What is Second Life? San Jose State Unversity School of Library and Information Science Robin T. Williams aka Greylin Fairweather answers some common questions about Second Life using a lovely metaphor:

SR Harris linked to this video in the Alliance Second Life Google group yesterday. Rather than a machinima, it's a selection of still snapshots taken in Second Life. It's a nice montage of libraries in Second Life and shows the variety of librarians working in the virtual world.

Some suggestions for teaching live Second Life workshops (different from teaching IN Second Life) based on my recent experiences teaching Second Life to librarians.

• Do NOT schedule on a Wednesday, as Second Life is frequently down for scheduled updates on Wednesdays
• Schedule at least three hours
  
• In the days leading up to the workshop, check the Second Life blog frequently for downtime notices
  
• Require users to sign up for Second Life and walk through Orientation Island independently
• Get participants' Second Life names in advance of the workshop
  
• Add all participants to your friends list before the workshop
  
• Create a group for the workshop, and invite participants to join it and other relevant groups before the workshop
  
• Prepare a goodie box of items for participants to explore during and after the workshop. I include: a custom t-shirt; notecards about Info Island, volunteer oppportunities, and education places in SL; "Customizing Your Avatar" notecard; facelamp; flight feather; height detector; Hypatia Dejavu's Griefing 101 lecture notes; and Jack-in-a-Box and Jill-in-a-Box freebies.
• Prepare any real life handouts
• Have at least two alt avatars of your own in case a participant has problems logging in
• Invite participants to log in as soon as they begin arriving, then teleport them to your location
• Work from a list of tasks rather than a specific outline (my working list of Second Life Competencies is here.)
• During the workshops, time your administrative tasks (inviting late comers to groups, checking off the competencies, etc.) for moments when you want to give the participants a few minutes to play and experiment
• Ideally, a workshop would have a second facilitator who could circulate among the participants, get a view on whether they're grasping the concepts, and provide individual attention where needed

What am I missing? Comments welcome!

I've now taught two (technically three, since the second was offered twice on the same day) workshops about Second Life, and I want to record my thoughts about teaching Second Life. Both workshops were for librarian audiences, but my plans and expectations for them were quite different.

The first workshop was for a consortium continuing education course. It was three hours long, and I intended to walk the participants through Orientation Island, give them a tour of Info Island and possibly Cybrary City, and spend a little time at the end going through a virtual goodie box I'd put together. I had to change my expectations almost immediately. Not everyone had followed the suggestion to sign up for their accounts in advance, and some had trouble signing up as a result--a few ultimately had to just watch my screen. Others had previously logged in, but depending on what they had explored, they were on different versions of Orientation Island. Several participants had completed Orientation Island already and were well ahead of the learning curve. I felt I let that group down in particular, because they could have benefited most from going beyond the basics.

Although I was disappointed, the workshop attendees were all positive on the consortium evaluation forms and all but one said they would recommend the workshop to others. The exception noted "not in its current format" and made some suggestions that were exactly in line with what I already knew I had learned from the experience.

For the second set of workshops, I required the participants to both sign up for Second Life and do Orientation Island on their own. Two reasons for this: first, it helps prevent running into Linden Lab's limit of ten new accounts per IP address per day and let's me know if there are any account/password problems to resolve. (And there were a few: I had one person in each session who had to borrow my alternate avatars.) Second, it gives prospective participants a taste of what they're getting into. Some may decide it's not their cup of tea, and others have a chance to think of questions. Quite a few of this workshop's participants told me even before the workshop that they were stuck on one of the orientation tasks. That was fine, because at least they'd tried it--and frankly, I find some of the Orientation Island directions confusing!

While I was preparing for the workshop, I tried making a fresh outline of things to cover. This proved frustrating, because I knew between questions and my own tangents, I'd be constantly off-track. Instead, I wrote up a list of Second Life competencies--things I wanted the participants to learn or be exposed to during the course of the workshop. It worked brilliantly, and I worked in all the little details I needed to mention. It gave me some solid goals and something to work from, but no stress about doing it strictly in order. Without strictly timing things, I managed to keep on track too. This led to saying things like "now let's pretend you've all got your avatars looking just how you want them..." because we could do a whole separate workshop on appearance! When I got to the section where I gave them their goodie boxes and asked them to take them out of their inventory, then pulled my camera angle back to see all their avatars standing next to boxes, I was so proud.

