Habitat For Humanity Site, South Richmond

I have spent a lot of time in the past year, in this space, remarking on how Second Life’s avatars are building an online world. But a real-life house is a world for a family, and I’ve just returned from helping to make that sort of world.

In Second Life, building is fairly easy.  With the free tools provided every resident, it’s a matter of making, shaping, and assembling geometrical “prims” into anything desired. Then, with a few more clicks and perhaps with a few Lindens spent, “textures” get added and modified to make the building look good. I enjoy this process, and one of my proudest moments of my past year in Second Life has been my “Frank Lloyd Wrong” glass house, now floating high above Richmond Island (though just below Pappy Enoch’s floating hillbilly travel-trailer).

As proud as my house in Second Life made me, however, the feeling does not compare to the work we are doing for Habitat for Humanity, part of the university’s “Build It” program this year. With my student Brian, shown helping me run a chop-saw, and a group of staff and student volunteers, we made framing parts for a new home, raised roof-trusses into place, put down weather-seal, felt, and shingles, and generally made a group of real-life prims into something that began to look like shelter.

Habitat’s model reminds me of the start-up spirit of Second Life, in fact. It is not a “give away” program. The owners of the new homes will get a reasonable mortgage, but they must put in “sweat equity” on their and other Habitat homes as workers.  Profits from the loans go to make more homes. And so families of modest means get to make a world for themselves.

I plan to volunteer more for Habitat.  I have enough real-life builder’s skills not to be a “noob” on the construction site, and one Second-Life skill comes in very handy: I can see right angles almost automatically, something that happens after lining up enough prims in the virtual world.  As I keep telling my students, many of whom range from an unreasonable fear of Second Life to outright despising it, it need not be “either or” for online engagements.

We must not lose our connection with the world on this side of our screens…yet sometimes we can build something useful and cheaper in virtual spaces. In a future post, I’ll talk about how librarians in SL are doing what they cannot here.  In a virtual space, they too are building a habitat…for information. Here’s a teaser pic from that tour (I’m in the dreadlocks…that is ANOTHER story).

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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