NEW CAERLEON – On the wall is a list on all kinds of exciting subjects: Virtual Art School, Center for the Study of AI, Robotics and A-Life, Center for the Study of the Self in Cyberspace, and many other things. Diverse as they may seem, they all have one thing in common.

”They all involve this new medium that’s cyberspace and virtual worlds. We are going to try and make sense of this phenomenon here.”

So said Georg Janick, aka Gary Zabel, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He’s the mastermind behind both the old Caerleon island, in many ways an artists’ colony, and New Caerleon, which will be more of an educational sim and an open source university.

Having worked with computers and the Internet for many years, he came to Second Life eight months ago with a goal ”to create a colony of artists and writers who would collaborate and teach, and that has been very successful. But I also wanted to expand into other areas, and that’s the purpose of New Caerleon,” explained Janick. 

”This seemed like the next step to me: Bringing higher education into the virtual world, and the virtual world to my students. We have five university professors here right now, including me, and many others, like artists, writers and activists – all of whom will teach here and conduct research,” said Janick.

He will himself teach cosmology, philosophy of mind, robotics, and art history at New Caerleon. ”I gave a course in cosmology in SL last semester for my RL students, and I’m currently giving some lectures on 20th century art in Caerleon.”

Janick describes the experience of teaching in SL as great. ”My students loved it. Both being in SL, and having access to people from all over the world. Hard work, but it paid off.”