Virtual Learning Worlds

I’ve written a lot in the past about Second Life and design, specifically the Second Life Design Notebook posts.

But the more I think about this, talk to people, and listen to my students’ experiences…I’m starting to think this has more to do with usability than design. My students constantly talk about being stuck in buildings with low ceilings, lots of objects, losing their camera behind walls, and other issues that really hinder the ability to navigate and move freely throughout the Second Life world.

Usability as it pertains to the web has been a very important area for web developers to concentrate on. People have authored entire books on usability and countless academic programs have entire classes dedicated to accessibility and usability. If a website isn’t usable, people get frustrated and leave. Second Life is no different.

A few examples:

This image was taken from a conference I attended in SL months ago. This looks like a typical conference room you’d see in the real world. In Second Life, it’s NOT very usable. At all. As people teleported into the room, we had bodies stacked 5-high. The teleporter eventually was blocked and stopped other avatars from entering the room. Moving in the room was brutal: the ceilings were low so flying was not a viable option and trying to find a chair (outside of the end chairs) was nearly impossible, because your avatar constantly rammed in to people or other objects.

This was also from a conference within Second Life. This arrangement doesn’t resemble any conference you would attend in the real world, but in second life it IS very usable. You can easily see everything, you can get in and out of a seat within seconds, plenty of room for everyone so people won’t be running in to one another or objects that are very close together.

This is an example of a museum in Second Life I recently visited. In this picture, it looks very good and similar to what you would see in the real world. But it took me many frustrating attempts to even GET INTO this room. I had to walk up two flights of stairs, which were very narrow with no guard rail. This led to my avatar falling off the stairs several times and starting over. I had to navigate a narrow hallway to get to the room, which I lost my camera several times behind walls as I moved my avatar around, making it very difficult to simply walk through a hallway. This is not usable. This is frustrating.

This doesn’t look like any museum you would find in the real world, but in Second Life it simply works. This is extremely usable because nothing hinders my avatar’s ability to navigate and view all the objects presented to me.

The difficult challenge is finding a balance between familiarity and usability when designing and developing objects that are meant to serve some sort of purpose within Second Life. Simply creating re-world replicas is not the answer, and is actually hurting Second Life more than helping it. Wired claimed that 86% of the Second Life population logged in once and never returned. If new users manage to get through the tutorials and off noobie island, it’s no wonder they leave because a lot of the places they might explore have terrible usability.

Imagine being stuck within a bad website, unable to get out. That’s often what it feels like within Second Life when you attempt to explore many of these areas.

My last post has led to some great discussions with colleagues here around the university and a few online. I’m still thinking quite a bit about how we’re attempting to integrate all of these various technologies into the curriculum. The more discussions I’ve had, and the more I watch my class interact with these tools, I’ve started to work down a different train of thought:

Digital expression vs. assessment

Let’s continue to evaluate my blog and Second Life experiences. An early assignment required my students to register and setup their own blogs. Subsequent assignments required posts that dealt with certain topics or questions. The students didn’t seem to care for the actual content of the blog, but some spent MANY hours customizing the look and feel of the blog. It appears as if one student even hacked the CSS to create a new layout.

Did I require them to do anything with the aesthetics? Not at all, but probably 50% of the class went in and tampered with the various templates and went to great lengths to make the blog unique.

The same can be said about Second Life. The first analysis assignment (see student quotes in this post) didn’t go over very well. The consensus was that SL is buggy, unintuitive, frustrating, and pointless. After the analysis, students were required to build an interactive sign consisting of 4 prims and a texture. About half the class went WAY beyond the requirements of the assignment, adding particle effects, motion, and several facets of interactivity to the signs.

I also had my students produce a podcast early in the year, which has been the overall favorite assignment so far. This assignment called for teams of two to discuss expectations of IST 110, IST as a major, and their understanding of podcasting and podcast technology. The students had a blast producing the podcasts and I even had a good time grading them. During the debrief, the only part of the assignment the students would have changed was the content. They wanted a much more open, creative topic they could structure their podcast around. I didn’t think I imposed that much structure, but in their eyes, I did.

I’m thinking that maybe I should have STARTED my blog module with the podcast assignment, or started my SL module with the sign assignment. Get them into the technology immediately with a goal or a purpose, and then facilitate the discussions, analysis, and critiques AFTER they have time to engage the technology in some sort of creative, expressive manner.

I’m having a hard time figuring out the balance between creative, expressive assignments and assessment. Leave too much room for expression, and you have no standards to grade upon. Provide a lot of structure, and students disengage or lose motivation because they can’t do what they want to do…

You can find the slides from today here.

