Virtual College Fair Attracts Teens

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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 11/6/2007 8:43:00 AM

As if attending an event from the comfort of your own PC wasn't good enough, this event also offered free (virtual) T-shirts.

More than 176 students meandered the 20 or so booths set up on Eye4You Alliance, an education island inside the teen portion of Second Life, the virtual environment run by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. Students could meet with representatives from various colleges, including Penn State, the University of Kentucky, and the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. There were also speakers representing a range of employers, from NASA to Amazon.com, who chatted about life—and work—after college.

“They talked about how skills teens use in Second Life, like computer scripting, can translate into a career in technology,” says Kelly Czarnecki, technology education librarian with ImaginOn at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, who helped run the event on October 20 and 21.

Czarnecki, Beth Kraemer of the University of Kentucky’s William T. Young Library, and teens on the island helped the colleges build booths and create some of the virtual objects such as the T-shirts and flip books that students could copy and take with them. 

Because of the ample prep time required (any adult entering Teen Second Life must have a background check), a few colleges applied too late to have a booth at the fair. But Czarnecki will be there to help them set up for the next event.

“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.”