Librarians and teachers who sometimes live a second life July 15, 2007

Two weeks ago I discovered fiction and poetry in Second Life, the online role-playing environment (don't call it a game) that just celebrated its fourth birthday.

I also found that where there's literature there are professors and librarians, eager to see what happens when classrooms are sometimes surreal places where students can teleport and fly.

Beth Ritter-Guth is an English professor at Lehigh Carbon Community College in Schnecksville, PA who runs Community Colleges Without Borders. The group hosts a number of online projects, including Literature Alive!, an educational program that takes place entirely within Second Life (SL).

With the help of designer Eloise Pasteur, Ritter-Guth designed several SL classrooms. One is a castle where classes on gothic literature are taught. There's also a Kate Chopin classroom, where students can watch 3-D interpretations of the writer's stories "The Awakening" and "Story of an Hour."

On a recent evening Ritter-Guth invited me to sit in on her SL class. I logged in and fumbled around as I tried to maneuver my poor avatar, for whom I'd chosen a sort of unfortunate cybergoth look. Then Ritter-Guth--as her avatar Desideria Stockton--sent me a link to her classroom, a kind of study lounge with informational posters on the walls.

About 20 avatars stood and sat around the room, and the chat box on my screen registered everything they said, whether it was to another individual or to the whole group. The crisscrossing conversations were not unlike the chatter of a real classroom before the teacher gets started.

"This is a class on Contemporary Fiction!" Ritter-Guth typed, commanding attention. "This is a real class and we have real work to do."

The kids were students of Ritter-Guth's real-life class at DeSales University, though the SL portion of the course is free and open to the public. As they set about defining literary terms, another teacher--an avatar named LauraMaria Onomatopoeia decked out in heels and jeans--gave me a tour.

In real life LauraMaria is Laura Nicosia, an English professor at Montclair State University in northern New Jersey. Ritter-Guth met Nicosia in SL when Montclair State helped for Ritter-Guth set up her virtual classrooms. When Ritter-Guth told Nicosia she planned to create buildings based on novels by Gloria Naylor, she discovered Nicosia is a Naylor scholar.

"We instantly bonded," Ritter-Guth said, and they went on to create spaces such as Bailey's Cafe, modeled after the eatery in the Naylor novel by the same name.

Nicosia led me into one of several apartments, an as-yet empty room complete with details like plaster and bricks. Nicosia said the students will each furnish an apartment after a character in one of the novels they study. She told me this type of learning is powerful because it engages several senses.

The American Library Association has joined SL too, in an area called Cybrary City. ALA Internet Development Specialist Jenny Levine said the professional group uses the service to disseminate ALA news, and also to hold events and interact with the public.

My next visit to SL was a totally solitary one, which allowed me to practice using SL's sometimes bewildering functions but prevented me from asking another real person about the things I found there.

Those included the delightful Readers Garden, which was filled with flowers, the gurgle of fountains, and the avatar-sized book of a long rhyming ballad written by SL-er Meekly Nordwind. The Garden hosts poetry readings and book discussions.

After my visit I chatted with Donavan Vicha, the Web Program Officer of the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies and the Reference and User Services Association, both divisions of the ALA.

"I'm not a librarian--but I play one on SL!" Vicha joked. He described part of SL's usefulness as a teaching tool for librarians-in-training, and he's excited about the service's possibilities for information sharing.

"Think of this: more than 500 self-identified librarians visit this role playing game environment called Second Life. What do they do? They go there to answer other avatars' questions! Why do they do this? They love it. Even when they're playing, it's what they do, it's in their nature. I can't begin to describe how that touches my heart."

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