I sit very squarely on the fence regarding Second Life. I have strong doubts regarding its application in the specific domain of education, somewhat less skepticism about its necessity as a baby step towards a new kind of web. But after reading through hundreds of blog posts by Second Life believers (a term they themselves use and which seems apropos when skeptics are spoken of as “doubters”) and thousands of messages on the busy Second Life Educators listserv (pretty high volume, a lot of noise, not too much signal), some patterns regarding Second Life skeptics and defenders are very clear. I have some advice for Second Life believers who truly care about effectively proselytizing for SL.
- Avoid the ad-hominem and argue the facts– this includes evidence-free speculation about a commentator’s motives. The uproar of Clay Shirky’s question about Second Life numbers promoted by Linden Labs– which essentially boils down to the simple question: two million users? Really?– was pretty funny. Had Clay written something supporting Second Life he’d have been lauded for his experience in social networks and his long-time support of, and research into, technologically mediated social spaces. He evinces (very light) skepticism about marketing numbers and suddenly he’s a washed-up, resentful, burned-out, eclipsed academic? Ad hominem arguments end up making only two things clear: lack of ready evidence and maturity by those making the arguments.
- Numbers aren’t numbers… they are metrics. They have to measure something. Defining “residents” as “anyone who has logged into the system” is disingenuous. It would be like advertising my store as having 10,000 “customers” because that’s how many entered my store. It’s inaccurate at best, unforgivable when there are other, better measures and definitions available. And there are better measures available in SL just as there are better measures of customers in a store. Propping claims up this way may be a hallmark of web marketing (counting “hits” instead of tracked readers or logins)– and symptomatic of the Web 2.0 bubble– but everyone involved is claiming that SL is something different than that, right?
- Speaking of difference: claiming that SL is a “different paradigm” that critics aren’t understanding is very different from demonstrating some characteristics of that paradigm. I see a lot of claims that SL is a different paradigm, a different teaching platform, is enabling different social interactions, etc. That seems to be the standard claim when one disagrees with a critic– claim that things are just too “different” for the critic to understand. If any of these are true– and some may be– then identify some of the characteristics of the difference beyond your own disagreement. Clearly it’s a different environment– that means nothing. It would be a different environment if I had all my students wearing fishbowls on their head and communicating with CB radios… but it wouldn’t say much about what my new paradigm was or why it was relevant.
- Second Life Educators, in particular, really need to start pointing to something that is actually happening and relevant to support their claims of Second Life as an effective teaching platform. Clearly it is being used for education… but the question yet to be answered (even a little bit, as far as I can tell) is why? What is the pedagogical advantage of Second Life? And if it lies in doing something other than replicating the face-to-face teaching environment and creating a kind of virtualized synchronous classroom, what is that other thing? If it is just replication with (dubious) benefits of affordance and access, then why not use a much lighter tool for synchronous teaching such as Elluminate which at least has the advantage of working with much less bandwidth and computing needs. If I had to bet, I’d bet on some new, emergent pedagogical advantages, though I don’t see them yet.
- Recognize that pointing out the failure of other predictions has no argumentative weight. More than few blogs pointed to Mitch Kapor’s “demolishing” of SL critics by pointing out failed predictions by skeptics of the past (no one will ever want a telephone in their home, there’s no future in personal computers, etc. While funny– and I know because I use this shtick myself when I talk about the future– it means nothing unless the failed predictions are backed up by the hard work of showing how those failures are parallel to the current situation. And I mean more than the base similarity that those skeptics likewise failed to predict popularity. How does the current situation, technology, societal structure, whatever, resemble that of the time the argument being brought out was made? How are the skeptical arguments similar now to those that were made then? If that work isn’t done, the comparison is meaningless. If anything, those who saw the rise and fall of other systems like MUDs and VRML have the better side of this argument so far. While SL believers simply point to failed predictions, those who have been around for a while can point to failed predictions that are eerily similar to the arguments being made by SL believers now. Some of the arguments are practically word-for-word resurrections of those old arguments… which means little if anyone can identify salient differences in the situation, of course.
