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Online Higher Education in Second Life?
XxtraLarGe asks: "As both a technician for my college's Distance Learning program and as an avid gamer, I have been tasked with investigating Second Life as a possible way for us to extend and enhance our online classes. I've done a lot of research, reading about what other schools have done. While I personally think it is a really cool idea, I am somewhat skeptical of the actual practicality and value of what seems to be a glorified chat room. I'd like to hear from others about their education experience in Second Life, particularly if you've been involved in setting up any online classes or taken any online classes. What sort of training would be required for the faculty, and is it really worth it?"
if so, consider the fact that you guys will look like total boners if you offer classes in a video game. I don't care if that sounds ok to you, accept that you're weird and think how it's going to sound to anyone who is in a position to hire anyone for a real job.
Ok, so Second Life is cool. It's waaaay trendy. It has the sexy.
But it is chat. Only chat. Chat that you can't archive, that is done with word bubbles, and without a moderation system. What on earth would make you think that this would be a good platform for instruction?
Additionally:
- It's a beast on the requirements side, you need a ton of 3D horsepower and a fat network pipe to use it effectively
- Large groups of avatars clustered together hammer the client, turning things into a 4fps slideshow
- Server uptime has historically not been stellar, though that may have changed since I was involved
- It's distracting as all hell - your students will spend all their time customizing/scoping out each others' avatars
Please, for the love of pete, get over the hype on Second Life.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
Well, if nothing else, at least once a day your virtual classroom could be invaded by giant, flying lessons in human anatomy.
SL is so extremely overhyped right now it seems like the new Internet of the late 1990s. People even have conference chats in there, and now we need to have schools in there as well? Get a grip guys, and focus on the quality and results of your work. Doing your work in a new and cool way isn't always better you know. The only ones who will profit from the hype is the Linden 'family'.
-- Cheers!
Having taken part in the initial beta of the Second Life voice client starting two weeks ago, I can say that when voice capabilities come to SL they will certainly make it more useful to educational purposes. The system they are testing already works well and allows for 3D stereo sound. I realize that this alone does not make it perfect for education, but it does mean that it will not simply be a "glorified chat room" much longer.
I think attempting to bring learning systems to SL does have merit. The tools actually are shaping up and aside from the universities that are already in SL, I know of a few other educational offerings that are being developed now that could demonstrate value for educators and students.
I think that this type of immersive long-distance multiuser education is here to stay. Whether it will gain public acceptance during the platform life cycle of Second Life really depends on whether innovative educators keep coming into the virtual world prepared to push it forward. So if you are looking for a polished educational software platform to set up and get rolling quickly, then SL is not for you yet. On the other hand, if you want to be a pioneer and expand your thinking on how virtual worlds can fascilitate education then you should invest a little funding in SL and see what you can make of it.
I can't see how having the school _in_ a video game would help with either. You could use a video game as an illustration or assignment, maybe, but having virtual avatars dicking around in a virtual world? Seriously, how's that going to help?
Except those are very specialized simulators, extremely close to the real thing. I can't see how playing any game would help programming in the same way. If you play MS Flight Sim, you might actually learn something about airplanes, but if you click around a virtual classroom in Second Life, all you've learned from there is to click around in a game. Maybe a valuable skill for something else, but it won't make you a better programmer no matter how you want to slice it.
Additionally, SL does have the dubious reputation among many people of being basically a 3D cybersex game, and of pink flying penises. Deserved or undeserved, I'm not discussing that at this point. Just that it has it. So while many employers could maybe live with getting your courses online, many _will_ be turned off by such an association. It's basically on par with saying that you got your education at the local brothel. You know, one of the hookers also was good with computers and stuff.
I'm not sure putting a silly avatar on it would help that horribly much. Or not enough to offset the other problems.
I'm guessing it would take a lot more than a week or two, including dealing with disruptions, pranks and whatnot. The pink flying penises aren't just a wisecrack, that's just what happened to someone's press release in SL.
Plus, I see it as more work for the teacher all semester long, if they actually want to simulate all the advantages of a real school. Just seeing the teacher standing there isn't going to do much.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Look beyond the hype and anti-hype. Second Life is a great platform for cooperation, and it is not just about chat.
People can build things together without having to know 3-D instructions of 3-D software. People can program in a C-like syntax, event-driven. It has produced a great result in beginning programming classes, since students have been able to produce enticing results from their first 'for','while', or if... And they find an immediate use for maths (3-D movement) and for lots of algorithms.
For instance, my undergraduate students are producing in Second Life "products" that behave as if they had RFID tags and are now developing a traditional Windows application for managing e-mails sent by those "products" - without actually having to acquire RFID tags. And they are just beginning their programming.
On the other hand, one of my PhD students is trying to integrate Second Life with teaching management software like Moodle or like our in-house system. There is an open source platform for accessing Moodle content from Second Life (Sloodle), but not the opposite.
I think you two could exchange interesting view. Get in touch.
Second Life in its current form is not suitable for any serious business (or education) for the following reasons:
/every single day/ and this fact alone will make any form of serious education completely impossible.
1. Unplanned outages. These have been there from the start, but for the past 3 months or so it has been horrible. Expect at least 2 to 3 days a week where no work can be done due to the fact that people can't log in, can't get to the assigned location, can't chat properly because their chat lines are coming out in jumbled order or not at all.
