“I’m very interested in how virtual environments can foster collaboration and community building in the class itself,” she says. Since so much of her class is centered on observation and research, the SL community as a whole will also play a major role, providing her students with interview subjects and discussion.

“I’ve been in lots of MMORPGs [Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games] and run into some nasty people,” Robbins says. “I’ve not seen any of that in SL. ... I feel like I can trust the community to be encouraging so long as my students are [not] bothersome.”

It is perhaps because the SL community is characterized by civility that in-world learning has the potential to promote respectful, supportive classroom behavior. According to Jeremy Kemp, “When you have the other person looking at you in the face, it’s kind of hard to be mean, and so it helps to generate an altruistic environment.”

Still, typical student behavior is to be expected; a student can fall asleep in a real class just as easily as his or her avatar can slump over, indicating that he or she is away from the computer. Instructors already accustomed to the real-life behavior of students seem prepared to accept it in-world.

“We see many things in a lecture hall with wireless when the students have laptops,” says Dr. Ed Lamoureax, who will be teaching an SL-only course during Bradley University’s three-week interim session in January 2007. “Students multitask now. It’s just a given.”

Kemp, whose studies focus on “legitimate peripheral participation” — extraneous classroom chatter such as instant messaging and passing notes in class — sees this behavior as a potentially good thing. “There are things that happen outside of the official line of communication in a teaching setting that students benefit from,” he says. An environment like Second Life can encourage students to use such behavior in a constructive way.

Expanding in-world resources
In-world, there are offerings that are open to the public, from lectures with NASA engineers to presentations hosted by The Infinite Mind public-radio show, which was the first live-broadcast program to have a presence in SL. There is also Info Island, home to the Second Life Library 2.0, a collaboration between the Alliance Library System and Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL).

“More and more educators see Second Life as a way to engage students,” says ALS director of innovation Lori Bell. “We wanted to see what role a library could play.”

A group of about 35 librarians have volunteered their time to build structures and stock the collection, which includes searchable indexes, audio and video clips, and books, many of which are public domain and available to own. “I see this as a great way to promote reading,” says Bell. The library also offers live help at certain hours of the day, for the typical real-life reference questions that inevitably come up, and it will hold live events like authors’ chats and tours.

The library is also exploring ways to offer learning experiences that simply would not be possible in real life. It is working with the Library of Congress to build a Declaration of Independence room, where a larger-than-life-size copy of the document will be on display along with additional readings, audio files, and period furniture. There’s also a library in the works on Caledon, the exclusively 19th-century island where avatars wear period dress.

Historical displays from other organizations are scattered throughout SL, including an International Spaceflight Museum that hosts more than 50 life-size rockets from space programs around the world. Visitors can ride the Titan II rocket to the International Space Station and view a scale model of the solar system where each planet has its own observation platform.

So what does the future hold for education in Second Life? “The crucial problem for educators is finding out if being in this environment, which is very expensive in terms of time and technology, is worthwhile from a learning-outcomes perspective,” says Jeremy Kemp. With the software still rolling out new features each week, it’s tough to get a grip on how this all will shake out. Academics such as Sarah Robbins, whose research can take place almost entirely in these virtual environments, see the movement online as a necessary change.

“Not being familiar with technology puts all academics at somewhat of a disadvantage right now, unless you’re tenured or in a really traditional university,” she says. “So it really behooves academics to understand how to deliver their content online. SL is the bleeding edge of that movement.”

That’s the SL academic world for you: the most advanced generation of educators on the planet, at home in their pajamas, challenging minds simply by logging on.

Kate Cohen is a Web researcher for WGBH’s Frontline and can be reached at kcohen00@yahoo.com .