Other posts in the second life category.

We held our first second life event last Friday, a “Build Your Own Motorcycle” event. The numbers weren’t staggering (we had 3 entries), but overall I think it was a success. We had five IST faculty members as judges along with some other students and instructors who came by to observe. So what did we learn putting on the event?

• Registration - I neglected to put a registration system in place before advertising the event. We ended up experimenting with an in-world registration system that captured the avatar’s name and pushed it to a Twitter account when touched. We had some issues with this, so we then created a similar system that captured the avatar’s name and sent it to a gmail account. The system had a few bugs in it due to admin features we tried to implement, but overall it could work.

• Synchronous vs. asynchronous - We decided to hold the event at a specific time within SL. The idea is that participants would login at a certain time, register, and then have time to show the judges their creations. I think a better idea would have been to put the creations on display for a week or so before the event, then have a synchronous get together in-world to announce the winners. Trying to do it all at once hurt our turnout.
• With the limitations on avatars per server, we designed a ’staging area’ in case we had over 40 people participating. The staging area was on our neighbor’s space, ETS @ PSU, right along the Istania border. To the average participant, they wouldn’t even notice the server differentiation but it would have offered us more flexibility and bandwidth.
• Permissions - We thought about using a specific events ‘group’ for the participants with special permissions on the island but I felt this might be too much administrative overhead. I didn’t want to worry about getting people registered, checking the system for entries, handing out group invites, and working with the judges all at the same time. Instead, I subdivided the staging area into its own parcel of land, and set the permissions to allow anyone to res and run scripts in this area. This is somewhat risky, but I felt confident we’d be ok since I could revert back at any time. Once the event was over, I reset the permissions.

That about sums it up for now. We are already thinking of a Halloween-themed event, but I’m not sure I have the time to design, organize, advertise, and host an event so soon. We’re hoping that other individuals or departments within IST ’sponsor’ events like this in the future with our help.

I had a great time yesterday speaking at Drexel’s LeBow College of Business and the Villanova Center for Instructional Technologies to a wide variety of audiences. We had instructional technologists, assistant Deans, faculty members, other administrators, IT specialists, grad students, undergrads…a great sampling of the entire educational community. I hope everyone that attended a session found some portions of the talk useful and informative.

A few notes from the discussion portion of the talks:

• The possibility of using student presentations to assess assignments in Second Life. For example, we have an assignment where students create a poster. Several technical requirements need to be met in Second Life as part of the rubric. Instead of the instructor logging in and examining every student project to make sure the requirements are met, have the students present their poster, and illustrate to the professor that yes, the team did meet all the technical requirements.
• Drexel already has a presence in Second Life that involves folks from the Library. The library has a great program up and running where faculty can ‘rent’ or ‘borrow’ an avatar using a library computer running SL. This is a fantastic idea which could help ease people into the SL environment in a very quick fashion (no orientation island, no registration, just jump right in with someone present to help).
• The idea of intellectual property rights as it pertains to technology commercialization raises a lot of issues. Especially when you have students doing a lot of your SL development, some voluntarily, who go on to develop some sort of technology that could be commercialized. How do you handle this?

Slides from Wednesday

Special thanks to Cathy, Erik, and Jen for organizing the presentations.

This post isn’t very content heavy, more a support post for a virtual worlds talk I’ll be giving at Drexel’s LeBow College of Business and Villanova later today. I’ll post a summary sometime later in the week.

IST’s Second Life Portal
Be sure to check the “SL Resources” section for educational and development resources.

A few virtual worlds…
World of Warcraft
ToonTown
Club Penguin
There
ProtoSphere

A few tools to build virtual worlds…
Active Worlds
Multiverse
Croquet Consortium
SmartFox Server

Sloodle

Second Life Currency Exchange

A colleague recently sent a blog post my way about the future of Second Life. Nothing major here, I’ve blogged before about Second Life going open source. I’m just curious how this is going to play out, and figured I’d post some personal thoughts on the matter.

Our college is involved with numerous open source projects that involve using things like Plone and Drupal. So I get a glimpse into these communities and know a little bit about how they operate. Everything is bottom-up in terms of design, development, and implementation. I guess this is due to no for-profit company owning the technology. Will the Second Life community really be the drivers for all of the open-source efforts, or does Linden Labs have its own agenda? I’ve heard some people accuse LL of simply looking for free labor from the community to help solve some of their problems with the Second Life technology. I don’t necessarily buy that.

