Second guessing: is there a context for Second Life in legal education?

In their paper Michael Bromby and Martin Jones (Glasgow Caledonian University) invited participants to speculate on the potential for Second Life in law, reporting on their experiences with students on a legal IT module.

The session was blogged on Zeugma, and Michael and Martin’s slides are embedded below. Michael also presented this paper at the 2009 BILETA conference, and two videos of his project are available on YouTube: introduction | findings

For more about Second Life see our guidance note, Teaching in virtual worlds.

Second Life is a three dimensional virtual world accessed by users via the Internet. Subscribers create characters called avatars in order to explore Second Life space and to interact with others. The avatar is an alter ego of the user, who chooses a name and can customise its appearance. Second Life has no unifying purpose – it is not a game with identifiable winners. Proponents of Second Life argue that it represents an embryonic migration to a 3D Internet.

Although Second Life is free to access, it is possible to buy ‘land’ in order to create content or sell services to subscribers. The economy of Second Life is built around its own currency, the Linden Dollar, which it is possible to trade for US Dollars.

Glasgow Caledonian University, in common with an increasing number of universities globally, has purchased land in Second Life and built a replica of part of its campus. The creation of such space was, however, made in advance of any detailed strategy as to how such an environment might be exploited for learning – instead, the university invited staff to submit proposals as part of a competition.

In the session Michael and Martin described their struggle to find a context for Second Life in legal education. Fundamentally, one area of concern was how students would react to the immersive environment in Second Life and how this might impact on learning. With this in mind, a short pilot project with 50 LLB students on the Legal IT module was initiated in November 2008. The session demonstrated the Second Life concept and reported the initial experiences of staff and the views of level 2 students gathered through a questionnaire.

Diane Wragg (University of Gloucestershire) reports:
Michael and Martin’s presentation on the use of Second Life in legal education was fascinating for the vast majority of the audience who had heard of Second Life but had no first hand experience. It was intended to begin with a demonstration of the Glasgow Caledonian ‘island’ in Second Life and the avatar of one of the presenters, but needless to say the system crashed!

Nevertheless participants gained a clear idea of Second Life and how it works. The overall impression was that there are great potential uses for legal education but as yet they are very undeveloped. There is little legal content already available, so if use is to be made of Second Life in the short term this involves creating the content as well as the structure.

The impetus for Michael and Martin’s project was that Glasgow Caledonian had made the decision to invest in Second Life as an institution. It was already proving useful for students in architecture and health related studies, so other subjects were effectively being asked to find uses – Second Life was not a solution to any perceived gap in law resources.

Contributions from the floor expressed interest – some law schools already have their own virtual or simulated worlds. My sense as chair was that it was unlikely that any of the audience would be regarding the development of Second Life as an immediate priority, but were very pleased to have been brought up to date with this area.

About the presenters

Michael Bromby is chair of the e-learning group at Glasgow Caledonian’s School of Law and Social Sciences. He is an executive member of BILETA and blogs for UKCLE at Digital Directions. Michael’s work on online discussion boards is funded under the Caledonian Scholars and Associates Scheme.

Martin Jones is director of the LLM programme at Glasgow Caledonian’s School of Law and Social Sciences. He is module leader for legal IT, e-law and EU law, and acts as Blackboard coordinator within the school. Martin has also been recognised as a Caledonian Scholar.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010