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Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor | Comment

Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online | Comment [4]

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ABC News to Open 5 University News Bureaus | Comment [10]

How a Lawsuit Over Electronic Reserves Could Affect Colleges | Comment [5]

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May 13, 2008

Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online

As more graduate students deposit their theses online and make them freely available, college administrators on a number of campuses are being asked to treat creative-writing theses differently. English professors and writing students are pressing college officials to exclude creative-writing theses from open-access policies, arguing that they undermine students’ ability to get published in literary journals.

Jeanne M. Leiby, an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, is among those who argue that writing students should not be forced to widely distribute their theses online. Ms. Leiby, who is editor of the literary journal, The Southern Review says in an article in this week’s Chronicle that she will not accept manuscripts that have been freely disseminated online.

She also says that writing students may be hesitant about making their theses open access because of professional pride. “I don’t necessarily want people to go back and read my thesis,” says Ms. Leiby, who earned a graduate degree in writing from the University of Alabama. “I’d like to think that in 15 years I’ve become more of a writer. I don’t necessarily want those early attempts associated with my name.”—Andrea L. Foster

May 8, 2008

Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds

Cory Ondrejka, the co-founder of the virtual world Second Life who is now a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, said in a speech today that virtual worlds are here to stay, and that professors are among the most active pioneers.

“In my view the academy has been blazing the trail of adoption of virtual worlds far more than gamers or industry,” said Mr. Ondrejka, who spoke at a conference at Case Western Reserve University called Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008.

Naturally, the event was broadcast within Second Life, in Case Western’s campus in the virtual world. I attended the conference virtually, and was able to ask Mr. Ondrejka what the biggest challenge for Second Life was in being able to be more than just a passing fad in higher education.

“The challenges with Second Life is it has significant technical challenges for use,” he said, noting that it takes powerful computers and fast network connections for Second Life to function properly. “You can’t assume that your students are going to be able to run Second Life within the school’s network infrastructure.”

He argued that some form of 3-D virtual environment will catch on, though he admitted that it might not be Second Life that wins the race. The reason that the idea is powerful, he said, is that studies show that humans respond to a visual Internet, and that they express greater trust for the people they communicate with when they see a virtual representation of the person. “Learning in a place in 3-D affects us differently than text,” he said.

Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.

Organizers of the conference set up a booth for The Chronicle in Case Western’s Second Life campus during the event (shown below), and I manned our table between panel sessions and chatted with a couple of conference participants.

At one point my virtual avatar got stuck between a virtual chair and the wall of the booth, however, and I had to reboot my computer to get that sorted out. Luckily that’s never happened to me in real life. —Jeffrey R. Young

April 11, 2008

Notes From an Online College Fair

Check out a recent New York Times essay on a parent’s experience with CollegeWeekLive.com, a virtual college fair where students and parents chat live with admissions officers from 200 institutions.

One thing Michelle Slatalla, the essay’s author, seemed to miss about going to a real (offline) college fair was the ability to follow the crowd to the “most selective” institutions: “here there was no way to gauge whether more attendees were flocking to Bryn Mawr College or Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.”

The next CollegeWeekLive fair, which is free, is scheduled for the fall.—Catherine Rampell

U. of Southern California Student and Professor Recreate Guantánamo Camp, Shackles and All

A virtual-reality project by a student at the University of Southern California is featured in this week’s Vanity Fair. The student, Nonny de la Peña, strives to show the horrors of the Guantánamo Bay military prison using the virtual world Second Life. She has recreated the prison and treats digital visitors, or at least their avatars, as real prisoners—shackles and all.

Ms. de la Peña is on track to earn a master’s degree from the university’s Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities. She produced a 2004 documentary, Unconstitutional, about the erosion of civil liberties since 9/11. —Andrea L. Foster

Update: Ms. Peña reports that she had a partner in the project. The partner was Peggy Weil, a visiting assistant professor in the Interactive Media Division of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

March 12, 2008

Colgate U. Student's Violent Message to a Gossip Web Site Leads to His Arrest

A joke about shooting fellow students, posted to a gossip Web site, led to the arrest of a Colgate University student this month.

The student, George So, a junior at the university, posted the following verbatim note to a Web site called Juicy Campus:

“I wonder if i could shut down the school … by saying I’m going to shoot as many people as i can in my second class tomorrow. I hope I get more than 50……….. For liability reasons and ip tracking I won’t leave it at that. But seriously, this site is rediculous, if it got big, and someone put the effort into writing a big long serious suicide note informing all readers that he would kill over 100 kids, they could shut down the school. Nice.”

One student at Colgate who saw the message, while researching an article she was writing for the student newspaper, did not find the joke funny at all.

She says she initially did not take the message literally, but after talking with her mother about it, she decided to alert authorities, just in case. “You just can’t joke about this,” says the student, who asked not to be named. “That isn’t even funny for a second.”

The campus police alerted local police, who also didn’t find the post funny. They arrested Mr. So after they traced the Internet address used to post the message, according to an article in the Utica Observer-Dispatch

“In today’s day and age, you need to take every perceived threat seriously,” says Charlie J. Melichar, vice president for public relations and communications for the university. “You can’t assume anything just because it’s written in such a way that it’s not serious.”

