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.

Cultures of Virtual Worlds Conference

I was only able to stay for one day of the conference, held at UC Irvine. It was similar to the MetaverseU conference in that some extraordinary thinkers and doers were there. Maria Bezaitis and I chatted a bit about how important metaphors are as bridges to understanding.  Melissa Cefkin is doing some great thinking on interactional space. Jasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields are doing cutting edge research in education and virtual spaces with kids; and Tom Boellstorf ethnography on Second Life is due out soon. I’m also going to check out Paul Dourish’s book Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction and was glad to hear from Mimi Ito, who’s work on digital youth culture is fantastic.

The audience was primarily academic but the conversations were anything but. Students and experienced researchers presented their work, with the conference being all about emerging questions that crisscross business, education, research, schooling and entertainment.

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.

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.

MetaverseU reflections

MetaverseU
Some quick reflections on the conference before leaving Palo Alto. Themes and comments that resonated for me.

It was great, intellectually stimulating event, and a fun, interactive crowd.  I was though disappointed at the lack of opportunities to have conversations.  Lot’s of folks attended via SL, and to facilitate a more democratic discussion, those of us live were asked to fill out cards with our questions that would be given to the presenters. It didn’t work really.

Reflections after ELI - Tweeting, Faculty, Second Life

Just returned from the Educause Learning Initiative’s Annual Meeting — Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0. I learned a lot and yet there are always those tidbits that you walk away remembering. The first was the experience of Tweeting during a key note session. There was essentially a conversation going on among the audience, as if we were passing notes, for lack of a better analogy. I missed the next featured session and thought I’d check the ELI Twitter feed to see what I could glean. Nothing really. You hadda be there. There was not summary, no context. It was truly a conversation in real time.

The next tidbits happened at my presentation Introducing university faculty and instructional staff to second life: A pilot initiative. It was well attended for the last day of the conference. I argued for the unsustainability of workshops as a default means of learning new technologies (e.g. Second Life) and wanted to have a conversation with the audience. I heard some good ideas, compromises between traditional follow-along workshops and unstructured workshops. The word workshop was even questioned, what about having learning labs. It reminded me that we have a Fac Room in ITS for that very purpose. So it would be a matter of staffing it with someone with that skill set. That sounds too easy, so it might be.

Then after the workshop I had a nice chat with Kyung Huh from the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment at U Texas, Austin. He’s been supporting their SL initiative which has been around since 2006. Like us they’re looking at its instructional value. He said that for the most part, faculty projects in SL don’t end up becoming what they set out to be. And it appears that while they perceive value in teaching in SL, it’s not instructional value but administrative value. In the end, they use SL to meet with students, either formally or informally. I thought his experience and insight was useful and mirrors our thinking too.

Finally, I saw one faculty presentation demonstrating the use of SL in a class. Two instructional designers were dedicated to a class of 20 graduate students to help them recreate/interpret a novel. In this case, they created rooms in the house, the main setting of the story. They had to find, build or buy what they needed. The instructor’s research in materiality in literary criticism prompted this approach. I saw that connection right away and didn’t become skeptical with the Engagement word, until she began reporting out student experiences and technical frustrations. I couldn’t help but slouch back into my same old song and dance: Engaged with what? And why? What about weighing the time on technical and supporting tasks with the student learning outcomes of the class?  I asked myself if she could have accomplished the same goals with PowerPoint, like Laurel Amtower did.

And finally, finally, in listening to others in faculty development, support roles, I realized again that we’re doing something quite extraordinary. Now I have to figure out how to tell a story about it.

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