Virtual Learning Worlds

The Second Life saga continues. For some reason I’ve been very pessimistic this week, but for the record I DO appreciate what Second Life has to offer, and how people are attempting to leverage SL for teaching, learning, and research. But I still struggle with it, for a variety of reasons. After months of creating IST’s SL presence, Istania, I’ve observed and come across some interesting things:

1. Second Life is NOT a game. I knew this from the start, but many do not.

2. I’ve found that the ‘typical’ SL experiences goes something like this:
Create Account >
Login >
Orientation Island >
Graduate to mainland >
I have no idea what to do with myself, this is boring >
Close SL

This is coming from about 50% of the faculty I talk to, but MANY of our students tell me this is their first (and often last) SL experience.

3. Personally, if I want students and faculty to use Istania, I need to craft some interesting experiences for them. This is both in the form of things to do on the island, as well as classroom and lab activities that faculty can use to engage students around a specific topic or concept. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about experience design, and how I can bend my knowledge of games, instructional design, and experience design to bring people into the IST Second Life space, engage them, and give them something to do for their first X hours.

4. Second Life IS NOT user friendly, and support materials to solve your specific problems are hard to find. Solutions are out there, but finding them can be extremely difficult.

5. A small % of people I introduce to SL get hooked. It’s their thing, just like World of Warcraft is my thing, Linux is someone else’s thing, DeskTop Tower defense is…well, a lot of peoples’ thing.

Lately, I’ve been very curious about demographics of the Second Life user base (specifically the academic/learning folks). Are there trends there? Even basic mean, median, mode data would be interesting. One theory I recently dreamt up is that the majority of the Second Life crowd (at least the SL academic crowd) comprise of mostly people who MISSED the gaming phenomena. Or at least, people who don’t regularly play popular games. The Serious Games conferences I attend rarely delve into Second Life…and that crowd consists of very knowledgeable gamers. Almost all the students I expose to Second Life who are gamers tell me “I log on for 5 minutes, get frustrated, then want to go play a real game.” I barked up the social tree with a few of them, and they laughed and just said “World of Warcraft” or “Xbox Live”.

Are there regular gamers out there who find themselves really engaged with Second Life? Is it as engaging as WoW, Guitar Hero, Gears of War, Wii Sports, or other popular games for those that experiment with all this stuff?

Well…in this case it will. Escape from the Ghetto, or GettOut, is a game being developed by a Czech studio about dealing with all the ills of poverty. Drugs, the authorities, discrimination, it’s all in there, and hopefully handled in such a way that educates what this country sometimes calls children at risk that live in cities. It looks like they even got the delivery mechanism figured out: FREE and DOWNLOADABLE

I’m going to skip commentary on the actual presentations themselves, they were all very good and gave me some additional angles to explore what I’m doing with Second Life. Rather, I’d like to reflect on the design elements of the space and the experience as a whole.

- Conference Layout and design. Each area that took part in the event was designed with consistency in mind (similar signboards, layout, etc). This gave all participants a quick and easy way to realize if you’re in the right place.

I did come across some conference and presentation facility replicas which I always find amusing. Suzi’s presentation took place in your standard, rectangular room, with rows of chairs. Getting to a seat was frustrating…it was difficult to move through the isle with lots of avatars bumping into each other, trying to fly simply slammed your head against the wall and forced camera clipping, and people were teleporting directly into the room on top of other avatars. This room layout and design definitely broke my first design lesson taken from SL. The NMC space where other presentations took place was the exact opposite and really looked to be designed with the freedoms SL provides in mind…the same freedoms that don’t exist in the physical world.

- Experience design. I think of this as looking at the totality of the experience, from when I teleported to the conference welcome center through to closing Second Life. I’d rank the experience of the conference about average. The schedule of events didn’t indicate WHERE the speakers were giving their talk. I had to use the signs to load each location on the map and make guesses based on the number of people on each sim. I felt that aspect of the conference could have guided the participants better. I’d assume they had this listed somewhere, but I was unable to find it.

The level of interaction also felt strained, particularly with just text. Some people copy + paste via a script into their SL chat window to present, others rely on really fast typing. When you ask questions of the audience, and get 25 responses scrolling by at light speed…I find there’s very little meaningful interaction. Would VoIP solve this? Maybe, I’m not sure. Possibly these worlds, at least SL, isn’t meant for MASS interactions simultaneously via text.

