Welcome to Secondlife.com, a global Web site designed to create a virtual world, or a second life. Create an avatar, or character, and walk around in a 3-D world to communicate with other avatars.
Using Linden dollars, an avatar can buy or sell clothes, furniture, cars, anything. Build a house. Build a business. Create a market. Live another life.
Winona State University may soon be part of this virtual world.
Winona State’s parent organization, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU), has recently paid almost $1,000 to buy an island about 8,000 acres in size on Second Life, called MnSCU Island, according to information from Secondlife.com.
The purpose of purchasing the island is for educational and research methods, according to Ken Graetz and John Stafford, who are leading the MnSCU funded project at Winona State in collaboration with computer science and education programs.
Hundreds of colleges and universities around the world already use Second Life for many different reasons.
St. Paul College has a building on MnSCU Island created for students to hang their artwork on display.
A school in Florida allows avatars to launch a rocket into space to go on a virtual tour of the solar system. Another college is using Second Life for architecture students to build virtual buildings.
Winona State’s island is not quite that fancy yet, nor may ever be.
“Right now, we’re just looking to see what Second Life can do for our students and for our professors as educators,” Graetz said. “How can this benefit our university?”
Graetz and Stafford are looking at two ways as of now: to see the emerging potential effectiveness of educational resources and also for supporting student services – for example, to promote the university.
The use of Second Life in the classroom would be the choice of the professor, Graetz said.
One way to use Second Life for Winona State would be to create a virtual campus for online users to tour, in case prospective students had limited means to make a trip to Winona to tour the campus.
“People are extremely visual,” Graetz said. “They are attracted to a 3-D world. It allows more cognitive ways of looking at the world.”
Avatars can fly, walk through walls, and transport to places around the world in a matter of seconds. However, Second Life is not a game. There is no health, point value or levels.
As with living in the real world, Graetz cautions that there are the same dysfunctional behaviors that on Second Life that one would find in real life.
“There is a lot of pornography on secondlife.com,” said Graetz. “Some people will build a store and stream inappropriate video clips in it.”
Also, there are some people who will use their avatars to harass other avatars on Second Life. However, there are ways of reporting this behavior to Linden, the company that owns Second Life.
This would also explain why there are two separate grids, or worlds, on Second Life – one for teens, which is highly monitored, and one for adults, which has fewer restrictions.
Darrell Downs is a political science professor at Winona State and has his doubts about using Second Life as an educational method.
“I don’t see much redeeming value in promoting a model of the real world,” Downs said. “You can’t have civil, intelligent conversations on Secondlife.com.”
Downs created an avatar himself to explore the Web site to find why MnSCU has bought the island.
“I just don’t see how making our first life in a second life will be any better; it’s not a positive place or a pleasant environment,” Downs said.
Downs also has concerns with the funded money by MnSCU for Second Life purposes.
“It may not be a lot of money spent on MnSCU Island, but its dollars we’re not getting in other places,” he also said.
Second Life is a commercialized Web site used by corporations all over the world. IBM owns 15 islands that are protected so that employees can use them for business. When the movie 300 came out, Second Life was used as a promotional tool.
Second Life has been seen in recent popular television shows, such “The Office,” and “CSI New York.”
In “The Office,” television character Dwight Schrute creates an avatar because he is unhappy with his current life and plays while he is at work.
Investigators in “CSI: New York” create avatars to track down virtual evidence on Second Life to figure out why a real person is dead.
Winona State’s next step is to purchase an island similar to MnSCU Island.
Graetz expected this to happen within the next few months.

Stephanie can be reached at SMTrask8045@winona.edu.