Mr. Melichar says that university officials sent an e-mail message to everyone with a campus address alerting them of the possible threat.

“As safety is our primary concern, we will have a significant law enforcement presence on campus tomorrow since all classes and activities will be held as normally scheduled,” the message said. “While some may perceive this to be an overreaction, we must take every precaution when the safety of our campus community has been threatened.”

Officials decided not to activate their emergency text-messaging system in this case, though, said Mr. Melichar.

The gossip Web site, which boasts that all postings are “always anonymous … always juicy,” has sparked controversy on many campuses.

This is at least the second instance of a threatening note on Juicy Campus leading to the arrest of a student. In December, Carlos Huerta, a Loyola Marymount University student, was arrested after posting a note to Juicy Campus reportedly threatening to shoot people on campus and then himself. —Jeffrey R. Young

February 19, 2008

Woodbury U. Plans for the Return of Its Virtual Campus

Woodbury University, in Burbank Calif., is greasing the wheels for the return of the Woodbury campus in Second Life.

At a conference this past weekend at Stanford University on virtual worlds, Jordan Bellino, a senior at the university, and Susanna Hendy, an instructor there, told this reporter that they traveled to Northern California not only to attend the conference but also to chat with representatives from Linden Lab, the San Francisco operator of Second Life, in order to urge them to allow Woodbury to have an island in Second Life at the discounted price reserved for educational institutions.

In June, Linden Lab yanked the Woodbury campus from its servers, accusing avatars there of harassment. —Andrea L. Foster

January 11, 2008

Stanford Scientists Build a Better Virtual World

A group of Stanford computer scientists has designed a program that could help users create a more realistic virtual environment in which to interact.

The Stanford Virtual Worlds group announced this week that they have created Dryad, a program in which users can easily “construct” trees in a virtual space.

Using the wealth of information about trees already collect by botanists, Dryad populates the virtual space with trees created from 100 different variables. Users navigate the space and pick their desired tree from thousands of possibilities. A social-networking component refines the software by “nudging” users to trees with popular characteristics.

This, in effect, allows users to pick an item they want without having to go through a complicated creation process, or being able to shape a realistic-looking object manually.

The purpose, apparently, is to eventually allow people to interact in virtual worlds more effectively by proliferating realistic-looking 3-D objects. This has positive implications for the future of online interaction and uplifting discourse, since users could be engaged in a more realistic virtual space. And, like most things in the online world, there’s always the potential for more prurient uses. —Hurley Goodall

January 4, 2008

Second Life Technologist Moves to Academe

When Cory Ondrejka announced last month that he was leaving Linden Lab, the San Francisco company that runs Second Life, there was widespread surprise, as well as speculation about what might have prompted his departure. As the former chief technology officer of Linden Lab, he is credited with playing a huge role in developing Second Life, a virtual environment that has become popular with educators and researchers. During his seven-year tenure at Linden Lab he wrote much of the original code for Second Life and designed the Linden Scripting Language. In a letter to Linden Lab employees, Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of the company, said he and Mr. Ondrejka had irreconcilable differences about how Second Life should be run.

Since that message, Mr. Ondrejka announced on his blog that he will be spending the spring as a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he will be teaching graduate students about online communities. He said he also will be “consulting, writing, and speaking about the economic and technological impact of virtual worlds.”—Andrea L. Foster

December 18, 2007

Are Immersive Worlds the Future of Education or a Distraction?

Some critics have complained that promoting video games in schools and colleges dumbs down education. Academics from colleges around the world gathered this month at Harvard to discuss a multimillion-dollar project to build virtual-reality software exclusively for education, to promote serious gaming in classrooms. Check out an article from The Chronicle (free link).

Not everyone thinks that encouraging students to play online games is a good idea. Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University, said video games do not help students handle real-life challenges.

“Education and entertainment are two different processes,” he said. “They require two different interfaces. Our whole society is being eroded by entertainment.”

December 4, 2007

Climate Change in a Virtual World

Climate change conferences on islands are in vogue this week. Not only is the U.N. hosting one in on the real island of Bali, but a scientific journal is sponsoring one on its virtual archipelago in a computer-generated world.

Second Nature is a locale built by the journal Nature in the virtual world of Second Life. (You have to be a member of Second Life to get on to the site.) It is the scene of four talks on the science of climate, beginning today and continuing through next week. First, Tara LaForce, a lecturer at Imperial College London, will speak about her research into carbon capture and storage, followed by Euan Nisbet, a professor at Royal Holloway College of the University of London. Next week Simon Buckle, Director of Climate Change Policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, will give a talk, as will George Monbiot, columnist for The Guardian newspaper and author of a book on global warming.

Avatars, the cartoonlike representations of users in Second Life, can attend the talks. The carbon footprint of each avatar, incidentally, has been estimated at a relatively modest 1,752 kilowatt hours per year, although the exact number is subject to debate.—Josh Fischman

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