Newly Newly Found: Eugene Eric Kim has a post on this topic and clearly wins some award for going furthest outside either tech or training for a relevant quote when he brings in William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience.
Newly found: Millions of Us weighs in on the debate here and here. Satchmo Prototype of the Electric Sheep Company also comes on in here. Oh heck...even Gwyneth Llewelyn fires a post into the middle of the debate. *As I look through these other posts and the ones running in the learning field, I'm struck by a definite feeling of membranes becoming thinned out (tip 'o the hat to Clay Shirky). These discussions are moving more freely back and forth across communities than around any other topic I can think of. I get the distinct impression that veils are about to come down and then we'll all be looking at each other going..."what you guys care about this stuff too?"
You know there has been this “5 Things You Don’t Know About Me” meme going around. I started trying to do a mindmap of who tagged who and had to stop after about 2 levels. This discussion about Second Life and Teaching/Learning has been about as far ranging and as hard to keep track of. This is my best shot - there is also probably enough wrong in here to keep me hoisted on my petard for at least the first quarter of the year.
I don’t really want to try to order all these various posts chronologically so I’ll instead just try to make sense of them from a thematic standpoint. I should also say that this discussion is incredibly valuable and I think that if we had had this variety and scale of intellectual debate around when e-learning itself debuted, then we might have a very different industry today.
Thinking back, I think I first noticed this post from Stephen Downes. Stephen points to an article by Graham Atwell here. Graham laments that while basic membership in SL is free, to own land costs money and that SL “attempts whenever it can to copy western capitalism as a model.” I don’t know which one of these things you should be surprised less by. SL doesn’t try to copy Western capitalism – it is western capitalism – it is a for-profit business run by a company. I don’t understand what is either inherently shocking or wrong about that. I will say that creativity does not have to cost in SL – there are spaces where you are allowed to create objects and you can consign them for sale at someone else’s store or avoid the in-world issue all together and use a web-based store like SL Exchange or SL Boutique. On the other hand, of course creativity costs. It costs in real world too. Paint costs, pens cost, the University of Flensburg costs…so what then is the unique rub with SL, that it too costs?
Graham also says that he is “unconvinced by the subtext in SL which is that you can be someone completely different than yourself.” I would argue that the real subtext is that in SL you can most closely appear to be the person you really feel you are without physical constraint and almost without economic constraint. Why do we feel that the avatars that people use in virtual worlds are somehow fake? They could actually be seen as a more ‘real’ window into the personality of someone than the physical appearance we take on every day.
The technical issues are dead-on and valid. Updates to the grid like the one from early December can cause a ton of grief amongst the populace. I would say that we are talking about a virtual world all of maybe 3 years old which now has over 2 million subscribers. I’m just glad that none of us have ever had major technical issues with authoring tools or LMSs… ;-)
As far as being the only person in some of the edu-places – I hear that too. My response is that like RL, SL is mainly empty space and that in a virtual world with an area greater than the U.S. city of Boston with probably under 20K concurrent users at anyone time, there is going to be a lot of empty space. It is worth it though to try to make it to some of the high profile events and really see a crowd spilling across several sims.
I COMPLETELY agree though with the overall spirit of Graham’s post which as I see it is that these places hold potential but that we have not figured out how to best tap that potential yet. Spot on. Couldn’t be more right. The same however could be said of classrooms. Certainly of e-learning. I just don’t want to create artificial standards for something just because it is new. I do think that perhaps one of the problems with how we are looking at SL is that we are evaluating it much like we would some other form of online collaboration or some such thing. I have a sneaking hunch that we are using the wrong rubric…interesting that Graham would have his experiment with an art class because I feel art, creativity, expression are much better metrics for looking at SL that if it can easily facilitate online collaboration. (another response to Graham Atwell.)
People also keep trying to draw out of the SL experience, the requirements that make SL an important if emerging part of the training and learning world. People should stop that. Yes, people should also stop the hype about SL and I am not saying that we should stop looking critically at some people are already breathlessly proclaiming SL to the greatest thing ever. My issue is that are we grown so cynical as a community that we are ready to toss aside something like SL because in the
eyeblink of 3 years, it has not managed to prove itself useful to us in a way that we can understand?
I should also say that one of the biggies jumping into this discussion is someone I respect tremendously – Clay Shirky. Clay’s post here has been getting a ton of link traffic. The main theme of Clay’s post seems to be doubt at the reporting on the numbers of users involved in SL. Clay points what he sees a large percent (perhaps 90+%) of people who try SL, drop out. Valid criticism although I’m struck by the thought that this sounds like criticism similar to that which blogs or blogging were taking on the chin a little while ago. Lots of people try blogging and stop. I don’t know the numbers but I don’t think that the dynamic in itself spells ruin for SL.