Remember, there are plenty of failed skeptics who– like Second Life advocates– wrongly predicted great popularity and the profound future effects of their favorite technologies and systems. Are all positive SL arguments moot for that reason?
At the Center for Distance Education we are actively looking into the potential educational applications of Second Life. Some of us are more skeptical than others about what we have seen so far. But all of us would love to find out what those interesting applications are. Unfortunately, the Second Life Education wiki only points to this “fantastic summary” of educational and serious applications which does little to dispel my perception that most efforts so far are just mimicry and replication of educational experiences that are likely at least as efficiently delivered face-to-face or through other enabling technologies for distance cohorts.
At every stage of our investigation we have to ask ourselves: why? What’s the unique application or advantage provided by SL for this task, process, event, or interaction? What can we get here that we can’t get in another way without the overhead and irritations of SL? I’ve found a few things that are intriguing– the virtual hallucination sim provides an experience hard to reproduce otherwise, the lightweight simulation and building environment would seem to hold some promise in terms of the relationship of the modelled objects to the avatar, but so far most of what I’ve seen could be done as well with Flash widgets, QT movies and QTVR, etc. I’m looking for evidence of the difference and innovation the believers claim… so far without much luck. But I (we) aren’t yet giving up…
I respect your points completely. I am more of a believer, yet I’m trying to figure out how the Second Life platform can really change/add value to how things are done presently. What is that value add to businesses, education? I think that it might just take some brain storming and imagination to think up a profitable/value add proposal. That person will make $$$$$.
Best,
Drew
Speaking as someone who has used Second Life, has been taught in it, and has taught in it too, and has indulged on both sides of the fence in e-learning too I’ve got some comments that I hope you won’t dismiss under comment 3.
The difference for me with SL compared to other distance learning packages is that sense of presence. I’m not the only one that’s pointed that way I know and it has problems of measurement in your requested statements above. One of those problems is that I’m sure it’s not that way for everyone, but then what in education is actually universally successful?
Let me try to illustrate. I took part in a well-respected online training programme for a piece of software I was trying learn for work. Speaking personally I found it frustrating for two main reasons that I believe SL handles better.
First, stepping through the learning programme was done in the same steps for everyone. There were bits that were, for me, taken way too slowly, and other bits that were taken way too quickly. (The same criticism can be levelled at learning from a book or similar.) Having a teacher “there” lets me, the learner, nudge for more details or to skip over bits, being there as a teacher lets me respond to those suggestions and requests from my learners. There was a Q+A service on my online training programme. I’d email a question and get an answer within 24h. Use of fora, wikis etc. can reduce that time of course, but there’s still a delay in the system.
Second, SL gives one a relationship with the others. My experience of moodle, fora, e-learning etc. is that I rarely have a significant relationship with them, much as I don’t with you. “Meeting” “people” in SL is just that… I meet them, and build up a mental image of them. Both methods let me learn something about how the other person is thinking, but the ways we express ourselves are different: a lot of people are a lot less friendly in a forum than in SL for example, and what we say in a posting like this is thought through and edited (at least I do that and i assume some others do) whilst in SL it’s more immediate, less edited. It is, to me, like learning about someone from hearing their speeches and public addresses compared to getting to know them over a drink or two. Both can be done, but I know which I prefer. I strongly suspect I’m not alone in that.
As you will know if you’ve read my comments on the education list I’m rather strongly opposed to using SL to simply recreate first life learning systems. There are definitely times and spaces where typical first life teaching systems are useful, but there are times when we as teachers cling to the familiar without embracing the new paradigm that we’re in. Maybe I simply count as noise to you, but I’ve been teaching in SL for 18 months or more. I’ve not sat down and done detailed research into approaches to teaching: I’m a teacher, not an educational researcher. I make mistakes, who doesn’t, but i rather strongly believe I’m doing something right. I keep over 95% of my learners (I’m up to 76 completed students now), and although there’s not a formal examination and qualification at the end of the day, I’ve seen products from about 90% of completing students that are for sale in SL using what they’ve learnt with my help. Given I also charge for the privelege of coming to class, and I get recommendations from my students to other learners as well as good retention and success rates. It is, of course, eminently possible that I’d have similar success rates in real life, with the one proviso that there is only student I’ve worked with who lives in the same country as me, so I’d have far lower numbers on which to base my analysis.
