Second Life is full of pioneering educators and academics, and innovative growth in the use of Second Life for learning continues every day. It had been my pleasure and privilege to meet many of these educators and learn about their projects. In my experience, I’ve noticed that the most successful projects typically involve interdisciplinary collaboration, expanding on the work of others, and sharing strategies for success. An amazing example of this type of innovation, on a statewide scale, is the University of Texas System.
The University of Texas System is starting a year-long project to explore the use of virtual worlds for learning, and they are bringing their entire 15-campus system into Second Life. For all the details, please see the Press Release at the bottom of this blog post.
I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Leslie Jarmon (SL: Bluewave Ogee), the primary investigator for this statewide virtual initiative, to learn more. Read on for the details!
Leslie Jarmon (SL: Bluewave Ogee), in the virtual version of the Ash Conference Room at the University of Texas System.
Pathfinder: This is an extremely large and ambitious project. You’ve successfully launched it after 4 years of research and preparation. What were the biggest challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?
Bluewave: Challenges for winning this initial 1-year launch included finding the most effective language and concrete examples from within the generous educational community in Second Life itself to craft a proposal that would be hearable by key administrators. When an opportunity arose, a real time demo of SL using Voice with real educators and Linden Lab officials answering the Chancellors¹ questions right there on the spot was more effective than 100 pages of textual description. Very pragmatic, concrete, visionary at the same time.
A key challenge has been rigorously ensuring that our provision of the virtual infrastructure for 15 campuses and information and training support will not be dictating which directions each campus will take as they discover and create their own unique learning and research journeys. We¹re meeting this challenge with the overriding mission of creating together a virtual learning community. Virtual worlds are a new human dimension for educational activity, and we¹re constantly exploring and learning alongside one another.
Left to Right: John Lester (SL: Pathfinder Linden) and Leslie Jarmon (SL: Bluewave Ogee) meet in front of
the virtual version of Johnson Claudia Taylor Hall at the University of Texas System.
Pathfinder: A new human dimension for educational activity! I love it. I’ll point readers to some of your published writings to learn more about that concept. 
You’ve chosen Second Life as the specific virtual world platform for this system-wide project. What were some of the key factors in this decision?
Bluewave: The goals of UT System Transforming Undergraduate Education initiative require that a winning project must enrich quality of the learning experience, simultaneously lower costs of delivery of instruction, and useable across a very diverse array of campus environments (9 academic campuses; 6 medical health science center campuses). Second Life aligns with those goals in several very concrete ways. Most importantly, it¹s what I¹ve called an embodied rapid collaboration platform, providing researchers, instructors, students, staff, and administrators access to one another in very new ways across geo-spatial and brick and mortar boundaries. Second Life itself is an open-ended complex learning system, with massive user created content, continuously moving the horizon of what known or understood. Finally, and powerfully, Second Life gives educators and students the developers tools, thereby making Second Life a tool-making tool itself. It has inherent robustness.
Having said all that about Second LIfe, ultimately it has been the foresight and boldness on the part of the Chancellors of the University of Texas System that has made this initial entry year possible at all. All kudos must go to them and their vision.
Pathfinder: Sharing strategies and best practices that will help other universities succeed in Second Life is a key part of your project plan. How do you plan to share this useful knowledge with the greater academic community?
Bluewave: We believe that this initiative is going to help so many people. It’s founded on the ethic of sharing. IRB-approved research is being conducted at 3 levels (system, individual campus, individual course), and so there will be many publications generated as we all continue to learn and understand more. After a year, we¹ll be able to share failures, challenges, and successes of what it means when a large statewide public university system extends operations into the virtual world. And the virtual learning community, of course, already extends and will continue to grow far beyond the UT System campuses themselves. Collaborations with other educators, already emerging, will continue to grow and extend more deeply into disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains.
We¹re very excited about the location of the soon-to-emerge UT System archipelago in close proximity to the wonderful Scilands continent in a mutually beneficial engagement of communities. Finally, the project calls for an undergraduate educational conference to be held both on actual campus sites and in Second Life at wherever students have begun collaborating and conducting research alongside our faculty and scientists.
Campus leads from each of the 16 campuses of the University of Texas System meet to discuss strategy.
Thanks for a great interview, Leslie! Read on for details about the project and how to learn even more.
-Pathfinder Linden (RL: John Lester)
—————————— Press Release ——————————
The University of Texas Initiates a System-Wide Rollout into Second Life:
Sixteen Campuses will Serve as Virtual Learning Model for Other Statewide Systems
Today, Linden Lab, the Makers of Second Life and Second Life Work are announcing the first statewide rollout of a virtual learning environment in the world. The Transforming Undergraduate Education Program, at the University of Texas System, recently awarded a grant to fund the initiation of a pioneering statewide virtual learning community of students, faculty, researchers and administrators in Second Life, that offers an innovative, low-cost approach to undergraduate instruction.
“The System’s virtual collaborative learning community of students, faculty, researchers, and administrators will allow participants to learn, share, collaborate and grow alongside one another,” said Leslie Jarmon, Ph.D. , the primary investigator for this statewide virtual initiative for the University of Texas 16-campus System, and a Faculty Development Specialist and Senior Lecturer in the Division of Instructional Innovation & Assessment (CIE/DIIA) at the University of Texas at Austin. “Step by step in this evolving system-wide virtual learning community, all of these players—and especially our undergraduates—will be seen as learners with expanded roles: learners as scientists, learners as designers, learners as researchers, learners as communicators, and learners as collaborators. We see endless possibilities on the virtual learning horizon.”
Like many higher learning organizations, the University of Texas System’s has an imperative to continually enrich the learning experience for students while reducing—or even eliminating—expensive brick-and-mortar costs while becoming energy efficient. These are the key drivers that led the University of Texas to invest in a virtual learning environment in Second Life.
The yearlong rollout involves all 16 University of Texas campuses and will be designed for extensive inter-campus, intra-campus, and out-of-state collaboration and will occupy over 50 Second Life regions. The UT System is a complex and multidisciplinary organization with 9 academic university campuses and 6 medical and health science research campuses. Each campus will be developing its own SL project plan according to its needs and priorities. Throughout the project, evidence-based research data will be collected and shared with the Second Life education community on best practices to offer to all educators—and other similar organizations—that are interested in holding classes and building campuses in Second Life.
“Since it was launched in 2003, hundreds of educational institutions from around the world have used Second Life as a compelling and cost effective platform to augment an existing curriculum and explore new models of learning. But, the University of Texas System’s ambitious system-wide program is not only an industry first, but it will also create the largest virtual learning community in existence,” said John Lester (SL: Pathfinder Linden), Customer Outreach Advocate at Linden Lab. “This announcement also provides another strong proof point that virtual campuses can be effectively controlled and managed to create a safe and secure learning environment. Needless to say, we’re very excited and look forward to watching the program develop and grow.”
For more information, plesae see the TUE Learning Community website or please contact:
UT System VLCI Initiative: Dr. Leslie Jarmon (SL: Bluewave Ogee) LJarmon@austin.utexas.edu
Linden Lab: Amanda Van Nuys (SL: Amanda Linden) amanda@lindenlab.com
