Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life. Pennsylvania State University is taking that a step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus are now required to be available for meetings with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State official said during last week’s Educause conference here.

Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.

Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So...

An arbitrator says Lakehead University, in Ontario, had the right to switch its campus e-mail service to a free program offered by Google and did not violate the collective agreement with the Lakehead University Faculty Association.

The union objected to the switch because it feared that e-mail messages could be opened by the FBI or CIA under the USA Patriot Act since Google is an American company, subject to that law. The arbitrator acknowledged in his ruling that "the likelihood of such incursions by U.S. authority into a private e-mail system (Lakehead’s own former system) was marginal compared to what might occur in the presence of the Google system." However, he...

To Willeke Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, exploring the ruins of an ancient temple within an air-conditioned computer classroom can be even more useful than visiting the site in person.

Ms. Wenderish recently co-produced a virtual-reality project called “Digital Karnak,” which allows students (and visitors to the project’s Web site) to learn how the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia. Milling about the ruins or studying a two-dimensional map of the Karnak site can be disorienting, she said. Virtual modeling, on the other hand, allows scholars to observe what in the structure changed and when—using a more sophisticated tool than the mind’s eye....

Those who attended the Virtual Journalism Conference at Washington State University this week may have glimpsed the future of global journalism in a brief documentary about an avatar-to-avatar news conference. The news conference, which took place in February in the virtual platform Second Life, gave eight Egyptian political bloggers a chance to directly question James K. Glassman, the public-diplomacy czar under form President George W. Bush.

“This is the ultimate situation of breaking down barriers of time and space,” said Lawrence Pintak, director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo—or, rather, his slightly-less-gray-haired avatar said that in the documentary. “We’re putting together...

Watch out, Second Life.

The University of California at San Diego announced today the creation of a new research center aimed at creating the “next generation” of virtual worlds, which designers hope will be more visually rich and have more features than Second Life and other popular online environments.

The center will use a new hybrid-computing platform developed by IBM. Sheldon Brown, a professor of visual arts at the university who is also the director of the new center, said artists working with simulations have been limited by the computing technologies available. The new IBM platform, Mr. Brown said, offers an increased level of flexibility and power that will give artists more freedom.

Among the center’s first projects will be the development of a virtual world based on Scalable City, a...

College debate matches can be physically intense — with participants rattling off arguments at top speed and gesturing dramatically. So it will be interesting to see if a debate contest can work in Second Life, the virtual world.

This week Stephen Llano, the director of debate at St. John’s University, in New York, announced what is billed as the first tournament debate held in Second Life. It will take place on February 4 at 8 p.m. Eastern Time in the university’s virtual campus (shown below). A two-person team from St. Johns will go head-to-head with two students from the University of Vermont. The topic will be whether or not colleges should limit tenure for professors.

Richard L. Gilbert, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, is about to begin a series of surveys of participants in Second Life, the virtual world where people interact as cartoonlike characters in a 3-D animated landscape. Usually the researcher would pay test subjects a small fee for their time, but for this study he’ll be paying participants in Linden dollars, the virtual currency used in Second Life.

He had no idea what the appropriate amount would be, so Mr. Gilbert walked around popular areas of Second Life asking strangers how much he would have to pay them to sit down for an hour and take a survey. “The average of all the responses that I got was $1,000,” he says. That’s 1,000 Linden dollars, worth about $4 in actual U.S. currency. “It’s much cheaper” than what he would have paid subjects...

Rumors that Google was working on a new virtual world have turned out to be true. The company unveiled this week its three-dimensional make-believe community called Lively, promoted in the video below.

Virtual-world scholars seem unimpressed by the project. The Terra Nova blog has assembled their comments. Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor of communications at Trinity University, is disappointed that Lively does not allow people to create their own content, a feature of the virtual world Second Life. “Google has given us an impoverished space in which content can only be developed in-house or by ‘trusted developers,’” he writes.

Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the...

Ren Reynolds, a British-based technology researcher, has recently formed a think tank on virtual worlds, called the Virtual Policy Network, or tVPN. The goal of the group, he says, is to get scholars, industry officials, and policy makers talking about virtual worlds. The group is expected to have a presence in Europe, Asia, and North America.

One of the group’s projects will be an annual report that takes stock of public policies around the world relating to virtual worlds. The think tank is asking colleges, businesses, and governments to provide financial support for the project. —Andrea L. Foster