Meet Our Members: Doug & Debra Brown
They're bringing manatees to Second Life
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CeAire (at right) and Hawc Decosta (center) with their friend, Unmasked Shepherd (at left), who designed their virtual Save the Manatee Club T-shirts. (Image courtesy of Unmasked Shepherd.)
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Meet CeAire and Hawc Decosta. She’s blonde, blue-eyed, and bubbly, and he’s tall, dark-haired, and serious. As new residents of their region, they are both concerned about the welfare of endangered manatees. Recently, they decided to volunteer to teach others about manatees and what they can do to help. This would all be normal, day-to-day stuff, except that CeAire and Hawc are avatars and exist only in the cyberworld of Second Life.
CeAire and Hawc Decosta are the online personas of Debra and Doug Brown, longtime Save the Manatee Club members who have been volunteering and doing education presentations since 1988. The Browns discovered Second Life through Doug’s work with an online university.
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| Deb and Doug Brown, longtime volunteers for SMC, at a real life event. (Photo courtesy of Doug and Debra Brown.) |
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“We had never heard of Second Life before last year,” says Deb, “but it has been in existence for over four years. Doug found out about it through an educator’s conference offered totally online by the University of Hawaii. No one has been able to give Second Life a definitive designation, but it’s not a game. It’s a social networking environment with a variety of activities and its own economy.”
Established by Linden Laboratories and open to the public since 2003, Second Life is a 3-D world created entirely by its inhabitants. Individuals communicate in Second Life using text-based chat that is similar to instant messaging or even have “voices” if they own a headset and microphone. They are represented on screen by avatars, or a person’s persona, in the online world. Second Life participants are limited only by their creativity in choosing hair, skin, and eye color as well as body shape and size and the type of clothing they wear. Some participants even choose non-human form. “CeAire and I share similar characteristics,” laughs Deb, “but she’s a much better dancer than I am and has no trouble finding clothes to fit. She owns more dresses now than I think I have in my entire life!”
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A virtual manatee.
(Image courtesy of Doug and Debra Brown.)
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Residents learn about upcoming events on a web map featured on Second Life. If they are interested, they can “teleport” to various locations within the SL virtual world to attend. Once there, they use their mouse to right click on other avatars to learn more about them. “The avatars represent people from many cultures, walks of life, educational backgrounds, and interests,” says Deb.
It was by attending various events in Second Life that Deb and Doug saw how the site could be useful to help educate people from all over the world about manatees. With the help of Joanna Scott, who works for the Nature Publishing Group in real life and administers nature-related events in Second Life, Deb was able to schedule an event titled Mermaids or Manatees: Myth & Reality at the Second Nature Island in February.
Using materials from their real life manatee education presentations, Deb and Doug put together a virtual presentation using visuals they had developed for a PowerPoint slide show. They created a virtual “brochure” (what Second Life calls a note card) with manatee information to distribute to interested participants and even created a virtual T-shirt with the SMC logo to give away. “The T-shirt is one of those fun things that has a short life expectancy, but it promotes the Club for as long as it remains in use by the person who receives it,” says Deb. “We have received a number of those free virtual T-shirts as handouts from various organizations, educational institutions, and businesses."
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| Above and below, CeAire Decosta (Deb Brown) speaks to Second Life residents about manatees at their Second Nature Island event. (Images courtesy of Krystine Qinan.) |
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The first-ever manatee education presentation in cyberspace went off well, with only a minor hitch. “Second Life decided to be very, very good to us,” said Deb. “Except for Doug's software crashing a few minutes before the presentation, we got things started on time and did the program in about 40 minutes, which left plenty of time for questions. Everybody that gave us comments, either verbally or in the text chat, was very complimentary and Joanna from Nature was happy. We estimate that there were about 35-40 different avatars present at any given time during the hour.” (View a slideshow of the presentation on Flickr.)
Many educational institutions are currently exploring the Second Life virtual community as a means of engaging student interaction in a 3-D environment. And it’s a great way to reach out and educate people from all over the globe.
”It’s important to remember that an avatar does not act alone, and behind every avatar is a real-live human being at a keyboard, “ says Deb. “Since we have been involved with Second Life, we have met individuals from many different countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Brazil. During a brief discussion the other day, I was able to explain what a manatee is to a person from France, give her the Club’s web address, and answer her questions about the adoption program.”
“We had as much fun doing this presentation as those we do with face-to-face audiences,” she continued, “and now that we’ve had one successful presentation, we are very much wanting to do it again!”
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| Another snapshot from the first ever cyber-presentation on manatees at the Second Nature Island event. (Image courtesy of Krystine Qinan.) |
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Dana is the manatee adopted by Doug and Debra Brown. Dana was born in 1988 (the same year the Browns started volunteering for the Club!) and winters at Blue Spring State Park. Although Dana was a homebody for two years after she was born, she is now known to be very outgoing and playful.
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Get More Info
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View a slideshow of the presentation on Flickr
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Find out more about Second Life (it’s free, but you must be 18 years of age to join).
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