History Education as Second Life

by Cliopatria

"Virtual Campus Could Aid in Emergency," eSchool News, 18 June, reports on the University of New Orleans' plans to use Second Life to insure that teaching and learning won't be interrupted by another disaster. Jim Mokhiber, an assistant professor of history, is enthusiastic about building a virtual African village for his students to explore. Dave Lester is skeptical about Second Life working on such a large scale as UNO plans."Teachers and students alike won't have the skills to make this feasible, not to mention the fact that displacing such a large number of people would likely leave them at inaccessible workstations (the system requirements to use SL are rather high)," he writes. See also: the skepticism of Brett Bixler of Penn State Virtual Worlds.

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Andrew D. Todd - 7/30/2007

The system requirements for Second Life are not uncontrollably high; the money could be found, one way or another. Skills are something one can learn out of a book. However, what is important is that people would have to commit themselves. Second Life is at an early stage of development, comparable to the automobile in 1910, or the personal computer in 1980. If you start doing Second Life right now, the act of doing so will make you into an enthusiast in the process of becoming a guru. Everyone has to work at building the system, somehow or other, if it is to work. Using Second Life will, for the time being, be much more laborious than simply driving to some place on high ground, away from storms. Second Life is certainly not ready for the "Professor, the dog ate my homework" kind of student. Large numbers of people have to exercise initiative, and you know how difficult that can be.

More to the point, there are simpler and more practical systems which do not require a huge learning curve, such as so-called "meeting software" (group videophone). Everyone has a video camera as well as a screen, and the feeds are spliced together and redistributed. This is trivial compared to Second Life. Meeting software does not support people doing seemingly impromptu ballet in the classroom, the way Second Life would, but you don't really need that kind of thing to teach history.

The problem with historical re-enactment is that there is a certain point at which you find that you are not teaching history, but rather techniques of make-up or whatever. Curious sidenote: I heard that the Royal Shakespeare Theater now finds it necessary to explicitly teach its young actresses how to wear long dresses, because they have grown up as tomboys in bluejeans and T-shirts. This kind of thing gets subsumed under the general heading of Theatrical Technique. Most colleges have a Communications departments, because the business of theatrical production got beyond what the English Department could tolerate.

To: Manan Ahmed

I should add that Second Life is in the process of going open-source. The basic client program which runs on the user's computer is now open source, and the company has promised to open-source the server program as soon as feasible, but the mass of costumes, properties, and similar backstage baggage are owned by a multitude of individual virtual costumers, virtual stagehands, etc., and it will take some time to convince them.

Manan Ahmed - 7/30/2007

Universities would be better off funding their own virtual worlds [if they really want to do it] rather than relying on proprietary/commercial systems like Second Life.

And really, what kind of long-distance/disaster education cannot happen with just a wiki, a blog, skype and a video chat client.

In any case, Second Life is so 2006.