There’s nothing like meat space for nuance, conversations on the bus, the level of applause in an audience or lack of it - and at the New Media Consortium conference its been no different - maybe once we’re all walking around with expressive avatars or Emotiv headsets or whatever, we’ll be able to give off that body language that you can only really feel by being there, and at Princeton this year the body language is a sort of collective foot shuffle when it comes to Second Life.
OK…well, first, this is anecdotal. It’s not like I ran around taking a survey of people. All those Harvard and MIT name tags made me nervous. Other than the folks from Apple and IBM and Sun and so on, I figure I was the only non-academic there, sort of slinking into the back of the room and hoping no one really noticed me in case I got asked to clean the blackboards or something.
And maybe I came late to the game. Because whenever Second Life was mentioned it was always with a sort of wistful sigh, whether in the keynotes or the individual presentations, sort of in the context of “we all learned in Second Life that immersive environments hold great potential, now…let’s talk about what’s coming along to replace it.”
And strangely, this follows on the heels of the Games for Health Conference in Baltimore where there was a similar sentiment. That Second Life showed the promise of the immersive platform but isn’t a place anyone really wants to dig into anymore, they’re too busy programming Wiis and building simulations on the back of Torque or whatever. And same thing with the Virtual Worlds conference in New York, where Sibley of ESC waved his hands around and tried to get the audience to grab their pitchforks or strings of code so they’d go out and fill those gaps in the metaverse technology.
His roadmap was all about engagement levels and the missing pieces to the techno puzzle. He promised a robust conversation on his blog and has happily churned out one post since April.
From ESC.
So, three conferences, three senses that the promise was never quite fulfilled, too frustrating, too many roadblocks, and so three audiences for whom Second Life is an ALMOST platform - the branding folks, the games folks (and games in the broadest sense of immersion for the purposes of changing behavior related to health) and now, my sense only, the education crowd.
My Avatar Doesn’t Get Around Much Anymore
At NMC it’s the first conference I’ve been to where you register your avatar as well as your real name, and there’s a little slot in the badge holder, and the thing is, 80% of the people attending seemed to have avatars, so it’s not like they don’t get it….400 sims or whatever it is that the universities have signed up for must be a sign of something, Princeton has it’s architectural wonders and its big sculpted flower thing and I KNOW there’s a lot happening in Second Life, I post about it here and there, trying to keep track of the highlights a little, just to remind myself that it’s a wide wide grid and there are a lot of prims being rezzed.
But like any new toy, it felt, at least in this crowd who would be wearing tweed patches on their elbows if they weren’t wearing khakis and Eddie Bauer button downs or whatever, as if the shine had come off a little bit, they DID the build, they HELD a seminar in world, and some of them pushed it a little further.
And I listened on the bus back and forth to campus, and at lunch, and heard some pretty enthusiastic folks talking about video mash-ups and Nings for their classes and whether they had Facebook profiles and other new shiny toys, and I came away with the idea that these folks saw Second Life, they know what’s there, and they’re reserving further heart for other things. Their passion isn’t stoked like it maybe once was, and that maybe they haven’t taken a really good tour of the Grid lately to see if there’s anything else going on beyond the virtual classroom walls. It’s not to say they don’t have a sense of it - but they’re not going to bother translating Wikitecture to the classroom, there are some other issues to deal with first.
We Want Open Source So We Can Be More Secure
Now for all their joy and wonder at educating today’s fine minds, a lot of this is about competition: with each other, for the attention of their fickle kids, for research dollars, and for publication. And these are good things - healthy competition goes a long way to fostering innovation and growth. But it also leaves them stuck a little, because everyone’s dancing around the topic of an intellectual commons, which sounds a lot to me like open source, and they’re wondering about copyright, and who owns what, and they brought up that nasty word interoperability about 100 times.
Because even the teachers are facing that big wall, that rushing river of code - the open source, open rights, creative commons, flood the world with content and let everyone mash it up and something nice will come of it and we’ll all go home happy and liberated and collaboration is the key to our humanity’s growth.
Um. But you go first.
So you have this sort of embedded contradiction: the universities need to be working on platforms that are open source BECAUSE they need those open platforms to be secure, to sit on THEIR server farms somewhere, to protect the information of their students and teachers, that link in to Moodle or whatever. They need it to be open source mainly because they need to then lock it off.
So Second Life, today, is stuck. Because until it lets the schools do what IBM is doing and host sims behind a firewall, it’s a prototype and not the real thing. Wonderland, which IS a prototype, they’re treating like the real thing because they can have a copy, host it themselves, and even though their avatars look like crap who cares - it’s their own and they can do what they want with it.
