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August 16, 2007, 08:29 AM ET
Colleges Are Building in Second Life, but Is Anyone Visiting?
Wired magazine’s editor, Chris Anderson, has gone from an enthusiastic supporter of the virtual world Second Life to a skeptic of its impact. And his reversal might have a lesson for colleges.
Mr. Anderson at first helped encourage the magazine to build its own space in the 3-D online environment, and he even held a talk about his popular book, The Long Tail, there. But after a while he couldn’t ignore how empty the magazine’s virtual clubhouse was. So he assigned a reporter to check out whether any other companies that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars are doing any better. They aren’t.
In a post to his blog last month, Mr. Anderson debates a vocal supporter of Second Life about whether events in the virtual world have value even if attendance is low. But he still defends his decision to close down his magazine’s Second Life office.
The Wired article and the discussion did not talk about colleges that are building campuses in Second Life, but it seems that some people in higher education might be asking the same tough questions that Mr. Anderson is. More than 100 colleges have set up some kind of presence in Second Life, according to officials at Linden Lab, the company that runs the environment. But are those campuses attracting enough visitors to make the investments worth it? Earlier this year we published an article and a video tour of Case Western Reserve University’s virtual campus, which it used to give tours to prospective students. But during more than a month in which Case Western students were on hand to show folks around, only 40 people wandered by, according to college officials.
Perhaps that’s enough to make it worth the effort — they did get some news-media coverage, after all. Are any college officials working in Second Life starting to have second thoughts? —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Virtual-Worlds
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