SDSU-DistanceEd-SL
Yesterday’s LAT published a piece about corporate America’s embrace of Second Life. New World Notes’ Wagner James Au, shared some of the back story. Great journalism, it was and what I love about the blogosphere.I added my 2 cents to his post, as I have been here and there, in the Metaverse- YouTube, Twitter,etc. I’m still refining it.
The LAT article is another tidbit to add to my box-o-examples of using SL in courses at SDSU. For now. Change is always afoot.
We’re just starting to go distance-ed at SDSU. Let’s get our footing in the 2D virtual realm first. Let’s get some experience under our belts with the tools we got already. And more importantly let’s start thinking anew about teaching and learning at a distance. It’s a different paradigm, model and set of theories.
It seems that the corporate world has allowed SL to become “official” meeting places for their globally distributed workforces. And why not. It’s outrageously cheap. It’s a new approach. What it offers (small and large scale social events at cool places with cool activities) are simulations of events. I could be mistaken, but I can’t imagine that IBM hosts Aspen ski weekends for it’s middle management in RL (real life). I could be wrong.
In any event, without making this more important than it is, three conditions come to mind and make this relevant to SDSU, 1) People cannot get together face to face, 2) People value (enjoyment, connection, etc) entering SL to meet with others. 3) It’s an alternative, not the only way of adding social connection to a distance learning endeavor.
Is Second Life an elaborate chatroom?
At its base it more or less is. I’ve gleaned this sentiment from different conversations in the metaverse, mostly blogs and threads, often from people who are long time inhabitants of the web as a social space, as well as some gamers who are derisive of its ungameness.
One comparison is that to MOOs, texted-based synchronous environments, where users built and experienced the space with text-based commands and descriptions, such as “Go through the door labeled hall,” “You are in an expansive hall lined with flickering sconces . . .” MOOs were more popular with techier types than the average person in the 90s.
Visually based chatrooms, an extension of IRCs, grew in popularity in the later 90s and early 2000s, and environments such as Active Worlds and There, count among them. Both are 3D and are often compared to Second Life.
From the standpoint of education and as an educational technology, SL is little more than an elaborate chatroom for most people. When you deconstruct SL in terms of its affordances as an educational technology that is also situated in an institutional context, it quickly loses value as compared with other educational technologies.
There are other things to do in Second Life besides chat, but let’s try to understand what they are, and how and why they fit into a learning endeavor. As Stephen Downes has pointed out, SL mirrors the real world and as a result affords the same kinds of educational approaches we use in the real world. I’ve observed this too quite early on and as a result have spent little SL time involved with the educational community.
I hope to elaborate on these issues in a way that helps faculty understand this domain and its relevance for teaching and learning.
If It Qwaqs Like a Duck…
… It must be another virtual world!
Thanks to a SLED announcement by Lori Bell of Alliance Library System, I had the opportunity to attend a Qwaq demo yesterday hosted by John at Learning Times. Very interesting, despite some unforeseen technical issues (gotta love technology!)
Built on the Croquet platform, the Qwaq environment offers some interesting collaborative features not currently supported in Second Life. For example, users can simultaneously collaborate on Word or other applications, view multiple live web pages (no dividing land into multiple parcels to support multiple media streams), and even stream a live video camera from their little Qwaq lego-like head. Yep - a talking head!
Due to the tech issues du jour, I wasn’t able to fully experience all the nifty Qwaq features. It plays nicely with Google SketchUp and seems to support multiple avatars quite well.
I’m excited! Does Qwaq replace Second Life? Of course not. But opportunities to experience and compare the differing strengths and capabilities of different platforms helps me think more carefully about instructional design decisions - including on which platform to develop specific projects. A good thing. I’ll be looking for more opportunities to experiment in Qwaq.
Here’s a YouTube featuring a Qwaq demo.
My 2 cents about the Metaverse
At the MetaverseU Conference at Stanford last month, the asked all of us these 4 questions:
- What excites you about current metaverse technology?
- What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
- What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
- What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?
Here’s what I said
Here’s what others said:
http://youtube.com/group/metaverseuWhat are Metaverse technologies again?
The Roadmap describes them as those that fall under these categories- Augmented Reality, Lifelogging, Mirror Worlds and Virtual Worlds.
Immersion and Usability in SL
In an interesting discussion around immersion and usability in Second Life verses World of Warcraft, Rick van der Wal made some great points regarding interface/interaction design. I’d like to think through them as they apply to formal learning (i.e. institutional, sequential, hierarchal and evaluated learning) in SL.
So far, Second Life has been applied like an educational technology in formal learning contexts. It seems to be used to deliver and enhance a course or a part there of. In terms of design, I see at least two design levels instructors should consider: The software (environmental) and learning space (situational).
Environmental issues impact any formal learning context. The design of a classroom, its equipment, the location of a campus, its services, etc., all impact the process. To compare SL with another technology, a course management system (also a virtual environment) is arguably the most sophisticated educational technology a typical college instructor works with in terms of its environmental and situational design affordances. It is designed so that s/he can create an elaborate virtual learning space. Most instructors however must learn how to design that space and often rely on support from instructional designers and technicians. The situation represents a fundamental shift in their role and work habits. The same conditions apply to Second Life, with the added challenge that it is designed not for learning but for entertainment. What this translates into is something akin to considering creating a learning space in the back lot at Paramount Pictures. It can be done, but why would you, unless students were learning how to make movies.
This is my essential argument regarding formal learning in Second Life. Except in courses for which the environment (not the situation/learning space) is part and parcel of their goals, it has questionable learning value when set against educational technologies on the whole. I’m arguing for situated learning that honors situated cognition, two theories of learning seldom utilized in formal teaching practices.
Circling back around to Ricks point, SL has considerable environmental usability issues that overlay all other situational design issues which in turn impact the degree to which learners can be immersed (unaware of) the software.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality: Adding contextual, historical and other information to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality which is designed to simulate a physical place, augmented reality uses technology to add information to a real place or object with goal of making it more meaningful and useful. One example are audio guides we can rent at museums; another is how MRI images can be superimposed on a patient’s body to help surgeons more accurately locate a problem . ELI’s 7 Things You Should Know About Augmented Reality does a good job at demystifying the term and highlighting its educational potential. When we start looking around we see other examples of augmented reality. For example mobile devices connect us with stores of information while we’re experiencing a particular place, GPS devices do as well.
So augmented reality is one future scenario we’re already experiencing, and like simulations there are ways to do it that don’t have to be high tech.
Does SDSU need Metaverse Roadmap?
If you’ve read (I haven’t) Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk science fiction novel, Snow Crash, you’ll recognize the term. It describes the future shaped by virtual and 3D technologies. The Metaverse Roadmap, in effect a roadmap for the future, is an ambitious proposition nonetheless, I’ve been circling back around to it for definitions and ideas. It’s a big-picture heuristic that’s useful because it’s descriptive and predictive.
It’s a “first-of-its-kind cross-industry public foresight project” that asks challenging questions about “near-term” (2017) and “longer term” (2025) trends.
