Local University Loses All Credibility

On Saturday, the Inquirer ran an article about Drexel’s new Second Life campus. Drexel’s new Second Life campus! I brushed it off, figuring either the citizens of the tech or Philadelphia blogosphere (shoot me) would have made fun of it immediately and so I didn’t have any obligation to post over the weekend making fun of it.

Then what do I see when I wake up this morning and search? Nothing! Somebody saying he was jealous of the move! Somebody else calling it interesting! And a blog post titled “Depression on Drexel Island” — oh, yeah, the campus is called “Drexel Island” — is actually about students learning about depression in a virtual classroom! Intentionally!

Need I mention this is about how Drexel opened a campus in fucking Second Life, home of the flying penis?

So where was I? Oh, right, Drexel’s Second Life campus. It gets 100 visitors daily. For all the media attention Second Life gets, it’s worth noting the most popular MMORPG is World of Warcraft, because you can kill people in it. (This is how video games should be. The highlight of Second Life is something like “opening a store,” something I can do in real life. If you want a game to be good, I better be able to vaporize unicorns, be a a plumber who stomps on turtles, fight giant robots with other giant robots and lead the Eagles to a Super Bowl win. You know, things that are impossible in real life.)

According to this chart, Second Life isn’t even in the top 12 MMORPGS. If Drexel really wanted to attract visitors, they’d set up a campus that sells Orc heads (or whatever) in Warcraft.

Drexel, though, isn’t the only one with Second Life real estate, though the school is the only one with a dragon-shaped island.

Although they do not use the program as extensively as does Drexel, Temple University, the University of the Arts, Thomas Jefferson University, and Pennsylvania State University have recently become Second Life sites. Susan Toth-Cohen, associate professor of occupational therapy at Jefferson, just began a year-long trial lease of two properties in Second Life to test its possible uses for the school.

Second Life would be helpful to online degree candidates, she said, because 75 percent of people who start such programs do not finish, often because of the lack of interpersonal interaction.

“Hello, I’ll be the chief surgeon for you today. I graduated from med school in Second Life, and so I am an expert in sexualized anthropomorphic foxes. And giant flying penises.”

Adventurous avatars [Inquirer]