LL has been talking about open sourcing Second Life for a long time now. Even though the article above paints a glowing picture…what’s the holdup here? I would recommend providing the development community the whole server platform and technology to experiment with. Some sort of affiliate program that requires an application and approval process. Get folks like IBM involved early so their technology folks can dive into the code. The time for talk about open sourcing is gone, just open it up. Even if it’s very limited to start with. I feel like LL is trying to exert too much control over this if they really want it to succeed following and open source model.

I was on www.secondlife.com today, and found information on something they are calling “Second Life Grid“. For long-time SL users, the Grid is what the entire server platform has been called for some time now. At the SL loading screen there’s a little box with information on the Grid, like status, current users, etc.

So what exactly is Linden Lab doing with this new program? It doesn’t look like I can actually purchase the server code and maintain my own server. I’ve glanced over the site, and I have found some information about APIs and service providers that I haven’t seen before…but that’s about it. One of my colleagues took a look over the site and uncovered what I didn’t see…

…this is a marketing thing. I’m sure “Second Life Grid” as a program has a few benefits, but it isn’t really anything new. I think this is just an effort to distinguish the original “Second Life” with “Corporate” or “Educational” second life. It’s all still the same Second Life, but by framing it under a different name/different program, Linden seems to be attempting to legitimize SL as a business and education platform. Will it work? I guess time will tell. My gut reaction is that this is something they should have rolled out years ago, not when companies are supposedly leaving Second Life.

The Second Life article from Wired I blogged about a few weeks ago seemed to have taken on a life of its own. Wagner James Au, the first virtual reporter to embed himself within SL, offered up this piece as a counter-argument to the Wired piece. Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired, also offered up this piece, on why he is done with Second Life. A lot of back-and-forth takes place between the blogs, but it’s an interesting dialogue.

The problem I have with it, is that it deals almost COMPLETELY with Second Life as it pertains to marketing and corporations…and inevitabley why SL sucks in that space. I really wish we could get away from this argument for a while. Sure, SL has its issues (technololgy infrastructure, support, shady adult content, unstable and unpredictable economy to name a few), but it still holds HUGE potential for education and training opportunities. Maybe I’m just biased due to my background, but it seems that very little attention is being paid to this portion of SL. At least outside the EDU/training circles.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Linden Labs has been involved in a few court cases revolving around IP within Second Life. Now, I’m unsure if this is the case that’s created the storm, but a storm is brewing. Basically, a SL creator was making money off a popular item, and another user found a way to duplicate the item, and undercut the original creator on the price. Check out the link above to learn more about the case (WARNING: the object in question is some sort of sex toy, but it may as well represent anything of value SL users are creating and selling).

It’s been a busy couple weeks, and I’ve lost touch with whether or not another big IP issue has surfaced in SL. The reason I’ve been looking was due to a recent chat with some IBM’ers. From what I understand, they have completely halted production in Second Life due to recent IP issue. I find it hard to believe it’s the emerging case above…it sounded to me it was a different case in which Linden Labs actually seized creations of a user who was disgruntled with Linden and wanted to move his virtual business to a new virtual world (probably deleting all his SL assets in the process). This is speculation at this point as I can’t seem to find a reference to this story. If anyone tracks a reference down, please post it below or send me an emial.

EDIT: maybe the big fuss is about the land ownership suit filed in PA court last year? Seems a bit dated.

I always found it fascinating that so many organizations have been willing to allow Linden Labs to host what essentially is organizational knowledge and assets on servers outside the organization’s firewall and/or server centers. Depending on how all this IP stuff shakes out, I have a feeling the Second Life and Virtual World landscape could change quite a bit, specifically when it comes to for-profit organizations.

For example:
IBM’s Next Virtual World: Looks to be utlizing Torque (an engine we’re looking at here at Penn State), which can be hosted on IBM’s own infrastructure.

Sun’s Virtual Intranet: This looks fascinating. We’re trying to put together a trip to chat with the Sun folks behind this platform and see if we can’t make some in-roads.

Lockheed Martin: No links to their project (it’s quadruple top secret, like everything else from LM!), but our College has a close relationship and I’ve spoken to some of their technology R&D folks. They’ve purchased some off-the-shelf engine technology, and are creating their own VW platform for internal use, similar to what Sun appears to have.

ProtoSphere: I really like the ideas behind ProtoSphere, but in terms of the challenges Second Life is facing with IP and organization’s who want to host their own platform, similar issues may arise. I’ve spoke with the founder, and his vision/ideas are extremely engaging. I’m trying to roll this into some projects here at the College.