As Jordan reported from the Wonderland side of things:
Everyone asked about security, particularly those teachers who want to make use of virtual worlds but not expose their students to others using the virtual world for less-savory purposes. We told them, of course, with Wonderland, they can set up their own instances of the server and control access by using an LDAP server for authentication. I then told them about the fine-grained security work being done by Tim Wright at Notre Dame (Note to Tim: LOTS of folks are really interested in your work!).
Photo from Wonderblog.
So, Wonderland has critical issue number one wrapped up: your kids won’t accidentally teleport to Gor. The data is secure. And you can link it to other data behind the firewall.
And it has more going for it as well, mostly around the interchange of content with external sources. With SL currently limited in its ability to port in Web-based content, and to easily port out data collected in world (although kudos to SLoodle), it’s a klunky work-around to integrate SL into other Web-based curricula.
And finally, if I heard the word “unstable” once, I heard it 100 times. A teacher is only going to stand in front of a class, virtually or otherwise, so many times and have the grid crash, or have a sudden “maintenance outage” or have a rolling restart before they move back to chalk. Forget about disruption - it’s embarrassing. And teachers don’t like to be embarrassed anymore than anyone else does.
Think about it: you’re 40-something, trying to inject some new technology into your classroom. Your students are mostly used to WoW and console games and Facebook. You suck it up and decide to hold a class in SL. And it crashes. Or it’s unavailable at class time. And you can HEAR the kids snickering, and now you actually DO feel old, and out of touch…because your attempt to be hip with the virtual world stuff left you with Grid marks on your face, no WAY are you doing that again unless you can blame it on the University IT department.
Project Wonderland - bring it ON!
Why They Need to Wander Around More
But.
There’s something interesting about how virtual spaces are being viewed. And it’s a lot like you or I view them, probably. They’re immersive. They’re places you can sit, and chat, and maybe rez a prim or two. Your teacher can do some cool stuff - make a presentation in world, link it to a Web-based quiz, flip it over into a Ning discussion group or whatever - and there you go….presence, avatars and identity, we shared some time together….
But….
And it’s the same but as with Second Life as a collaborative tool, which people really mean as “a way to meet when we’re all in different geographic locations”. Because the but is that there’s something more going on in Second Life, more that HAS gone on, it’s just that few people seem to be making the connections yet.
In the opening keynote address, Diana Oblinger talked a lot about how newer technologies allow for new modalities for learning. She touched on immersion as one of those modalities, but she also talked about mass collaboration as problem solving rather than as meeting, and she talked about digital storytelling, and haptics, and simulations.
And it strikes me that the source for some of the best practices for education in Second Life might just lie outside of the academy. Whether it’s Studio Wikitecture or the embedding of Google maps in world or whether it’s the world of what’s not POSSIBLE in real life which has enriched our ability to conceptualize, collaborate and express.
In all fairness - there are a lot of innovative people in academia. There are projects, and approaches, and tools, and new ways of thinking about thinking. And the same barriers facing academia face the brands, and the businesses, and others who might just believe in the possibility of Second Life but, um, you go first….because for now we’re still waiting for it to get out of Beta phase, it’s still unstable, it still doesn’t give me the tools I need if I’m going to do REAL work there….it’s a fun place to visit, I’ll throw down a prototype or two, learn a trick that might be handy later, but I’m not going to bet the bank on something where my clothes can’t be guaranteed to show up when I log in.
And while Linden might try - the second week of their um birthday celebrations is an example, I guess…there’s a need to establish best practices not just across the disciplines of academia, but across the artists and architects as well, between the NPIRLers and the eggheads (er, sorry, couldn’t help it, revenge for being uneggy).
Show me your spinny prims and I’ll show you a new way to learn. Because so long as SL is viewed as a platform for slightly different ways of holding a class instead of a new way of thinking about the world, it will always just be another classroom, and one where you can’t lock the doors and the lights flicker ominously at that.
Thanks for the review of some of the symposium’s main sentiments. So why isn’t anyone talking about Activeworlds, I wonder? Or are they? I haven’t looked at Wonderland yet, but we’re not in a position to build something from scratch, so I tend to not pay much attention to those projects yet.
I’m extremely curious to see what the future holds for SL as more and more folks discontinue their premium accounts and head to the virtual frontier.
Without a doubt, the NPIRL folks get Second Life; so do other artistic folk like Chouchou, who create, not recreate, with the environment. It’s the difference between an expressive and an additive approach to a medium. But you can’t be expressive without basic skills and this is where I think many educators miss something important. These basic skills consist of a configuration of 3D modeling, scripting, some kind of design, art, architecture, etc; they’re not a skill set many instructors or college students have or necessarily need or want to have.
