Student Exchange, Without the Jet Lag: Educational Collaboration in a Virtual World

In advance of their overseas visits, California and Japanese high school students get acquainted on neutral Second Life turf.

by Rob Baedeker

Leslie Bank, a tenth grader at Turlock High School, in California's Central Valley, has a favorite place to visit. "It's a cool lake, and it's up in the sky," she says. "I like to go there and explore."

Her gravity-defying getaway is located in Second Life, the online, 3-D virtual world developed by San Francisco-based Linden Labs. (See "The School of Second Life: Education Online.") Second Life participants create avatars, or customizable digital selves, to navigate a virtual landscape with an over-the-shoulder screen view of their persona as it walks, runs, or flies through or over mountains, forests, buildings, and all manner of objects created by users employing Second Life's internal 3-D modeling tools.

But Bank's involvement with the virtual world goes beyond extraterrestrial rambling. She's one of the first students to participate in the Pacific Rim Exchange (dubbed PacRimX), a cross-cultural project that will link several high schools in the Modesto, California, area to Kyoto Gakuen High School, in Kyoto, Japan, via a group of private "islands" in the Teen Second Life Grid (a separate Second Life space that exists apart from the Main Grid and is open only to kids 13-17 and approved adults).

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