The only major change I would make to the second workshop format is to add an additional hour and take more time to explain the elements of objects (prims, textures, scripts) as I did the elements of avatars. We didn't have time to tour Info Island in the morning session, but we squeezed a tour into the last ten minutes of the afternoon session. I have a Pied Piper HUD for using with group tours, but it was laggy. Perhaps if we all had faster machines and were on different Internet connections it would have been less problematic. At that point, everyone seemed comfortable just following me, so it was unnecessary anyway.

I used a rearranged version of my slides from the first workshop to introduce the participants to Second Life and some of the tasks. I have, alas, broken my new personal rule about minimal text (five words or less) on slides for this, but my excuse is that the text is intended for the handout version. Anyway, here they are. If there's a next time, I'll be taking out more of the ones I didn't use and adding some new ones about objects.


The second set of workshops felt much more successful to me, and they were so energizing. I loved doing them, and I hope the participants had half as much fun as I did. I almost regret not proposing a Second Life workshop for AALL (though I will be speaking about it), but I'm still too wary of convention center Internet connections to think that would be a good idea.

Next post: some suggested best practices for teaching Second Life.

From my colleague Rob Hudson comes this weekly Chronicle "brown bag" live discussion transcript. Merrill Johnson, associate dean of the University of New Orleans's College of Liberal Arts, discusses UNO's Second Life presence along with issues like presence and distance learning, disclaimers and university policies, building, time commitment, and helping faculty and students through the learning curve. It's a great introduction to many of the issues involved in setting up an institutional presence in a virtual world.

Well, not exactly me, but one year ago today, an avatar named Anne Idler was first rezzed into Second Life, bewildered, aimless and not quite sure what she was getting into.

It's been an interesting year of experimenting, learning, building, networking, rebuilding, teaching, and more. One thing that has evolved along with my virtual skills (and avatar, see left!) is my attitude and confidence about being "that librarian who knows about Second Life," as Kathryn Greenhill put it several months ago over at Librarians Matter. Kathryn was wondering if that was how she wanted to be known in the community, and at the time (back in May), I was wondering the same thing. Alongside the worry about having too much fun, spending time away from "serious" endeavors, and how those factors could impact my professional reputation was the knowledge that this was my first year in the profession, and I was building that reputation from scratch. What if Second Life turned out to be some crazy, flash in the pan folly? What if most of the law library community thought it was silly, frivolous, and irrelevant? Would I would be forever known as "that (silly/frivolous/irrelevant/etc.) Second Life librarian"?

I needn't have worried. About six weeks after I mentioned Kathryn's post and my plans to comment further about it (only now fulfilled), I went to my second AALL annual meeting. To my surprise, I discovered that "that Second Life law librarian" had generalized into "that librarian who's great with technology." Everyone I talked with about Second Life, acquaintances both new and from the previous year, thought it was an interesting and exciting thing to be exploring. I'm sure there are some law librarians who think it is silly, frivolous, and irrelevant all at once--and many more who haven't heard about it--but there were more than enough in the former category that I'm not worried about it anymore.

While it was a reassuring conference on a personal level, it was also eye-opening at the professional level. In the law librarianship course I took in library school, I was made aware that law librarians are often slower to change and try new things than the profession at large. Subsequently having been so encouraged to explore new things in my job, I thought perhaps that was outdated or incorrect information. However, many of my peers in age and/or experience in addition to thinking Second Life was cool, expressed their envy at my getting to explore ANY new things at all, technology-related or otherwise. There may have been some away from home/conference venting going on, but I heard such thoughts from enough people that it made an impression.

Networking with Second Life librarians from all types of libraries has helped to clarify my thoughts on why it is important to play with this new technology, much as it was to tinker with HTML and websites was in the mid-90s. I'm almost done putting together built 2.0 of the NSU Law Library in Second Life, and I'm planning to show it to some of our faculty once it's ready. I'm excited about that, because I think Second Life ultimately has more interesting potential for subject-area learning--role-playing, cultural studies, integration with learning management systems for distance learning, and especially the legal issues relating to virtual worlds, among other reasons--than librarianship. But I also have a new legal research exhibit idea based on some of the ideas I've had and borrowed from others during my first two years of visiting Legal Skills and Values classes to teach online research concepts to our first-year students.