[...] A critical look at Second Life January 15th, 2007 Over on his blog, Chris Lott has a critical look at the use of Second Life for education. Actually its more of a critical look at the education users of Second Life. Critical consideration of games based learning was the founding principle of this blog, though I haven’t yet cast a critical eye over Second Life myself - so it’s worth considering what Chris has to say. [...]
Hi Chris,
for sure don’t give up looking for that evidence. I wouldn’t claim to have all the answers, but I put my thoughts up here: http://learninggames.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/a-critical-look-at-second-life/
cheers
Daniel
I should make clear that my speaking about “measurements” is specifically about how to assess the actual, functional population of Second Life. Measuring other things, like what works and what does not, is much more difficult if not impossible.
Second, this is far from noise! I straddle the fence between being an educator (I am primarily a teacher) and a researcher (I make motions in that direction but quantitative research, in particular, bores me). I’m interested in what works, where it works, and how it works… in approximately that order.
Of your two main points, the second one– the immediacy of presence and the relationships it can give rise to– is the one that intrigues me most, and the idea that keeps me interested in SL as a vehicle for education. I suspect that the relative friendliness of people in SL as opposed to an online forum or a distributed classroom using other technology is in part a matter of self-selection– friendly people wanting to communicate with others are those who tend to flock to SL right now… they are mostly there because they want to be. But I agree that there’s something to the effect.
Another confounding factor might be group size– my experience in SL so far is that a “big” group in SL is much smaller than a big group in, say, an Elluminate Live classroom. So if I am comparing synchronous experiences I may be comparing 4-8 students interacting in SL to 12-20 or more in Elluminate. The smaller group is much more likely to have stronger feelings of shared community with participants that feel they are getting to participate… which leads me to wonder about how the size of the population will change the community dynamics. How many students do you typically work with at once?
Your first point is well taken. Its important to compare like scenarios. In my environment, my primary comparison to SL would be similar distributed, synchronous classes using some kind of shared classroom tool (we use Elluminate, obviously). The synchronous scenario is generally “better” for immediate, customized action and interaction– but again it depends on how many students one is dealing with. I know I get just as frustrated in a regular classroom (or an Elluminate class) when the disparity of experience/knowledge in the group of students is too great. So there are various options in any synchronous environment to deal with these differences while responding immediately. The question then becomes the mechanics of the environment and how they lend themselves (or not) to that facilitating that process (which is kind of the holy grail of teaching, right?
Thanks for giving me things to think about…
Okay… I’m not a teacher, more of a trainer in new technologies, and a bit of a researcher, though not an academic one, but I’d like to share a few thoughts about the pedagogical advantages of Second Life (or 3D online worlds in general) that I have gleened from my journeys (much of it on SLED) and what teachers using the platform have said:
1) Second Life is intrinsically engaging, sometimes distractingly so. See Intellagirl’s ‘My life as a Second Life Dorm Mother’ - http://www.secondlife.intellagirl.com/2007/01/12/my-life-as-a-second-life-dorm-mother/
2) Second Life is intrinsically social. Many teachers report that their students “hang around” after class and get to know each other. They also report finding students online together socialising, building and exploring the world outside of class times. You’re less likely to see this if you use Elluminate or Blackboard (although some conversations may continue in asynchronous tools like forums and mailing lists). Many argue that making learning more social improves pedagogical outcomes.