Overall, I came away with many positive things from the conference, including new ways of using SL, more SL educators to add to my contacts, and lessons learned I can immediately apply to the SL project I’m working on. I wish I could have attended more sessioins so I had a broader experience to reflect on. Hopefully we’ll see more of these events soon!

One of my colleagues from Grad School, Suzi, is presenting this morning at 11am Eastern at the Second Life Educators Conference (which takes place 100% within SL). I’m a bit late signing up (registered yesterday), and have been visiting the website to learn more.

This post will be a running narrative I keep flowing as I explore different aspects of the conference.
Caveat: I can’t spend 100% of my time focusing on all this stuff today due to work deadlines, but I do intend to have the SL window open at all times and try to check out as much as possible. If you see Bart Weber online, give a shout-out

9:40am EST - Visited the SL BPC wiki, viewed the presentation schedule, but I can’t figure out how to GET to some of these presentations. It would be nice if the schedule actually had SLurls to presenter locales.

9:45 - At the NMC campus watching a presentation by Desideria Stockton about teaching literature in SL. There appears to be about 20 attendees in the stands. There’s a screen in the background that looks to have ppt slides on a loop running while Des answers content and teaching related questions from the audience (all text based).

Sounds as if Desideria has her students choose a literary character (for example, everyone chooses a character from Macbeth), and then the students role play and judge one another based on the readings and how each student understands the personality/motivations of the character in question. Interesting use of SL…

10:00am - Presentation ends…was I the only one who /clap ?!?! It’s interesting to see the same thing take place virtually that takes place at real conferences: the speaker steps off the stage and moves a bit behind it, and 4-5 people rush out of their seats to go ‘talk’ with her

10:05 - 10:30 - Trying to get to Kathy Schrock’s presentation about SL in K-12, but the sim that her talk is on is too crowded. Teleport attempts continually getting denied. The good thing is that they have planned overflow locations. The bad news is that the talk isn’t being broadcast into the overflow location…it’s just a handful of us sitting around wondering what we should do.

10:40 - Finally able to port into Hyperstring. The conference room Suzi is in (Yep, looks just like a real conference room) is so crowded my computer might explode. Taking a long time to render avatars, running extremely choppy…and from what Suzi tells me, so is hers. This should be an interesting presentation, both in content and logistics.

11:00 - Suzi’s presentation starts on time…with some random chatter and people still moving around trying to get situated through the lag. Occasionally random people walk in and interupt, but Suzi handles it well. NOTE: w/o audio, asking a room of people to introduce themselves via SL chat is hysterical.

11:10 - I’m finding out, as I’m guessing Suzi is too, that crowd interaction with a room of 25 people via text is tricky. Suzi’s talk is all about comparing SL you to 1st life you, SL interactions vs. 1st life interactions, and comparing her SL interactions as a female vs. her interactions as a male (one of her grand SL experiments).

11:25 - Suzi has some SL examples she’s come across in terms of group dynamics and collaboration. How changing your appearance mid-meeeting in SL can add humor and/or new ideas to explore. She see’s SL as a ‘limitless’ space for collaboration. I’m not so sure I agree, especially based on the strained interaction of a presentation like this, but I see where she’s coming from.

11:38 - The moderator announces that we have too many people in the room, and asks if people wouldn’t mind porting out to the overflow area. If people don’t voluntarily port to overflow, she needs to eject people. I see some people disappear, I’m assuming voluntarily. I do see some people nodding off in the room (which means they are AFK).

11:47 - Suzi wraps up, seemed to be a well-received talk. The moderator is discussing space limitations for the next presentation (it’s a keynote), and urges people to use overflow if their computer can’t handle the load or if they are wearing a lot of extr prims (IE: bling!).

Time to check out for lunch and maybe check out afternoon sessions later.

I really like how our field can’t agree on a moniker for our products. Edu-games, serious games, MUVEs, VLWs, ILEs…the list goes on. I’m not so sure one all-encompassing title exists, but we need to stop throwing wood on the fire.

Anyway, I found another Gem today, My Word. Even though this is aimed at kids, I could probably use some touching up on my verbage skills (at least that’s what mom keeps telling me). The game is for the Nintendo Wii/DS. Which leads me to ask the same question again:

Why are all these fantastic edu-games, from top publishers, showing up on mostly handhelds and a couple consoles?

