Dr. Gerald Lucas, Assistant Pro­fessor of English, is teaching two sections of ENGL 1101 this semester that focus on writing for Second Life. What exactly is Second Life? And what place does it have in the class­room here at Macon State College?

According to the Linden Lab website (the creators of Second Life), “Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its residents (people like you) that’s bursting with entertainment, experiences and opportunity. The Second Life Grid provides the platform where Second Life resides and offers the tools for business, educators, nonprofits and entrepreneurs to develop a virtual presence.� (http://lindenlab.com)

Second Life’s virtual community has over a million users worldwide who essentially create a second life in which they can choose to participate in various activities such as exploring, building, owning property, holding jobs and shopping. So, how did this online virtual community end up in Lucas’s ENGLL 1101 classes?

Lucas came up with the idea to incorporate Second Life in his ENGL 1101 classes because he was looking for an innovative way to revamp his ENGL 1101 composition class. “The first thing that really motivated me to use Second Life in this composition course is that composition is very dif­ficult to teach and it’s easy to get into a rut every semester. It just got to be sort of boring,� Lucas said.

“Secondly, I needed something new to do, something a little more innova­tive in the class other than ‘let’s just take out a pen and write an essay.’ I had been familiar with Second Life for a while and thought it might be an interesting way to get students to talk about what I see are becoming more important issues.�

He continued “Second Life al­lows us to look at issues like identity, identity building, gender, sexuality and race. It brings all these ideas to the forefront in a way that students can engage them because they are all entering Second Life at the same level. None of them had ever been in Second Life before and most of them had never heard of it.�

Since Second Life is a 3-D graph­ics environment, it allows students to participate and interact directly within a dynamic world. According to Lucas “Second Life is 3-D and it is engaging in that way. It’s not text-based, so students aren’t turned off. It’s an engaging environment and it allows the students to look at these issues while actually participating in the world of Second Life.�

MSC student Rachel Edge enjoys writing in this class, “Dr. Lucas is probably my favorite professor that I have had the opportunity to work with here at MSC. His class this semester involving Second Life is defi­nitely a new experience for all his stu­dents. It is always complex and allows students to voice their opinions on some tricky and sometimes uncom­fortable subjects such as virtual rape, reality vs. virtual reality and ethical situations online. The fact that we are using Second Life as a learning device really emphasizes the importance of such topics.�

Assignments for the students in ENGL 1101 Writing for Second Life have included building avatars and tweaking them and taking screen captures. The students are given an assignment in Second Life and then write about the process of their as­signment and experiences in Second Life.

For example, the students wrote about why they chose to create their avatar the way they did and why they chose a specific gender or look. By exploring Second Life through their assignments, the students are forced to interact, participate, chat and com­municate within the world of Second Life.

Overall, Lucas has been pleased with the Writing for Second Life classes. As he said, “One of the moti­vations for doing this is approaching writing in a way that’s different, in a way that’s not just the let’s sit down and write an essay, but it’s let’s ap­proach it from another way. And I think I have had some success with that. I think the students who are in there are engaged.�

“I would absolutely recommend the class to other Macon State students. It would be a new and exciting way for them to search out answers to questions that they themselves may have been too afraid to ask. The fact that Dr. Lucas allows his students to have discussions during class time is effective because it involves get­ting his students to debate with each other and learn to respect their peers’ perspectives,� Edge said.

written by Becca Edwards