Liability in Second Life

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Michael J. Bugeja has a provocative article on Second Life in the Chronicle of Higher Education,

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=dHv22gfCjgzHjdwtshMyvczQnrKgkjsP... September 14, 2007, "Second Thoughts on Second Life." His concern is with liability. In Second Life, there can be good things and bad things. Just like life. Virtual rape, virtual harassment, virtual sexism, racism, homophobia. Virtual murder. The problem, though, is that there is no policing and, if one requires using a virtual environment like Second Life in a course, it is not clear what the professor's role is. Policeman? Protector? What are the liability rules here? Linden Labs, which owns and "operates" Second Life, identifies itself as a "distributor of content" and says it has "very limited control, if any, over the quality, safety, morality, legality, truthfulness, or accuracy of various aspects of the Service." Well, if they don't who does?

Prof. Bugeja recommends the following to anyone thinking of teaching a course in Second Life. And I recommend you read his whole article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, at the url above and saved to my Del.icio.us account.

Reblogged from "Second Thoughts on Second Life"by Michael J. Bugeja. This section begins with Bugeja talking with Melissa Blevins, a civil lawyer in Iowa, about the potential for cases to be brought against professors and their institutions for requring participation in Second Life when harassment occurs there:

To be released from liability, [Blevins said,] . . . professors would need to insert a clause in their syllabus stating: "Second Life participation is voluntary and lack of participation will not affect your grade." If you're requiring participation, holding classes in Second Life, you and/or your institution also may be accepting liability for virtual events that happen there.

Few campus lawyers were willing to go on the record with other suggestions or warnings because legal standards in this area have not yet been fully determined. That suggests that universities have rushed into online consumer markets without fully understanding liabilities. Until we do, we must rely on traditional academic standards:

• Procedure: Send a copy of this article to your campus lawyer, equity officer, accountant, human-resources supervisor, teaching-center director, network administrator, and ombudsman, requesting their opinions about issues raised here.

• Debate: Hold a public forum and/or a faculty meeting to discuss these issues openly with experts on cyberlaw, new media, technology, gaming, harassment, ethics, and other related disciplines.

• Research: Go online to view the warnings and disclaimers included in the syllabi of computer-science professors, scholars in studio and fine arts, and in social, forensic, and medical sciences (to name a few) whose real or online environments might expose students to content that some might find potentially offensive.

• Best practices: Prepare faculty members and students for the Second Life experience in orientations, adopting the policies already in use by campus programs that routinely expose students to unfamiliar environments, such as travel abroad, archaeological digs, social work, internships, and volunteer work.

• Assessment: Analyze technology use in terms of cost versus learning outcomes and keep files of your institutional efforts to be used in accreditation as well as disputes, documenting that you have addressed these issues.

Linden Lab says it has "the right but not the obligation to resolve disputes." But you as an educator have the right and the obligation to use academic principles to explore harassment issues in the for-profit tech world now embedded in academe.

by ee on September 11, 2007 - 2:38pm.