The Affordances of Second Life for Education - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 113

those familiar with gaming, this time commitment
may be fairly short. The SL interface is similar in
some ways to first-person video games such as
Myst or Halo and to other online environments
such as World of Warcraft. However, for people
who have had little or no exposure to such pro-
grams, SL presents a somewhat steep learning
curve, with a bewildering array of menus, panels,
messages, objects, animations, and sounds; many
users simply do not feel comfortable enough in
their first exposure to the environment to ever
return. Even instructional technology professors
have found the use of SL for professional col-
laborations and discussion to be daunting!
A second obstacle is the technological (hard-
ware and software) requirements for successful
use of SL. Many schools do not have up-to-date
computers, with sufficient memory or graphics
capabilities to run SL efficiently. Laptops, espe-
cially, if they date from 2005 or before, will most
likely not be able to run SL. Also, if a whole class
of students is using laptops and a wireless network,
bandwidth may become a problem, resulting
in significant lag (slowness with downloading
changes in the environment), which can be either
annoying or debilitating, depending on what the
user is trying to do. To see if your computers
meet the system requirements of SL, see http://
secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php .
The third major obstacle, and it is enormous,
is age segregation. Second Life is currently avail-
able only for adults (through what is called the
“Main Grid”) and teenagers (age 13-17, in an
area known as the “Teen Grid” or “TSL”). TSL
participants are automatically transported to the
main grid on their 18 th birthday. Students under the
age of 13 are not allowed in Second Life, and are
unlikely to be any time soon due to Linden Labs'
concerns about liability for what might happen to
younger children. However, indications are that
soon educational institutions will be able to set
up their own Second Life servers, on their own
networks, and so schools might choose to bring
students of any age into the environment. If this

happens, many of the obstacles that we discuss
in this section may be moot.
The Teen Grid was created primarily as an
entertainment venue for teenagers, and some
of its features make it very difficult to use it ef-
fectively for educational purposes. Most of TSL
is off-limits to adults, other than employees of
Linden Labs. Adults may visit a few islands that
are managed by educational organizations. How-
ever, adults who enter TSL—after a process that
involves creating a new avatar and going through
a criminal background check that can take many
weeks—are limited to the island or islands of the
particular educational project that has sponsored
them, and they are prevented from communicating
with adults or teens who are on other islands in
TSL. This means that adult collaboration across
educational projects must take place either on the
Main Grid or via various listservs. Also, once an
avatar has entered TSL, it becomes very difficult
to obtain or get access to objects or tools that are
available on the Main Grid. A process of collect-
ing such requests and having them delivered from
the main grid by new avatars that enter the teen
grid is necessary.
The creation of SL user accounts can currently
be a bit of a chore for a number of reasons. We've
mentioned the process that teachers who wish to
enter TSL must go through. Also, while individual
students can create their own accounts for TSL,
when they do so, they have free range of the entire
grid, which is not necessarily what schools will
want for their students. Educational institutions
can apply for multiple student accounts that are
created all at once and are restricted to a particular
island or group of islands, making them more suit-
able for purposes. In addition, some third-party
vendors can set up bulk student accounts through
a process known as “Registration API” because
of the technology that makes it possible.
Even when bringing a new group of teachers
into the Main Grid, there may be issues. If a user
tries to create new accounts on the same day
from a given IP address range (as, for example,