4) There is a sense of shared presence and experience in Second Life that I haven’t experienced using traditional videoconferencing or web-conferencing tools. Being at an event in Second Life really feels like being there. You can attend a presentation or movie or any other event and comment on what you are seeing with others present. This also makes for a type of collaboration not available elsewhere. There are plenty of activities that can take advantage of these unique characteristics. A typical use would be architecture students working on models of architectural designs that they, and others can fly through, and get a feel for, later.
6) Second Life (and other 3D online worlds) have other unique characteristics that allow for a range of activities such as simulation and role play, data visualisation etc. I’m too tired to add specific examples, but there are many and hopefully others may add some.
By the way Chris, you say “Ad hominem arguments end up making only two things clear: lack of ready evidence and maturity by those making the arguments.” Isn’t that in itself an ad hominem?
[...] Advice for Second Life Believers 5 Sean FitzGerald (aka Sean McDunnough), chris, Daniel Livingstone, Eloise [...] [...]
Sean– I’ll think about this and respond later in the day. In the meantime, is my ad-hominem argument circular? Perhaps… but I am vast and contain multitudes
Excellent article. I think it’s especially important to get some more input on this issue:
“really need to start pointing to something that is actually happening and relevant to support their claims of Second Life as an effective teaching platform”
Thank you.
Where is it? What we see are several hundred ecstatic Kool-Aid drinkers in the educational field led by game-god Pathfinder Linden. Their classes tend to be *about* the very thing that they claim is causing a revolution in learning — i.e. their classes are *about* the new technology *itself*. The learning consists of learning Second Life’s feature set and linking it to other social media *itself*. There isn’t a compelling illustration of using this technology to teach *other stuff* that I’ve seen. Oh sure, I realize there are some planet models to study the solar system, or a stage set that reproducts the experiences of a schizophrenic, but nobody has illustrated that this is really better than RL experience, field experience in actual RL based on interviews with RL people or reading or even looking at pictures. The metrics and results for this do matter.
Obviously, trying to get a class of 25 kids to sit down on a laggy, griefable sim in Second Life, on cement auditorium seating and listen to one avatar who often can’t even be heard beyond the 20 m2 chat range, with all the distractions of IMs, browsing of SEARCH, other applications etc is as difficult — more difficult! — to do in SL as in RL.
So rather than conclude, hmm, guess SL doesn’t really have a value-add other than giving my students a chance to build in 3-D and learn some 3-D streaming tech skills in case it comes in handy someday, the Kool-aid mixers and drinkers tell us disparagingly that “oh, those old meatworld learning methods of didactic teaching are for the birds, today’s kids are supposedly to learn unilaterally with multitasking multilevel multimedia blah blah” — or whatever noveau theory they’re pitching.
Yet even with that brand of evangelism, they are mystical in their claims — we have to just “get it” about this new “e-learning”. They talk mystically about “e-learning tools” and you teleport to the store and it has…a notecard giver. Or…a clunky whiteboard you can’t even write on past a paragraph or share a text with another person to edit it as you could in an ordinary shared Word program using Interne groups and listserve.
I’m a big evangelist myself of SL because I do think it is revolutionary and does have many capacities, but they are good and bad, and sifting and filtering takes skill and time. The claims of being a better teacher is one that I’m really waiting to have consolidated.
I’ve tried to test my own theory of trying to use the ancient Romans’ “Memory Palace” mneumonic device of walking around rooms and remembering places and objects to trigger associations and paths for material to be mastered. It’s called Memory Bazaar, check it out here:
I think we haven’t even begun to tap the 3-D and animated and scripted functions of SL for learning. I think part of the problem is that there is the inevitable layer of digital arts and new media courseniks who are merely teaching about the thing itself, so that sounds self-referential. This will fan out in time, surely. But it will take patience. I go to a course of Intellagirl’s where the punchline is that I put on another avatar she has in a box and I um explore my alternate identity blah blah — it seems fake, hackneyed, and something we all did already in the first 24 hours we already entered SL.
