College-bound Avatars

Teens investigating colleges assembled in virtual environment Teen Second Life (TSL) this fall for the first Virtual College Fair. As if attending an event from the comfort of your own PC wasn’t good enough, the fair also offered free T-shirts (albeit virtual). More than 176 students meandered among about 20 booths in Eye4You Alliance, an educational “island” inside TSL cosponsored by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) and the Alliance Library System of East Peoria, IL. There, teens could meet with reps from various schools, including Penn State, the University of Kentucky, San Jose State, and the University of Paisley, Scotland. Additional speakers represented a range of potential employers, from NASA and Amazon.com to TSL creator Linden Lab. “They talked about how skills teens use in Second Life, like computer scripting, can translate into a career in technology,” says Kelly Czarnecki, a technology education librarian who helped run the October 20–21 event.

Czarnecki, who works at ImaginOn, a cooperative venture between PLCMC and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, and Beth Kraemer, of the University of Kentucky’s William T. Young Library, solicited teen volunteers to help create booths for the event, as well as the T-shirts and other virtual swag that students could take with them.

Because any adult entering Teen Second Life must undergo a background check, a few colleges ended up applying too late to have a booth at the fair. But Czarnecki will be there to help them set up the next time. “A lot of people didn’t know how to build objects, and we expected that,” she says. “But we worked with them, and we’ll be willing to do that again.” You can view a video of the fair at www.uky.edu/~kraemer/FairFinal/FairFinal.mov.