September 26, 2007 by Nobody Fugazi
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When Second Life and the Soul popped up, I boggled. When I read it, I boggled again. In the article, apparently written by a student of [w:Princeton University], I didn't get the normal 'feel-good-education-in-Second-Life-is-the-cats-meow'. It would have been refreshing - except it initially seemed to be an echo of someone else's voice, or someone with enough angst to make a teenage poet envious. On second reading it seems confused:
...Princeton has recently begun pouring money into a software program known as Second Life. The University owns a plot of "land" in cyberspace on which it is reconstructing such familiar landmarks as Nassau and Alexander Halls. The design is imperfect; The campus floods only after heavy rains. Though no full explanations have been offered, the challenges presented by this initiative are already clear...
Those of us who use Second Life would probably yell at the unnamed author for calling 'Second Life' a program; it is just a little bit more than that. The second half of the paragraph has me wondering if Princeton's real world campus is flooding... and I wonder why it seems special that 'the campus floods only after heavy rains'. Only? This is confusing. Reading on:
...Shall we truly come full circle to the intellectual abyss that precepts were designed to remedy? Do not "virtual" classrooms yield "virtual" learning? We are human beings, not "avatars." For a campus to be free and open, we must speak with our own voices and hear with our own ears...
Virtual learning? What's that about? Of course we're human beings. I don't think anyone has had an avatar run their lives...
...Should Second Life begin to intersect or usurp student life, however, this campus will be radically worse off for it...
Wow. Just plain... wow. Granted, I can agree that there is often a focus on technology which demeans education - there are lots of computers in schools that are glorified typewriters, if only because curriculum hasn't been adapted for the technology. At the University level it is supposed to be better. Costs of use of Second Life by an educational institution, as paid to Linden Lab, are low - but how much money is spent on staff salaries?
I honestly don't know what to make of the article, though, especially in the context of Princeton. Maybe I've been divorced from tobacco water pipes too long. Not that I ever used them. I heard about those from a friend who experimented for 30 years.
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I haven't been to SL Princeton . . .
. . . but I do live within driving distance of the real one, and I can assure you that, like most of central New Jersey, it does flood after a good rain. I'd hesitate to draw the line at heavy.
From context I'm guessing the Princetonian genius writing this article for the school paper is not at the top of hir class. I'm also guessing that virtual Princeton's campus represents the terrain at one of its soggier moments. Or perhaps it's just still under construction. Then again, maybe someone submitted as flawed terrain map for the initial terraforming of the sim.
Actually, I think my favorite malapropism in the piece is the bit about "perspective" students. I thought the author had just finished telling us that we were all real people, not avatars. So why be so concerned with perspective? Don't real people make their own perspective, sort of like something else I remember -- I think it was a brand of dog food -- that makes its own sauce?
Apparently the writer was also unaware that "this newspaper" also lives in an online edition, since the tenor of the piece evokes such an image of an aspiring student journalist whose mind is still stuck somewhere in journalistic time between H.L. Mencken and Randolph Hearst.
I'm so confused. I think I need to check out SL Princeton, instead of Burning Life, the next time I'm able to actually get into the "program."