One of the things that drew me to SL to begin with was the increased educational presence in-world. A year ago, SL was very much in evidence in blogs and other media as a kind of new frontier. Colleges and universities were investing in their own islands, SL created a teen grid for the 13-to-18 year olds, and professional organizations established programs to encourage and mentor new residents. As a long time participant in virtual worlds, I was interested in how this presence was playing out — in seeing how the educational establishment was adapting to the environment.

First, while I am not a lawyer, I believe that any college or university which accepts US federal dollars and requires students to use second life as a classroom space is in violation of regulation 508 because SL is not accessible to individuals who are blind. The viewer does not appear to be accessible and the value of the environment solely as a chat room is so small as to be asinine. The argument that “we have no blind students so it’s ok” is merely a blank check for the first blind students who wants to retire without finishing his/her degree. The creation of an inaccessible school is a de facto violation of US laws governing accessibility including IDEA, and regulations 504 and 508. The much bruited installation of “voice chat” as accessibility option is merely an indication of how very little the educational establishment actually understands the issue of accessibility.

Second, the main instantiation of educational activity in SL seems to be the recreation of the classroom in virtual space. Touring campuses and educational spaces reveals instance after instance of lecture hall and virtual classroom dedicated to displaying 2D data in 3D space. Powerpoints, audio (voice and mp3 streaming), and video screens appear to be the main mechanism for education in the space.

Third, efforts to introduce games and problem-based instruction as educational strategies have focused on adding a “game layer” on top of the SL environment rather than using the environment itself as a game. This is particularly ludicrous when dealing with subject matter such as marketing, economics, mathematics, history, and literature. It underscores a reality that educators are still in the “doing the same old thing with new technology” stage of adoption. I’ll be anxious to see how long it takes the educational community to realize that SL affords capabilities that transcend and exceed the capabilities of the classroom.

Fourth, my sense is that educators are generally tourists — outsiders looking in, just visiting — in the environment. Few hold jobs. Comparatively few even “get off the island.” This is especially true of those educators who participate through the auspices of a private island. They’re very busy controlling the environment to suit their own purposes without really taking the time to understand the culture and environment. It’s no wonder they’re unable to recognized the inherent value of the space.

Fifth, everybody is interested in the space as an educational environment and almost nobody is looking at it as a learning environment. Ask the average educator what they’re interested in and you’ll get a variation on the response, “I want to find the best way to teach here.” Contrary to popular belief that is not the obverse of, “I want to find the best way to learn here.” It’s not surprising. They still think that there’s a direct correlation between teaching and learning in RL as well. That bias has been brought in world.

Sixth, research in SL is actually NOT exclusively “media comparison” which was a surprise. There are actually people looking at some interesting things like how embodiment choices in SL effect one’s RL thinking. Much of the social research on gender is flawed because it’s based on self-report. Almost all the “personal space” research is based on the flawed assumption that people stand where they intend to stand (and not the last place a movement left them). I’m still trying to figure out what a valid “educational research question” might look like in SL.

Conclusion: Teachers want to use the space. Most of them want to use it for the wrong reasons. Many don’t have a clue what it means to be “in the world” in any real sense, instead focusing on imposing RL constraints on SL constructs — even when those constraints are irrelevant.

The Educator’s Coop group is filled with people who obsess over trying to find ways to “teach” in SL. What they mean by that is “deliver instruction.” In most cases that’s “display a PowerPoint”, “show a video”, or even just, “display some text.”

My problem is that SL is the wrong environment for all those.

In the first place, PowerPoints are almost universally the wrong choice of medium to “deliver instruction” despite their endemic application.

In the second place, the power of SL is, at least in part, in the shared experience of a 3d environment — whether synchronously (together) or asynchronously (one at a time). Reading or watching a video is a two-dimensional activity and there are much better environments for delivering text, audio, and video than SL.

