Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Ill., home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it’s a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley’s multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second Life.
Ever since Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company, unveiled Second Life in 2003, professors and college students have flocked to it. Professors use Second Life to hold distance-education classes, saying that communication among students actually gets livelier when they assume digital personae. Anthropologists and sociologists see the virtual world as a laboratory for studying human behavior. University architects use it as a canvas on which to explore design. Business professors see it as a testing ground for budding entrepreneurs.
Read the complete Chronicle story, and take a tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus in Second Life.
18 Responses to Professor Avatar
Melanie Thompson - April 17, 2012 at 5:47 am
Great article, thanks. via @TheSfep:disqus
msumenglish - April 17, 2012 at 5:55 am
As Roy Orbison, said,
Only the lonely (Dum-dumb-dummy doo-wah)
Know the way I feel tonight (Ooh yay, yay, yay, yeah)
Only the lonely (Dum-dumb-dummy doo-wah)
Know this feeling ain’t right (Dum-dumb-dummy doo-wah)
landrumkelly - April 17, 2012 at 6:37 am
Only listen up, dude. It can only get worse: I actually have a dog named “Only.” Before that I had a cat that I considered naming “Than.” It was either that or “But,” and my wife objected to having to lean out the door and call the cat. (“But!”) So, “Inside” it became, in the name of an economy of language. (“Inside!”) I bet that I am the only person in the world who ever had a cat named “Inside.” Well, almost the only person–there is my wife to consider, if only we were still married.
At the end, we were still deliberating what to call our kids, if only we ever had any.
The divorce was a blessing.
That’s a true story.
11173183 - April 17, 2012 at 8:04 am
Well Ben, when you “fulminate”, you go at it big time. Enjoyable read, thanks.
dank48 - April 17, 2012 at 8:43 am
Wonderful article. Btw, the folks who complain about “a lot” are of a piece with the ones who try to make “only” obey the laws of their imagination. When I was teaching ESL in Nordrhein-Westfalen back in the ’70s, our excellent textbooks (published by Klett, a company that knew how to do instructional materials, imo) made it clear that, in the real world, English speakers tend to use “a lot” in affirmative statements, “much” in negative statements and in questions:
Your brother eats a lot. Your brother doesn’t eat much. Does your brother each much?
Sure, now and then you hear “much” in an affirmative, but not much.
Peter Hirsch - April 17, 2012 at 9:28 am
I’ll take rhythm, meaning and syntax every time. Especially rhythm.
misslizzie - April 17, 2012 at 9:33 am
While not entirely on point, whenever someone complains about the word “a lot,” I feel the need to leave this: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
Excellent post otherwise!
dank48 - April 17, 2012 at 10:16 am
I assume that you object to “alot” rather than “a lot”; me too. On the other hand, much as I despise “alot” and its cousin “alright,” we’ve all accepted “already,” “albeit,” “almighty,” “almost,” “alone,” “also,” and “always,” so my dislike comes down to the fact that I learned to spell these words a certain way at a certain point in their evolution and just don’t like seeing what I “know” changing. I don’t like it. I don’t have to.
what4 - April 17, 2012 at 10:23 am
Why don’t we create a grammar book based on “did you understand what I meant?” rather than “was that correct?”
Actually, the Internet is writing that new grammar as we speak.
scades - April 17, 2012 at 10:59 am
Who can ask for anything more?
mikegrubb - April 17, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Dank48′s post made me think about “much” in conjunction with “thanks.” One of B.Y.’s relatively recent posts– http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/02/09/the-looking-glass-vs-mirror-war-language-and-class/ –identified “thanks much” vs. “thanks very much” as a class marker. I wonder if there is a distinction between those who use “thanks much” vs. “thanks a lot.” The observation dank48 points out may suggest that people who use “thanks much” have a negative view of expressing gratitude while those who use “thanks a lot” have a positive one. Hmm…
Jonathon Owen - April 17, 2012 at 1:20 pm
My boss has argued that even if real ambiguity is seldom a problem, it doesn’t hurt to move it anyway. Sometimes it does, though—I’ve seen a couple of cases where a moved “only” changed the sense, and it pretty much always ruins the rhythm of the sentence. And of course, editing every instance of “only” takes time, which costs money. Why waste that money on something that doesn’t actually help and may frequently hurt?
And even the suggested edit of “One particular comma use is consistently and pretty much found only in The New Yorker” isn’t good enough if you want to be a real stickler about it. By the logic of the “only” fetishists, “only” in this sentence limits the preposition “in”, meaning that it’s found only in the New Yorker, not on it or through it or around it. Of course, this just goes to show why this is a stupid rule that everyone should forget. Real English doesn’t work that way.
Richard Grayson - April 17, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Some of the problem comes from people confusing the word “Only” with “Olney,” the attorney general and secretary of state in the second Cleveland administration.
Richard Grayson - April 17, 2012 at 8:44 pm
Nevermind.
Andy Hollandbeck - April 24, 2012 at 9:08 am
There is something to be said for precision. Even if no one misunderstands your meaning, there’s no reason you shouldn’t try to be more precise. And of course we expect more precision in the written word than in the spoken word. It isn’t a matter of right or wrong but of more or less precision. A “misplaced” only isn’t wrong, per se — it hits the target, but it doesn’t hit the bull’s-eye. We try to hit the bull’s-eye when we can.
In this case, I think, their hearts were in the right place. They were simply wrong. And as any editor knows, people get wordy things wrong all the time, even when they stop to think about it.
srbenedicta - April 25, 2012 at 1:36 am
Or, Olney, Oregon!
lazybones - April 26, 2012 at 11:51 am
Thanks for the rant!
The problem with moving the “only” in “One particular comma use is consistently and pretty much only found in The New Yorker” is that the phrase “pretty much only” desperately wants to remain intact; consider the nonsensical effect of omitting the only: “is consistently and pretty much found in the New Yorker”. So if someone, for whatever reason, really doesn’t want the “only” to appear before “found”, the only acceptable solution that I can see is to place the “found” before that phrase: ”One particular comma use is found consistently and pretty much only in The New Yorker”. Parenthetic dashes around “and pretty much only” would tidy that up a little. But I feel sad for anyone who thinks that any such change is necessary, or even improves matters.
gavin_moodie - May 5, 2012 at 4:56 pm
It seems that those who prefer the ‘rhythm’ of Yagoda’s word order are preferring just habit. I agree with the New York Times’s sub editor in preferring precision over custom.