More than three years ago an island was purchased for the Roy H. Park School of Communications in the virtual world of Second Life. Now the island often resembles a ghost town.

“Sometimes you expect a tumbleweed to blow by,” assistant television-radio professor Kim Gregson said.

Despite the buzz about Second Life when it was publicly released in 2003, only a handful of Ithaca College professors have experimented with it. Though users could socialize in this customizable digital environment through avatars — character representations of themselves — many users, which have included educators and casual gamers alike, have felt that their expectations of it have fallen flat.  

The Park School paid a $1,500 start-up fee and has been paying $150 in rent per month since it launched in 2006. Diane Gayeski, the interim dean of the Park School, spoke about the potential of online education during her candidate sessions.

“It will be up to the permanent dean and faculty who teach courses that might require online tools such as Second Life to make decisions about how it might be continued in the Park School after June 1,” she said.

To attract new users, especially in higher education, Linden Lab, Second Life’s creators, is developing an alternative product, while educators take a second look at the potential of fully incorporating virtual reality into the classroom.

Gregson first introduced former Park Dean Dianne Lynch to Second Life, who then seized the chance to buy Park’s own virtual island. Gregson said she has continued immersing her students into the world for her research and game development classes for several years, and, for her, the educational outcomes have fulfilled Lynch’s vision of three-dimensional, international interaction.

“Ithaca is a fairly homogenous community … but Second Life is full of people from around the world, so it’s easier to do better research than you could do in the real world,” she said.

A frequent complaint against Second Life has been the lack of user-to-user privacy, since the world is one large, public space. Linden Lab is seeking to address this by its recent announcement to deploy standalone versions of Second Life, which allow educational institutions to host exclusive worlds on their own servers, protected behind their own firewalls and accessible only to faculty and students.

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has been testing the pilot version for the past year. Project lead Sue Shick said the additional level of privacy has lent itself well to role-playing situations in cooperation with a local hospital to teach medical students sensitivity training.

“What we’re trying to see is whether the conversations between avatars in this world are going to disinhibit people from discussing things with a surgeon,” she said.

Sophomore Ashley Alicea said she hasn’t returned to Second Life after taking a class with Gregson because she doesn’t enjoy interacting with strangers in the chat-room environment.

“If more of my friends were in it, maybe I’d play more,” she said.

Gregson said most of her students don’t continue using Second Life after the courses despite their positive feedback. She said faculty and students have likely resisted virtual spaces because they’re difficult to navigate.

“There’s a huge learning curve,” she said. “People who like being in control find it embarrassing when you don’t know how to [make your avatar] sit down. People have to be willing to take a chance and learn, but we haven’t yet.”

Sharon Stansfield, associate professor of computer science, said she agrees that virtual worlds haven’t become popular because they’re not user-friendly.

“Virtual worlds aren’t intuitive,” she said. “That’s why I think the Nintendo Wii is the first step toward a commercial application of virtual reality.”

Dozens of colleges and universities currently have active projects in Second Life or similar virtual worlds, according to a February 2010 report by the New Media Consortium, an organization for educational groups to evaluate new technologies.

More than 1,400 organizations, including educational institutions and Fortune 500 companies, own property in Second Life, and the number has risen in the past two years, according to Justine Lee, Linden Lab press officer.

But, unlike many colleges and universities on the list, Ithaca College has never launched a campus-wide virtual project, according to Marilyn Dispensa, instructional technology coordinator for Technology and Instructional Support Services.

“When other faculty are ready to experiment, we’re ready to support them,” she said.

Other professors at the college who have experimented in Second Life include assistant philosophy and religion professor Rachel Wagner, who has demonstrated Second Life to her students about its implications to religious communities, and clinical associate professor of physical therapy Mike Buck, who attempted to create a virtual physical therapy clinic for students to practice working with patients.

Cornell University also owns property in Second Life. Carol Grumbach, a lecturer in Cornell’s Program on Ethics and Public Life, is bringing law and engineering students together to role-play an investigation of actual toxic contamination in a virtual South Hill.

“This is a real-world problem that raises ethical issues any lawyer would face,” she said about the project, which begins next week. “... [Second Life] was the only way to make this happen.”

Gregson will leave the college at the end of this year, planning to continue using the program wherever she teaches. But she doesn’t expect other faculty to perpetuate her enthusiasm for it.

“Maybe we were just on the bandwagon too early and some other folks will pick it up in a bit when it becomes more commercial,” she said.

But she added that even if the school abandons the Park island and if Second Life turns out to be a short-lived fad, virtual communities have long-term staying power.

“It’s a creative space, and that ties into education in a big way,” she said.