The fundamental issue, for me, is what I’ve dubbed the Tyranny of Synchrony. It comes from the classroom mndset that says, “We can instruct people better in a group setting where I can bring them altogether, tell them all at the same time, answer all their questions as we go.” The fundamental flaw here is that, while that might be an efficient application of instructional resource, it’s not necessarily the application that yields the best learning outcomes.

Myself, I’m getting more than a little tired of the focus on Education in SL, and I think maybe it’s time we shifted to a focus on Learning.

But before I lose what I am thinking at the moment …

I am building on SL with the main goal of dialogue spaces. The more I build – the more I am convinced, that for dialogue and participation, the ERG model of open spaces with images and “boards” and other props thrown around and handed around works very well on SL.

However – since SL is full of stuff we can do without encountering or viewing when we are there for discussion on specific topics or for class – it is a good idea to screen out some of the surrounding stuff.

For instance on my “Maidaan” (large open grounds – I use a Hindi word to express the openness of the metaphor that I am trying to invoke in the building) at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Brouwer/168/145/43 – I have “cloth” screens all around instead of walls (most of these are phantom so people dont encounter walls while trying to come – but where the surroundings are not conducive to the atmosphere I am trying to invoke – I have set those to “physical” ) .

While some of the houses and buildings are beautifully built on SL – they have other purposes, I feel. And for what I am trying to set up – these are claustrophopic.

Likewise with the use of voice – which to me would need to be used performatively and strategically.

r

It appears to be predicated on the assumption that people don’t want to “look old.” I think this may be overly simplistic. As one of the senior members of the group (at 54), there was not any kind of conscious decision to pick a shape and skin that “looked young” rather I sought shapes and skins that — if not accurately reflecting my RL body, at least reflected a male, Caucasian in late middle age. This was not a conscious decision on my part, but rather a sense of “but *that’s* not *me*” whenever I saw the wide-shouldered, narrow hipped, flat belly and butt which represents the youthful male shape in SL. Instead, I wound up with a rather narrow shouldered, moderately muscled, slightly bottom heavy shape and a dark skin — as if I’d been working in the fields all my life.

So in the absence of wrinkly skins, how does one represent “age”?

meanwhile

Radhika’s blog has some posts of interest

For me, the idea of “differentiate” isn’t necessarily clear. I *reference* the two spaces as “meat space” and “cyber space” to denote an artificial distinction between, say, a building on my campus and a house in Second Life. This differentiation is necessary because we use the word “building” in both contexts and it sometimes needs context setting in order to be made clear.

But the argument of “real vs virtual” is a meaningless construct for me. The confusion results from a semantic confusion of the computer term “virtual” and the English word “virtual” which have different and distinct meanings.

When used as a modifier in communications and computer contexts, like “virtual machine” and “virtual world,” the word virtual means “mediated by computer” and has no bearing on the philosophical notion of “reality.” In communications contexts, the term applied as in “virtual world” connotes akin to the name of a communications channel.

When used as an English term, like “virtual prison” or “virtual angel,” the term is rooted in the word “virtue” and can be restated to something like “a prison by virtue of having many of the characteristics of a prison” or “an angel by virtue of having many of the characteristics of an angel.” The idea is that the reference isn’t to a “real” thing, but something — by definition — other than the real — it’s not a “real prison” or a “real angel.” While the temptation is to extrapolate that meaning into the computer context, the reality is that this usage requires a comparative entity. We need a construct like “the school was a virtual prison” or “Jenny was a virtual angel” in order for the phrase to have any contextual meaning.

The temptation is to transfer that usage into “Second Life is a virtual world” and I believe that this is the confounding semantic trap that most people fall into. While it’s certainly a valid sentence to restate it as “Second Life is a world by virtue of having the characteristics of a world,” the notion of “real or not” is automatically void. That construct requires “not real” as a predicate. Clearly this is not the context in which we need to deal with “virtual world.”