As for Clay Shirky, I was among those to criticize him thoroughly, and I criticized his theories about “the group as its own worst enemy” last year when everyone was raging ecstatic about that. I think the social software gurus aren’t prepared to have their pwned technology to be taken out of their hands and used in ways they didn’t intend, which don’t aggrandize them anymore as gurus.
People who wax pedantic on the lessons of Compuserve and AOL and Geocities etc. regarding Web 2.0 and the Metaverse can’t persuade me that history will repeat the same way twice, or that their purpose in issuing these homiles — keeping themselves in place as Web 1.0 gurus — will have any relevance. It might be a mixture of Compuserves and AOLs and shareware and opensource and everything in between that we see. After all, the model for how to pay for it isn’t so clear.
I also took Shirky to task, as others did, for not starting his broadside by looking at the economics page where the Lindens already supply more statistics on usage and activities than any other game or social software company out there. Had he done that homework, he’d have been more credible. To this day, I find his claim that 42,000 premium account landowners aren’t relevant because “land owning isn’t everything,” when they are part of what makes up 70 percent of Linden Lab’s own revenue in land and tier (monthly maintenance fees). I think Second Life is a world, or a kind of country without frontiers as such, that has to be analyzed not only in terms of population but of expenditures per capita, profitable busineses, GNP, GDP, etc. etc. All of that information is provided on the statistics page.
Ross Infohub Memory Bazaar:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ross/48/227/57/
Sean, could you provide some more data on how socializing is learning? How it improves learning? How it facilitates learning? I mean, college kids socialize in bars after their classes. So maybe we should encourage them to spend money on beer, not on Second Life land or something. Seriously, you posit something we can all agree on — yes, Second Life is all about the socializing! — but then don’t link that up to actual pedagogical values.
Prokofy,
What is your problem? You arent working as a real-life educator. I can’t take your comment as anything other than an example of your well known opposition to any element of real-life invading your second life game of land baron-ism. Yes, you love being the top vocal critic in SL of… well just about anything. But this need not concern you.
Lets just say… some educators have already finished teaching classes in SL which were not simply about SL or about the technology. Some have reported that their classes went well, that they got good results and that their students liked the class. Anecdotal perhaps, but at this stage even these anecdotes blow your objections away. As for the more rigorous research to back it up… that is underway and takes time. But it is underway, believe me.
If you were a professional educator raising serious points, I would try and answer them - but you arent. We’ve heard it all before from you. Sadly, I’m sure we will again.
If you want to know why, as Sean puts it, “Many argue that making learning more social improves pedagogical outcomes”, then get off your too-high horse and go read some educational journals. If you’re too lazy to try that, I suggest you stay out it.
Chris, great thoughts! Much of what you said here is how I have been feeling about our investigations into SL. However, you say it more eloquently that I would have :-). I have been searching for evidence that would entice me to not only invest my time into the learning curve required as an instructor, but also encourage me to require my students make this effort. I have concerns about the required bandwidth and stability, especially in cases like ours here in Alaska. I love the concept and intrigue of SL, but I too want to see where it is headed instructionally before I will be a true believer.
Daniel,
Uh, why would I have a “problem” if I merely challenge what looks like a lot of hype to me, and frankly looked like a lot of hokum to the original poster, too, eh?
It has nothing whatsoever to do with my being “a land baron” or playing “immersive” Second Life or something. I’m happy to have SL be used for really serious applications. I would applaud this. But I’m skeptical. I see a lot of mystification and Kool-Aid drinking here. I don’t see real stuff. I see extremist ideologies that are fashionable here or there, the child-centric ideologues among them, that are willing to privilege “the learner’s empowerment” and “the learners’ voice” blah blah — but never answer a single hard question about whether the learner ever learns anything except how to work the levers on complex video game mechanisms and how to socialize more and faster. Where’s the knowledge?
>Lets just say… some educators have already finished teaching classes in SL which were not simply about SL or about the technology
Links? Press articles?