I do think that Clay hits an important point when he states that “Second Life has made it acceptable to root for the DRM provider, because of their enlightened user agreements concerning ownership.” He goes on to say that “This obscures the fact that an enlightened attempt to make digital objects behave like real world objects suffers from exactly the same problems as an unenlightened attempt, a la the RIAA and MPAA.” This is key because it echoes something that has been going on since the first shopping mall opened in America – the commercialization of the public space (good article here). One thing that we should never forget is that SL is a commercial venture and could go away or have its terms of use changed at a moment’s notice. There is a long and detailed response to Clay’s post here.
Danah Boyd also has a much-cited post in this debate but honestly I can’t figure out why.
Graham has some great ideas about the technical issues inherent in SL, Clay’s work on how numbers are figured and on public v. private spaces are important steps in this discussion but I can’t figure out what Danah’s point is beyond her assertion that we probably all won’t live in virtual worlds. No kidding. I do think that it is ironic that someone like Danah who is clearly immersed in virtual worlds, would make the assertion that “Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.” Hmmm..that assertion on a blog (which is not physical or manifested in meatspace but is instead ‘virtual’ construct) is probably a gateway into what exactly we consider virtual worlds. There is a good discussion on this starting over at the Learning Circuits Blog.
Do we demand 3D of our virtual environments? So I think Danah actually echoes a point that I see emerging from all this - that people re-create their physical or offline social structures in virtual worlds…I say ‘exactly!’ BUT I’d argue that these spaces (SL included) are actually allowing us to create much more truthful representations of how we view ourselves than is represented in the RL.
To move expressly into the training/ learning world, Clark Aldrich has a post on the Learning Circuits Blog entitled “Second Life is not a teaching tool.” If Clark’s main point is that we need to consider and think about how to best use something like SL, then we are in violent agreement. I do however, disagree with the very title of
his post. I’d argue that SL is exactly as much of a teaching tool as our vision allows it to be. Are classrooms teaching tools? They too are “content free.” How about a black/white board? How about a brand new shiny computer? These are all tools and all deserve careful thought and consideration on how to best employ them. SL is no different in many ways.
I do think that people are still struggling with how to use SL and
how to use it in a way that gets out of our own RL-restrained ideas of what education, training and learning should look like. Here, I would echo Warren Ellis who leads off a wish list of what he wants for SL with this:
"Someone to stand up and say that creating replicas of bland middle-class homes for people to stand awkwardly in and not actually do anything inside is just retarded and a stark and utter waste of a massive digital art installation, rich IM environment and potentially system-altering computing/work/media space. It’s not like you’re going to sleep in that bed. At the very best, you’ll watch an avatar of yourself lay on it and look weird and a bit dead. Stop it now.”
Ooooh. I love that. I’d apply the same thing to a lot of what people are trying to do vis a vis education in SL. You have access to a world where you can fly, model in 3D – think on those capabilities and consider how we could use what is unique to SL to our own best benefit – I don’t think its as another venue for Powerpoint. Clark also has a second post asking for examples of training projects inside SL and gets 11 responses.
Finally, I’d like to point to a couple of articles outside the edutech blogging sphere. 3pointD examines a post by Raph Koster and an Escapist article by Allen Varney on the growth and potential of “boutique MMOGs.” The idea here is that much like niche Web sites (perhaps something like Slashdot) there is the potential for numerous virtual worlds which can be inexpensively produced and maintained and which unlike World of Warcraft do not require millions of subscribers to be a success. Interstingly, 3pointD also has another post relating the details of their first “Think Tank” event held in SL. I’m still working through the chat transcript but the list of items that they considered is impressive:
- standards and interoperability between platforms
- user experience and retention
- technological barriers to entry
- technological limitations (avatars per sim, etc.)
- building community
- setting societal standards
- creating sustainable learning projects
- SL-Web functionality
- tools for communication and collaboration
- making avatars more expressive
- creating identities that are portable across the metaverse
- promoting “dirtworld” sustainability
- virtual architectural preservation
- integrating corporate projects
- relationship to real-world governmental concerns
- preserving privacy and anonymity in-world
- broadening concepts of what the metaverse is
So what does all this add to? To me it all points to the several things:
- Yeah…there is probably too much hype. OK..so what? When has hype been new to the Net/Web?
- Yes…we need to consider how to best use virtual world technology like SL
- Yes…people are trying things already as far as education/training/learning go
- Yes..it’ll be great when we have more examples
- Yes..it will also be great when we some great examples of e-learning (10+ years in)
- Yes…it will be great when we have fully mapped out the potentials and limitations of of e-learning (10+ years in)
- Yes…it will be great when we realize that we don’t yet know everything there is to know about how people learn and how we can help them
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