LIS 9763

This week’s readings tended to focus on games=play vs. education. So I am taking a different direction and focusing on an issue that I think has generally been overlooked in the literature we are reading. That is, the legal issues facing educational institutions using Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are interesting places to look into. Second Life is the big one that gets all the exposure in library literature and part of this is due to Second Life’s outreach efforts to the educational communities. According to Kelton, Linden Lab (the creator of Second Life), “has made exceptional efforts to reach out to the educational community and to provide the resources that will allow teaching and learning to be an important part of its business plan. Educational institutions receive discounts to encourage investment in “land,” which must be used for educational purposes.”
 
As more people move into the virtual worlds, it becomes more complex and commercialized. Then real world problems begin to crop up, although due to ‘the newness’ of these problems, how to effectively resolve them remain uncertain. According to Benjamin Durabske (in his 2008 book, Virtual Law: Navigating the legal landscape of virtual worlds):

"Because virtual worlds are designed to mirror the real world, many of the same problems that require attorneys in the real world arise in virtual worlds as well. Users (via their avatars) form and break contracts, create works of art, invent new technologies, make money, lose money, buy and develop virtual property, create new brands, defraud each other, defame each other, steal from each other, and attack each other. Though many of these acts are clearly covered by existing laws, fundamental differences between virtual worlds and the real world leave the application of these laws to in-world activity fraught with uncertainty. New laws may be written to specifically cover activity that takes place in virtual worlds, but more often, particularly in the short term, existing laws will be interpreted to cover in-world activities" (p. 14-15).

The only article I recall from our readings addressing this issue mentioned that, “Unguided exploration is an effective learning style for certain students in certain subjects, but virtual worlds present a risk of students’ simply goofing off, not participating at all, or engaging in inappropriate or offensive behavior.”

However, the problem can be bigger than simply the students’ behaviour. To quote Bugeja, “We're talking about whether you as a professor or administrator will be held accountable for introducing your students and/or employees to a virtual world that accepts little responsibility for anything that happens among avatars, including online harassment and assault.”
 
Unlike traditional video games, in online virtual worlds, each avatar inhabiting the game is operated a live person. When an institution gets involved in virtual worlds, they need to understand that this can cause special types of problems that do not occur when using other forms of games. Michael J. Bugeja’s article gives a good summary of some of the issues. As Bugeja states, “When it comes to technology, we in academe usually only see the positives, often without assessment data to justify our expenditures.” And this can be seen in the articles presented this week. Due to the various ways that other people use virtual worlds, educators need to think more about the consequences of introducing students into such an environment. A good book to consult when finding out about the various non-educational ways people use Second Life is Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.

One way to resolve some of the problems like harassment, is to create private areas that only students from your institution can access. Private worlds may work better for things like specialized training initiatives. According to an article in Forbes,
 
“organizations are increasingly using Second Life for distance learning and virtual tradeshows as opposed to marketing; parent company Linden Labs rolled out the Second Life Grid, which organizations like IBM, Stanford and NASA have used to create their own private worlds within Second Life.”

So if you wish to use Second Life in your course, this may be a good lead to follow for educational institutions. However, as Chris Johnson states, “Walling off students from the rest of the environment may address international legal issues, but this defeats the social aspects of many of these worlds.”

I think that given the right circumstance, Second Life and other virtual worlds can be of great educational use to various fields such as medicine, emergency services, and particularly many technical fields, or even for the study of history or architecture. There are simulations there than can allow people to experience things like schizophrenia and you can visit recreations of historical sites or even hell. You can switch the gender of your avatar and visit places that are restricted to male or female only in the real world.  

However, the role libraries have to play in the virtual world is still remains murky to me. When libraries get involved in virtual worlds, they will need to look into what they really hope to accomplish by joining and whether virtual worlds run by for-profit institutions are the way to go.