Drexel Triangle Second Life Article

The Drexel Triangle published an article about Drexel Island on July 27, 2007.

I think it is great that the library is installing Second Life on its desktop computers:

Drexel opens Second Life campus
By: Nancy Lan

The next time you log in to Second Life, the 3-D virtual world run by its residents, you might run in to a Drexel professor teaching a course.

The University bought land on Second Life, May 9. The property has been named Drexel Island and cost about $900 to purchase plus an additional $150 per month for maintenance, according to Jean-Claude Bradley, E-Learning Coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Bradley said Second Life can help faculty members take their classroom materials to a new level.

"It's a more engaging kind of environment than, say, a message board or instant messaging … it's a lot more intuitive, I think, than blind chat," Bradley said.

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Second Life will also be available soon on all desktop computers in the library. Siftar said that this implementation will provide "Heightened fun … all on your own computers collocated in virtual space, flying with one another, going and teleporting to different sites. That's a very teambuilding experience."

Philadelphia Inquirer Second Life Article

The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article on Drexel Island Sunday July 29, 2007.

Here is a sample:

Adventurous avatars
Drexel opens a new educational frontier in cyberspace.

By Katie Stuhldreher
Inquirer Staff Writer

Drexel University professor Jean-Claude Bradley can log in from his lab or home and teleport to his organic chemistry classroom, fly around his three-dimensional molecular models, and teach wearing a cat suit.

Bradley, 38, uses the virtual world of Drexel Island - an e-campus shaped like a dragon, Drexel's mascot.

City of Pods

This has been a productive week with setting up Drexel Island on Second Life. We have settled on a pod tree structure to house departments and faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences. Eloise helped with the pods and Beth and I selected most of the content. The chemistry pod has a list of recent student awards, some images of our equipment and a 3D Bunsen burner and molecule.



The faculty pods are arranged like leaves hovering above the departmental base pods. There are plenty of spaces that we'll populate as we get more faculty involved. For my pod, I have my picture, a link to my organic chemistry class wiki, my research wiki and an example of a quiz obelisk. Other pods have desks. I think that this would be a nice arrangement for virtual open houses where prospective students could visit a few professors from each department in their pods.

The library is now also set up with this pod city framework, organized by guides to literature and databases. There are teleports connecting the chemistry department pod (slurl) to the chemistry resource pod (slurl) in the library section. I think that this type of navigation is important to leverage our resources and make the island as useful as possible to students and faculty.

I ran a Second Life workshop on Friday for CoAS and assisted more faculty from English and Math to set up their avatars. Already we have had participation from Enrollment Management, Drexel E-Learning and the iSchool in the main building. It looks like Nursing is next...

Here is a presentation that I used this week with some representative screenshots: