Colleges Are Building in Second Life, but Is Anyone Visiting?
Posted on August 18, 2007
Filed under News
This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education also links to others in which business and academia are questioning the ROI in building a virtual presence in SL.
Read Why I gave up on Second Life
And How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life. “IBM has created a massive complex of adjoining islands dedicated to recruitment, employee training, and in-world business meetings.” I toured the IBM complex with one of its designers. Quite impressive from a design perspective. But when we got to the customer consulting area, complete with service reps waiting to answer our every question, my thought was: “Who comes here? And why?”
I’m not shooting myself in the foot by publishing these as we launch the pICTsl Farm. They reaffirm my intuition, SL and professional experience that SL is not ready for “prime time” particularly in educational contexts where resource constraints of all kinds create a miserable environment for getting at the real potential of a social sim, such as SL.
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Ready for prime time? hmmm… 8.9M accounts and 1.6M in the last 60 days… yah, that sounds like it waning in popularity.
Usable for education? How much more media rich does a place need to be to be good for adult education regardless of the learning method they prefer?!
The task universities and business need to be about is driving users & constituents there to be a part of the community.
As to engagement, people will stay in SL when they are part of something – just going to hang out is not a good reason; events, education and community are.
Steven, thanks for your thoughts. And I agree with your points completely. It’s the community aspect that is the clincher. It’s a big commitment — time and emotional investment. I’m uncertain most faculty and for that matter busy adults would easily perceive the value of, in not necessity of community for SL.
So there’s got to be more there. That’s what we’re hoping to start to think about. What is that? What could it be and how will it look? I’m more convinced of the informal educational potential of SL than the formal, the implications for distance education than blended, presently.
Suzanne and Steven:
Suzanne, I e-mailed you some of the following, but I thought I would share it.
I am embarking upon research about how receptive students will be as six of my undergraduates in an upper division ethnic studies course are beginning to create their avatars (as of yesterday). They will take their midterm on the farm.
How I got their interest has been through a process that began with having an anime artist come to class (every class), identifying the artist/musician/gamers quickly (by making references to Heroes, Dr. Who), realizing quickly (day 1) that we had critical mass, having a geek TA who really wants to do this and is willing to spend all the time it takes to get people started. I also have an opera singer (visiting from Zurich) who doesn’t like games/technology and wanted no part of this until I brought images of my own performance character, 3-D glass and an art piece (a game based on Cortazar’s Hopscotch that I began working on in Bernie Dodge’s class–with cool gamer dice, 3-D board, etc.). Her comfort zone somehow got established (theatre?), and even though she won’t participate directly, she’s now part of the team because she wants to know more.
For me, all of this is a victory–in relation to yawning students–and we haven’t even started yet.
Of course, we are building on the local skater/stencil art/sewer art/alternative music/gamer/sci fi/activist rhizomatic cultural infrastructure that is local. Our activities are linked to an art show we will have on an off night at a club, Brick by Brick. It is the bilingual/bicultural border interstial online/offline space that is making this work thus far.
Emily sounds great! You’re always doing wildly cutting edge stuff. We’ve got plots on the Farm, bring your students on by.