Now if only I had a Second 24 Hours each day...

I haven't kept up with Doonesbury since Alex was involved with the Howard Dean campaign, but Tom Bruno aka Oodle Fadoodle just let the ALS Second Life library crowd know there was a Second Life shout-out in Sunday's strip.


Click through for the whole thing.

Keeping up with news relating to Second Life is a near impossible feat, but here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the past week or so:

Lawyers Find Real Revenue in Virtual World
Law.com has a great report on lawyers in Second Life, what they're doing there, what they think of virtual practice, their extra-curricular activities in Second Life, and virtual legal systems.

Go Get a (Virtual) Life
Ira Flatow and company at NPR's Science Friday along with callers discuss Second Life. (thanks for the tip to Second Life Insider)

Online Gamers Become Guinea Pigs
Thanks to Betsy McKenzie at Out of the Jungle for pointing to this Boston Globe article about how scientists are using virtual worlds and MMORPGs to study the spread of infectious disease and how people react to it, altruistically and otherwise.

Cornell to Study Business and Oversight in Second Life
Second Life Insider reports that Cornell business professor Robert J. Bloomfield is offering a 1 to 3 credit course for students to study business and regulatory oversight in SL that clearly has some strong law crossover. As the article points out

Second Life is a fertile ground for studying free market business in an unregulated environment - either because regulations do not exist, or the regulations that do exist for bodies claiming to be banks and stock-exchanges are not observed by proprietors - who may be dismissive or ignorant of the applicability of physical world regulations on their virtual businesses.

Script Me!
Finally, for those of us building in Second Life, Script Me! is an amazing tool developed by a computer science professor. Need a custom script? Fill in the form and there it is. Did I say amazing? I meant AMAZING. For me, scripting is the most challenging part of working in SL--I'm all about taking existing scripts and customizing them. Script Me! is going to make that even easier. Many thanks to JJ Drinkwater, esteemed Librarian of Caledon, for sending this link to the Alliance Second Life Google group.

Funny timing. Last night I made an enquiry about renting property in Second Life--something I've been thinking about for a short time now--and I just discovered that the NY Times ran a long and interesting article today called A House That’s Just Unreal all about Second Life real estate. It ran in the Home & Garden section, rather than technology, and included a few questions that puzzle me whenever I go furniture shopping in SL:

It has also given rise to a number of philosophical questions: since you don’t eat in Second Life, do you need a kitchen? Is a bathroom really necessary? Since you can teleport, do you need stairs?

It's mainly the toilets that puzzle me. I can sort-of understand wanting a really luxe virtual bathtub, but provided one has access to one in good working order, who fantasizes about a great toilet?

Virtual stairs, meanwhile, are my biggest virtual design pet peeve. They're so unnecessary, and my frustration in dealing with them is always accompanied by memories of the King's Quest series of games I played in the late 80s, in which there were always tricky staircases one had to navigate as part of the gameplay. One wrong step and your character was dead.

Courtesy of someone on the Second Life library listserv comes this interesting news about new Library of Congress preservation initiatives.

Federal cultural institution The Library of Congress has announced its Preserving Creative America initiative, which targets preservation issues across a broad range of creative media, including movies, digital photography, and video games.

The Library of Congress announcement further notes that Linden Lab's popular virtual world Second Life will play a vital role in the project, with online communities such as Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum tapped to participate in the project.

The statement mentions that the program will work to standardize content formats and metadata. It will be interesting to see how this develops, since the constant changes not only to objects and collections, but to the geography of the world are challenges when working in Second Life day to day. I'm wondering if the project will involve one of the open versions of the SL client. In any case, here's hoping the advance planning leads to better success than the 1986 Domesday project.

I'm particularly delighted that the International Spaceflight Museum is slated to be preserved. It was the first really cool place I discovered in SL, and it's such a great example of the great collaboration that SL enables.