I maintain that the idea of “virtual world” is more akin to “telephone” and names a communications channel. In this context a channel is not necessarily “a medium” but more like some aggregated notion of media, technology, and pathway. The telephone is a good comparison to Second Life in this regard. Familiarity with phone leads us to overlook some realities of the channel, however. We use a variety of technologies – spoken language, audio encoding/decoding, analog or digital transmission, etc – to connect two or more people. The concept of “real or not” never comes into play. We don’t have a “virtual conversation” on the phone. Your relationship with your mother on the phone is as real as it is when you are in the same room with her in spite of the reality that you are not hearing your mother’s real voice on the phone, but rather a decoded simulation of her voice created when the sound waves from her vocal cords hit the diaphragm in her phone and are converted to some other form for transmission to your location, and are then recreated mechanically for you to interpret. Of course it’s not REALLY her voice. The construct has no meaning because the notion of reality isn’t relevant to the larger notion of the conversation you’re having with your mum by using the channel called “telephone.”

Likewise the question of reality in dealing with Second Life is a meaningless construct. In the same sense that your mother’s voice is not real when you hear it on the phone, the messages — graphic, audio, whatever — you get from Second Life are not real. It’s not a physical house, nor a physical body, but rather a digital construct that’s used for transmitting a message in the same way that laughter, sighs, and inflections are audio constructs used for transmitting a message on the phone.

With that as a given, I believe the interesting questions about SL are still surrounding the messages we send, the negotiations we make — explicitly and implicitly — over the nature of the conversation, and how we choose to use the capabilities of the channel to send messages. Even questions of “what constitutes a message” have a certain interest. But the idea of “real or not” when applied to SL — for me — has no more meaning than when applied to the telephone.

One of the questions they ask is “what you are interested in and imagine doing in SL as an educator/researcher?”

In part I’m doing it by participating in this little activity with rad and in part the answer has to be, I don’t know yet.

One of the difficulties in dealing with educators and researchers in general is that they seem to want to know what you’re going to study before you even have an idea of what might be interesting. THE big question about SL for me is “What’s a valid question?” The embodiment topic is sort of interesting. Research on “Do people treat me differently in this body or that body?” is probably interesting, but I’m not sure what to do with it. “Yes,” as an answer leaves a lot to be desired.

So, I told the interviewer (yes, you have to have a phone interview! — I hate phones), I’m not really interested in *teaching* in SL per se. I’m not sure that the idea of *teaching* in SL has a lot of merit frankly. For that matter, I’m beginning to question the merit of *teaching* in RL. I *am* interested in the power of creativity as motivator and in the issues surrounding perception of distance. I still run into people — like this group who insist on having a phone interview — who feel like the communication isn’t valid unless they can hear your voice. Or see your “body language”

Which brings me back to embodiment in SL where the POV is not thru the avatar’s eyes, but something else — most often over the shoulder but frequently at some tangent zoom angle. Just because the avatar moves its head, doesn’t mean the person at the keyboard is looking in a different place. Placement of avatars in relationship to each other is — at least for me — a haphazard exercise at best. I find I DO like to sit. I dont know what that means. It has something to do with anchoring the av so I’m free to use the cam. I will move so that the group is in the 20m chat circle from me, even if it means that people on opposite sides only hear me and not each other. Most people don’t seem to even be aware that there IS a chat range, let alone how big it is. I wear a small device, in fact, that tells me who’s in chat range. It updates every 20 seconds and I find it invaluable, but I don’t think that most people find that information is particularly useful. Why IS that?

And one last idea before I pack to go to a physical conference that could be just as easily handled by text chat, my largest reservations about the Coop have to do with the tendency for people to get into SL and not move around. Educators in particular treat the rest of SL like some kind of dangerous third world country where the water is suspect and the food is bacterially contaminated. If all they/we as members of the coop do is sit on the Mesa and chat, then the whole experience is lost.

We’ll see.