Where am I going with this? Give a kid drum sticks and he’ll bang on everything. Is he a drummer? Not in my book. Coloring books, paint by numbers, piano lessons, art class don’t trump creativity, they make it a whole lot more meaningful. Where there weren’t recreations of status quo kinds of pedagogies, there were attempts to posit that creative expression alone was a valid use of SL.
This isn’t one rainy day after school in 3rd grade.
Throwing learners in at the deep end is bound to produce casualties. We’ve seen it; students reporting frustrating experiences and wondering what building an X has to do with learning Y. The other casualty I notice is a sense of “entitled creativity” in our culture, one that feeds off of a rather dumbed down and commodified sensibility of artistic expression. If we’re going to involve students in expressive technologies, then we do them a disservice to not enable them to use them as such.
Suzanne - Really wonderful points. And while I agree with you that there needs to be the proper respect for the learning curve required of students, I’m not sure that the lessons to be drawn from Chouchou (I almost mentioned Chouchou, we’re on the same wavelength in who has talent!) and others are entirely related to how the medium can be used for expression.
A few things I’d love to see happen in SL:
- An artistic commons, a group of residents who would be willing to team up with educators, maybe for free and the fame, maybe for a few Lindens - most schools can’t afford a lot, but you’d have I think a fairly deep source of creative talent willing to help improve the experience of SL.
- Supplement that with a crowdsourcing Web site for build and tools. A teacher wants to demo a particular concept, crowdsource the demo.
- Establish a best practices databank that not only takes the learnings from teachers, but from others as well. You could have one Linden (or a private company or individual, whatever) whose job is to look at work in world and help translate it to education methodologies. So, for example, you might look at the work that Keystone is doing with Studio Wikitecture, and create an “education packet” out of it for teachers, with decent documentation, instructions on modifying, etc.
- Develop a script library, especially around things like physics, procedural objects, and games. Think of the number of in-world games, treasure hunts, etc. - many of these scripts and objects could be adopted easily for student activities. But it’s tough to track them down, and it’s tougher still to know how to adapt them.
Much like Clever Zebra is trying to do for corporate builds, the idea of a ‘commons’ for learning objects, scripts, and lessons learned from the best artists and scripters would go a long way, I think. It’s not to say that these resources aren’t available within the NMC or through the SLEd lists and elsewhere, but it would go a long way to create an “NPIRL” for education don’t you think?
Create objects and learning interactions with a bit of awe to them, make it so that teachers and students don’t need to learn to build to take advantage of all the talent, objects and scripts that already exist - and if you really want it to sing, integrate it with the work the SLoodle folks were doing.
Hmmm.
I have a spare sim or two. Maybe I should just start it myself. Haha.
Thanks for the great feedback.
Dusan, I do think there may be some of the “been there and done that” among the most techie of educators. They were the early adopters and now are looking for new challenges. But as you said, this is just my impression from overhearing conversations and some presentations.
The shape that education should take in SL is hotly contested. This is even more true in RL education where active learning and social learning paradigms go head to head with more traditional philosophies. I agree with you that it’s important to understand and explore SL and not camp within a locked down space. I’ve been going to sims and events and meeting a wide spectrum of fascinating residents for several months. I think we (a very small cadre at my university) are about to embark on a small experiment. I am very much in the “need for reform” camp of science educators, and I have come to view SL as a place for immersive and transformative experiences and relationship for faculty and teachers rather than for students. Interacting collaborating with educators from around the world can broaden perspectives and open minds–at least that’s the experiment I’d like to try.
I wonder if you have met the organizers of the SLCC–educators all, and three of the most creative thinkers about education in SL that you will find. I expect that one or more of them are at the NMC Conference and maybe presenting. Ann Enigma/Hilary Mason is a long-time resident of SL, and I greatly admire her work.
I also agree that more conversations and interactions among educators and other creative residents is well worth facilitating. The constructivist philosophy of education focuses on student construction of their own knowledge by active participation. Rather than having builds done for them, I’d like to see an education themed and immersive sim created by collaboration among builders, educators and students. I even had what I thought was an inspired theme picked out around the time of Life 2.0. Since you seem to have a sim or two to spare, I’ll tell you about it sometime if we meet up “in world.”
I like the article and i recognize a lot of your sentiments. We’ve done some work for dutch universities and schools but I interpreted them not as a ‘done that’ - I’ve read it as a ‘not yet’. I see yet again, the educational expectations are outrunning technological adoption which is a gap (the chasm) that is going to have to be bridged on both sides by developer developer and consumer.
Universities are notoriously bad at this. Through the Erasmus university in Rotterdam I now what an advantage they have when it comes to developing, but what a handicap they have in communicating their findings. N.D.A’s, ego’s (don’t underestimate this factor in being a bottleneck towards adoption - intellectual status often outweighs commercial gain) and financial investments/lobbies really restrict placing their findings in the end-users hands (which obviously is a requirement for successful application). Something marketing is notoriously good at but THEY seem to be in the ‘been there done that’ stage after Second Lifes visibility (mistaking the market for the medium).