2. Griefers. SL is so full of these it's going to kill it off soon. The flying penisses are not a joke from some journalist and they are not the only griefer tool by far. The prime target to aim these puppies at is anything that takes (second) life too seriously. I'd say that makes serious education the #1 target.
3. Huge performance trouble on the backend, with asset servers that looked meager a year ago when there were on average 10000 concurrent users online. At this point the number of concurrent users goes over 30K every single day, and as soon as they hit 20-25K, any use of inventory items will become impossible. This includes opening scripts and notecards (the SL equivalent of books), building stuff, accessories for your avatar, etc. To make it clear, this happens
4. Total impossibility to get any form of compensation for lost items, work and/or time. Linden Labs, the company behind SL, is not interested in what you lost. The best you'll get is a quote from the EULA, if you are one of the lucky few that get a reply at all.
SL is barely suvivable as a form of entertainment at the moment. Using it as a platform for business or education is complete idiocy. Have a look at the Linden Labs SL blog and read the comments to the post relating to technical problems and outages. You'll see what I mean.
PS: I've been playing SL for about a year.
Having held two seminars in SL - at the request of other players - as well as doing the same in a real university I think I can fairly comment on how lacking SL is as a teaching medium.
The seminars were a "101" style introduction to a scientific subject. I prepared for it much as I would have any presentation. I made my standard dull yet structuring powerpoint slides, exported them as jpegs and scripted a slide viewer in LSL. The seminar was well attended, drawing 20+ attentive students to each two hour seminar. I had built a classroom facility that allowed all to sit close enough to me to be "heard" and able to see the slides. The seminar consisted of about one hour of me "chatting" through the slides and an hour's worth of Q & A. The slides and the chat transcript were made available and requested after the seminars.
Here were the advantages: it allowed people from any internet equipped, English understanding country to attend. It did communicate the information fairly well although it was a little taxing to IM chat continually and substantively for that long. The attendees were quite interested in the subject and were extremely polite; as far as I could tell, most were probably more focused on the chat and slides than on other avatars. Given the format, if I had to do it again, I'd have streamed audio from me to all of them and used the IM-style chat for receiving questions.
I needed two thing that I wouldn't have needed outside SL. The first was a sergeant-at-arms to watch for and ward off the disruptive "griefers" that uniformly invade any significant gathering of players in SL. The second was an assistant to ensure that questions were vectored into me as it is difficult to raise a virtual hand or grant the floor to a questioner.
I also was using something that in no way enhanced the quality of the seminar: SL. The slides could have just as easily been on a web page, and the dialog would have been equally well served by any generic multicast chat service. There is no inflection or gesturing that I'd have done in a real world seminar; I doubt anyone even looked at my avatar as it was sitting and IM-ing. Chat is about as narrowband a communication medium humans have ever used, and the incredible amount of bandwidth required for the 40-person-hour seminars would have been just as well served by IRC.
With the possible exclusion of 3D models for demonstration, SL affords absolutely nothing to the teaching or learning; indeed, the seminar was significantly slowed by the medium. Furthermore, these seminars were at least a year ago. These days, I'd have had to use a private simulator to ensure that 20 people could attend and the extremely overburdened "content" servers may have difficulty in getting the next slide image to the 20 attendees in the time it takes me to chat through one. The only way I have seen SL used as an effective teaching medium is to teach others to use SL itself.
"Get your degree without leaving your parents basement!"
[Insert pithy quote here]
In itself having online classes in a 3D virtual setting like Second Life is a good idea. It is surprising just how much more of a connection seeing and interacting with others in such a manner brings compared to text only. Integrated voice should serve to deepen the immersion and effectiveness of using SL as an online education platform. The real problem though, is that Second Life is not quite up to the task yet and the kind of hardware that students would need to run it well is not that widespread yet.
The hardware issue makes me think that while Second Life is not, strictly speaking, a game, it would be a good idea to create an optimized client for game consoles like the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. These two consoles have the raw computational power and graphics capabilities that should make for a smoother in world experience. Plus, game consoles are standardized platforms that are widespread and easier to support than PCs at lower cost to the user. Sony's virtual world project Home (beta soon), may point the way for Second Life on a console.
In a lot of ways, Second Life is glorified chat. But don't forget, in the early days, AOL made a lot of money off of mere chat. And now chat and online forums, etc. are being used effectively for online instruction. So it's just a matter of time and technology before many of us will be taking our seats in a 3D virtual classroom, hopefully free of flying male anatomy!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
There are a couple of points here. First, using Second Life (SL) as an environment for learning brings it under the general heading of online learning about which there is a rich literature already and which deserves some attention on your part. A readable introduction to this topic is Palloff and Pratt's "Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom", or Harasim et al. "Learning Networks : A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning On-Line " for a more scholarly treatment.
Second, there are two basic kinds of online learning: asynchronous environments and synchronous environments. SL would fall into the latter category, so that is where you should focus your attention.
Third, there is a literature on using MOOs and MUDs (the predecessors of SL and other virtual worlds) for educational purposes. This is also a good place to look for what works and what doesn't. Lynn Davie and Jason Nolan are two researchers who have written about this. As well, Edward Castronova's book, "Synthetic Worlds" also deserves a look for a general introduction to a variety of aspects of the current crop of virtual worlds.
Fourth, whoever is using SL or any other online learning environment should be made aware that online learning of any type proceeds differently than face-to-face classes. One of the biggest mistakes that an instructor can make to to try to port their f2f class directly and without change into an online environment. There is a learning curve, and there is information on what works and what doesn't (see above.) They need to look at it.