of the conference in the article Public Policies for Virtual Worlds.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Online communities changing online activism?

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation has given a $550,000 grant to the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy to "examine the role online communities can play in fostering real-world activism". (the rest)