So what will it take to ‘cross the chasm’? To me, the answer is in http://youtube.com/watch?v=nK7TQVFSA1Y (1:20 - 2:00). A Steve or Bill recognizing the problem this technology would solve for a specific market, and build it. Identify, develop, market.
- Identify the problem. What is holding business/education or critical mass in consumers back, why is this not solving a problem for them?
- Develop the technology into something that will address these problems
- Market the solution to the identified problem
Chimera - many thanks for the reply. I’d love to meet in world.
I do want to make sure I make clear that although I used a fairly wide brush, I also recognize some of the incredible work that’s been done and indeed will be done in Second Life. Whether the work of someone like Tom Boellstorf studying Second Life, or the work of the folks at Princeton facilitating the exploration of art, or the use of simulation to train nurses (have to find the post, but I blogged it previously).
I’m glad however with your take on that “sentiment in the air” that the early adopters are perhaps opening new horizons. I think that a great deal of SL’s potential has been untapped. These are partly platform issues, such as stability, the inability yet to embed HTML, or the need to get Mono up and running (which will make a big difference to the ability to simulate, I think) and partly the lack of a coherent way to organize information.
And while I’m holding a “newbie UI” contest, I’m also of the belief that the tools actually need to become MORE complex in order to allow for the increasingly detailed requirements of people such as yourself. For example, I’d love to see a really detailed physics panel, or a robust particle system. Sure, you can get some great HUDS that do these things, but maybe they should be built into the system.
With these types of tools, students really could use SL for the types of things that Diana shared in her keynote, perhaps - I wonder, for example, whether something like he mass collaborative nanohub could be replicated for smaller groups in SL.
And you’re on - let’s meet, I’d love to continue the conversation.
@Digado - Thanks for the video, always amazing to extrapolate what Steve Jobs has done to the current status of SL - but what’s the equivalent of his statement, referring to Xerox that “basically they were copier-heads” when it comes to Second Life?
I wonder as well, since I’m on this riff, whether Steve’s DEPARTURE from Apple wasn’t as critical to their success today as both the early work they did and the work they’re doing today. The parallels are there - I don’t think anyone would deny that Philip is a visionary. Maybe in pulling back he’ll get some perspective, but my parallel fear is that M Linden goes too far along the linear SWOT analysis approach to strategy and loses track of those moments of awe which maybe kept us in SL in the first place - we need moments of awe, not just marketing and feature/benefit decisions.
I’ve bumped my head up more than once, having worked with universities for 14 years, against the egos and so on. But egos can be good. So can the need for building a reputation. So long as they’re backed by passion and intelligence who cares.
I sort of feel that open source and the commons is a red herring but I may be wrong and I’m loathe to jump into the debate, I’m ill informed about enough things as it is.
So, we have Chimera to help Digado - you in on the develop and market part?
“referring to Xerox that “basically they were copier-heads” when it comes to Second Life?”
I see it everywhere really. The most visible early adopters within Second Life are in the tech market, the community developers are tech minded, Linden Labs is a technology company (hence their poor community/marketing management). Every time i see their public blog being updated by nothing but issues and problems solved I think ‘do they ever consider the message they are sending out with that nonsense?’. The open source development, the viewer development, realXtend technologies, the decentralization of Open Sim, the wikis, the JIRA, the office hours and most of the VW blogs- All these developments are still concerned with HOW - which is the ‘copier-head approach’ (or people with a passion for technology).
In actually communicating the advantages/application of virtual worlds beyond the developers and early adopters, the WHY question is the more relevant. It identifies a problem, gives direction to development, addresses a niche that could truly find a use inside the application and create a buzz based on achieved accomplishments rather than expectations (overly simplified, but a proven strategy and well documented in ‘Crossing the Chasm’). I haven’t seen that many solid attempts to see the WHY being answered yet, certainly not within the Second Life development.
Whether Steves departure was actually good or not - i don’t think there is a way to really tell. Steve will say it wasn’t (in fact, he has on many occasions) but perhaps he never would have invented the iMac if it wasn’t for him getting back to a company in need. I hope M will be able to focus on the WHY more than Philip could, but that would mean losing the ‘everything o everybody’ approach, which i can’t see SL doing anytime soon. (hence, as indicated in your original article the industry focus on companies that have managed to develop towards a solution such as Croquet, Wonderland, ActiveWorlds and hopefully Ogoglio)
[…] argued eloquently about needing more WHY and less HOW when it comes to Second Life in a running thread from my attendance at the NMC conference. His argument is […]