I don’t see why I’d have to read an educational journal to ask a very pointed question about how socializing on the Internet is helping learning. I don’t see that this helps my children do their homework or learn; it has its limits, and must be restrained. There are some things that are learned by socializing — how to use games and worlds and social software are among the useful things one learns by fooling around on the Internet. But…then what? What is the content? What *else* is there besides the technology itself? I don’t see why this would be discredited as a legitimate line of questioning.
Hi Chris,
You make some great points, as do many others in this thread.
Every fall, I incorporate a Second Life module in my courses on new media and cyberculture. This is a short (2-3 week) module near the end of the term, after we’ve slogged through the more dense theoretical writings on the social impact of technology.
I’ve also designed two classes around Second Life. The first course, on game design, was offered three years ago when the world was in its infancy. (See: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/games/index.html) In that course, the environment was a great way of gaining hands-on experience with user-friendly development tools. Of course other tools (e.g. the Neverwinter Nights building kit) would also have sufficed, but those tools would have lacked the massively multiuser component that is so exciting in virtual worlds.
This semester, I’m teaching a course on promotions and publicity in virtual worlds (http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/metaverse/readings.html) to a group of new media students. During our first meeting last week, many expressed skepticism about the more grandiose claims made for Second Life. When I mentioned that I personally paid more than $1,000 USD for an island as part of a business venture, some of the students were completely flabbergasted. I tried to explain that I *also* got some magic beans along with the island, but this did not seem to convince them. It will take a while to convince the students that I’m not completely nuts, and some may never agree with me. (But that’s the great part of a liberal arts education — we’re allowed to see things differently.)
Prokofy makes the point that most classes using Second Life are about social networking and virtual world technologies, and he has a point. This is certainly true of my new media and cyberculture courses.
However, the courses on game design and virtual world promotion are an attempt to explore larger concepts (e.g. game design/criticism and interactive marketing respectively) through the lens of Second Life. These classes aren’t about Second Life, though it is a vehicle for playing with the other theoretical concepts.
Architecture professors are doing some fantastic work with Second Life as a tool for rapidly building out design concepts. It sure beats gluing toothpicks together in the middle of the night.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many other examples. I am certain that we will see many other innovative uses of Second Life (and other virtual worlds) in the classroom.
I’m personally bullish on Second Life, both as an educator and as an entrepreneur who is part of a virtual world development agency. However, I’m not convinced that it will be the dominant way of accessing the Metaverse five — or even three — years from now. Heck, it seems that Linden Lab themselves have acknowledged the likelihood of other platforms taking the lead.
For now, Second Life is a terrific tool for *some* but not all educational applications.
Aaron Delwiche
Trinity University
p.s. This is blatantly self-promoting, but some of the readers of this blog might be interested in my article on the use of multiplayer worlds in the college classroom. The data itself is a few years old, but the idea of situated learning is very powerful for anyone who is teaching with such tools. The work of Constance Steinkuehler and Lisa Galarneau might also be useful to SL educators.
p.p.s. P, I have not forgotten my promise to post something about the ethical challenges that stem from working in an industry while also teaching classes related to the mechanics of that industry. Now that my tenure materials are filed, I’ll be able to work on that.
More interesting and thought-provoking things to think about. I agree that it is unfair to (too heavily) ding early educational efforts because their content tends to focus on social networking and virtual worlds themselves… the trick is figuring out what is applicable outside that content domain and that particularly amenable group of students. Much more reading to do… I appreciate all the comments!
[...] Ruminate » Blog Archive » Advice for Second Life Believers Nice discussion and critical engagement with SL for ED, Jan 2007, many weigh in (tags: secondlife education press) [...]
[...] does a round-up of the three-party talks by Shirky, Jenkins, and Coleman. Chris Lott also has some things to say about education in SL that has unfortunately put him at loggerheads with the SLED [...]
[...] Snel naar het web, voor Second Slice, het spiksplinternieuwe Virtual World Marketing Magzine voor echte believers: adverteren gaat bijvoorbeeld in LindenDollars. Absoluut niet mijn pakkie an, maar wel opmerkelijk . [...]
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