Appeared in print: Sunday, April 17, 2011, page B1
Wednesday night, a man from Washington, D.C., walked up to me after a talk I gave on writing and suggested I do a book on a female Civil War doctor.
His name was Arthur Conan Doyle. He looked a little like a distinguished Richard Dreyfuss. We chatted a bit. I thanked him. And then, poof, he was gone as quickly as I shut off my lap top computer.
That’s because our conversation wasn’t taking place in the real world but in a virtual Second Life world, on a University of Oregon campus surrounded not by Eugene but by the sea.
And Doyle, himself, wasn’t real, just like the dozen others who’d come to hear me speak — Ruby Flanagan, Ecclectic Moonkill and Martwin Islay among them — weren’t real.
Heck, just like I wasn’t real.
We were all walking-talking avatars, characters in a Second Life online community interested in writing.
Since November, Second Life has been the major thrust of Project DIRECT (Distance Innovations for Rural Educators using Communication Technologies), a quite real program within the quite real Oregon Writing Project, which is part of UO’s quite real Center for Advanced Technology in Education. (There’ll be a test on this later.)
And those avatars I spoke to — with a mind-numbing lack of gesturing, some hinted — belong mainly to rural teachers in Southern Oregon.
“We have all these wonderful teachers in rural areas who are so isolated,” says Peggy Marconi, assistant director of the Oregon Writing Project. “They have nobody to share ideas with about their profession. So, we tried to connect them by phone and e-mail, which wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped.”
Then along came Second Life, spearheaded by a grant rounded up by OWP Director Lynne Anderson-Inman.
“The response from the participants has been overwhelming,” Marconi says.
“Even though we’ve met only once as a group in real life, we have, since November, built a community of people who are supporting each other,” says Mary Harwood, a Goshen Elementary teacher and mentor on the project.
“It’s fantastic,” says Brooke Armstrong, an online teacher for the Southern Oregon Education Service District.“I truly feel like it has helped me get back to the top of my game.”
The people-powered avatars gather each Wednesday night in this virtual world to learn, share ideas on writing, talk about teaching, and, sometimes, fly.
Alas, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can also fall from the sky. Talk to a wall instead of the audience. And, as happened to a teacher a while back, get a bookcase stuck to your leg.
That’s nothing. While waiting to meet Harwood in a coffee shop, I fired up my Second Life screen only to embody that famous quote “the avatar has no clothes.” Whoops. Nobody taught me to dress.
If I’m an avatarian neophyte, the world is full of the opposite. More than 20 million people are registered users of Second Life, which began in 2003.
“Intel conducts most of its meetings with it,” Marconi says. “Air Force pilots use avatars.”
The Second Life world — it’s free for basic service (secondlife.com) — is virtually limitless. An Episcopalian Church holds its services on it, creating a worldwide membership.
Beyond lessons on writing, the Project DIRECT folks have taken safari tours, traveled to Hyde Park in London, bought kimonas in ancient Japan. Oh, yeah, you can travel back in time. Or forward.
“A teacher could take her classroom to a lunch-counter sit-in in Birmingham, Ala., in the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s,” Harwood says.
Among the Southern Oregon teachers, one is prepping to build a Native American long house with her students, another opening a virtual bookstore. Of course, Second Life isn’t without a downside. It’s not for the technologically timid. Jerks in real life can be jerks in a virtual world, too; witness the “griefers” — uninvited harassers — who recently interrupted a UO session. And real as it is — Marconi is convinced she caught Harwood’s cold in Second Life — I found it like talking to the ticket-taker behind a movie theater’s Plexiglass.
But that could be my inexperience speaking; hey, at one point I started bowing in mid-sentence.
That said, though I’d be concerned about people who allow this to replace their real lives, I’ve signed on for a second session, convinced it’s a tool with benefits.
As I spoke, the dozen students raised their hands to ask questions or typed them out for all to see on an accompanying box. My slides showed up on a miniature drive-in-movie screen. The screen and the rest of Project DIRECT’s slice of the UO island were designed by consultant Tom Layton, a former Eugene School District high-tech guru who is now semi-retired and living in Washington, D.C.
I met him Wednesday night. Well, sort of.
He was, I later learned, no other than Arthur Conan Doyle.
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