If You Want to Sandbox Build on Harvard's Second Life Sim, You Still Can

Click here to visit Berkman, sponsored by Harvard's law college of the same name, a mostly defunct educational sim once formerly used as a teaching resource for actual Harvard University classes from 2006-2008. I just visited its sandbox area to create and play with some prims, inspired to come there by a recent Twitter thread about defunct SL campuses for real colleges. Many of them still seem be in-world, albeit all but abandoned -- including the sim owned by the world's top university.

The mystery is why they haven't been taken offline. Either Linden Lab forgot they were there after they more or less ended the company's education outreach program -- or perhaps they're on an automatic payment system, and school accountants haven't noticed the bill? In either case, it's still there for impromptu sandbox building parties, or for creating new objets d'art you can show off to friends. "Oh this little thing? Just something I made while at Harvard."

A tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life https://t.co/aEgAL0hRQ9

— Jason Farman (@farman) August 14, 2018

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

' world's top university. ' How to compete with that statement. Oh yes -> FaceBorg. "Evil always" :)
Do the numbers - what does a sim cost to a multi-.. ok, so multi-dollars is a big number to me but insert millions. So $175/month for mainland now is - built in to some long lost accounting rollover. Noise, even in the Huffman sense.
SL is full of little spaces you just have to explore a bit.
< might want to change 'The mystery is why they haven't been taken online' there. >

[Mangrovejane]

I explored the universities a year or soo ago when I first started SL as I was looking for inspiration and justification to my own university. I wrote my own blog post on the university exploration as I was surpursisd that thee were SO many but they were mostly empty and waiting. A lot of them were outdated but still beautiful. Harvard was great because it had the sandbox as well as an extensive campus and a resident dragon. I visited it a few times and there were a surprising number of people there using the sandbox still. Another university I visited had a full tv studio set up that was quite impressive and a guy I chatted to for awhile who liked to visit there and basically used it as his home base when he was chatting to people in world because it was really low lag and very quiet.

Since then, I have had contact with UWA, who I also wrote a couple,of blogs about as they lost funding and were going to close, but then regained funding and stayed open for awhile longer. UTSA is also still inworld and active at my last visit. It would be great to hear from some universities that remember they are still in world or are actually active in world.

[Pathfinder]

When I started working at LL back in 2005, my focus was on exploring how Second Life could be used for educational purposes and to help build that community. I thought it would be important to get some well-known universities involved and encourage them to buy private islands to experiment with, and since I was living in Boston I thought approaching different people at Harvard would be a good place to start. And that led to the Berkman Center at Harvard, and folks like Charlie Nesson, and now you know the rest of the story. :)

[Cindy Bolero]

There are many, many old 503c regions still online in SL established years ago, where the owners never paid renewal but still have access to the land. If the avatar owner has long left SL, but left perms to a group or public, associates or squatters can continue to use it or even rent it out for profit. This has always irked me. Perhaps I've not worked hard enough at beating the system, and I've always paid my tier so LL won't suspend my account if I'm late or default.