I’m beginning to see a HUGE market for porting games such as these to the PC/Mac environments. Do you know of any elementary/middle/high school that has a huge supply of DS or PSPs lying around for students to use? I don’t. But I do know a lot of schools that have *gasp* PCs and Macs! Who has my VC money?!?!

I thoroughly enjoyed the first page of this article about gaming infiltrating the work environments of corporate america. The writer discusses two great examples:
1. Entellium, which makes CRM software that includes a lot of game concepts. Character building, rating other players, and rankings all play a part in this system, in a very game-like way. Great stuff.
2. Seriosity, a company that appears to be making digital collaboration software that borrows a lot of game design aspects. You can rank emails, which in turn start to build meta-data around the sender of such emails, and it sounds like you can somehow export the meta-data to illustrate that, for example, Steve has been sending quality, innovative emails based on your rankings, while Sam’s emails are consistently ranked very low, indicating maybe you don’t see a lot of worthwhile information coming from Sam’s digital communications.

Things like this could be VERY powerful in corporate settings, and really transform an organizations’ internal workflow and processes, hopefully creating overall improvements in efficiency, service, or a plethora of company activities. On the flip side, this type of software makes things VERY transparent: you can basically see that Bob hasn’t rated you high, or you can see in the CRM that you rank LAST amongst your co-workers. A little pressure and competition is a good thing in my opinion.

We’ve been talking about adding a lot of these features to things like class forums and blogs, where students’ posts could be rated, and each week we’d have a “Top 5″ list of some sort based on the rankings. It’s a bit gimmicky, but it will work. Competition in the classroom is something that seems to be frowned upon in grade school, and even up through college. Bah I say! Even if there’s no tangable reward for winning, many students get into the competitive spirit just to be able to say “I won!” and have that as bragging rights. If it gets people engaged, why not give it a try? We have some similar ideas, what I consider low-hanging fruit, to possibly spice up some of our online learning opportunities.

…and if you know anything about gaming or the serious gaming community, just skip the second page of the article.
“Skills you develop in game worlds solve real-world problems”
ORLY?

Summer is finally here, the students are gone, and it’s a good time to step back, take a deep breath, and reflect on the past academic year. The Institute has a new director now, and amid a flurry of Second Life discussions, he asked me what I thought about the Croquet Consortium. I put together an email and fired it off to Brian, and after re-reading it, thought it might be worth posting here (with minor edits):

I see three different types of virtual worlds out there right now that are all worth exploring:

- Commercial Virtual Worlds (mostly MMOs) that could be used for education and research. These include things like WoW, EQ, Whyville, Club Penguin, City of Heroes/Villains, Toon Town, etc. All these virtual worlds have some unique characteristics, and are worth keeping an eye on as educational and/or research opportunities present themselves.
Barrier to entry? Little to none

- Virtual worlds that can be used as platforms. This would include Second Life and There (www.there.com). The thing with There is that it isn’t as robust as Second Life in terms of user-created content. Users can only really design clothes and maybe vehicles. But…There has a MUCH better UI and technology running their world. The U.S. military is using There technology for training purposes (http://www.forterrainc.com/)
Barrier to entry? Not very difficult for someone with a bit of tech knowledge

- Virtual world packages/tools. This includes things like:
ActiveWorlds
MetaVerse:
Multiverse:
And by the looks of it, Croquet.
All of these are worth exploring and keeping on the radar, but these are more like virtual world tools and/or authoring environments where you need to create the whole thing from the bottom up.
Barrier to entry? Steep, and would probably require a small skunkworks team with a variety of skillsets (3D modeling and asset creation, network configuration, server admin, design, etc)

One very interesting opportunity:
Smart Fox Server
This is the technology stack that powers Whyville and Club Penguin, very popular flash-based VWs accessed via the web. From what I understand, this technology is FREE to download and experiment with, then it gets into pricing based on how many concurrent users you want (but is still very reasonable).

I spent some time with my family this weekend, including my 85yr old Grandma, and my 3 nieces, all <10 years old. I packed up the Wii and brought it home for the day because the weather wasn’t ideal for outdoor activities. It’s always fun to set that up and watch the madness unfold.

Predictably, my nieces were the first out of the gate, playing through several games of tennis, bowling, and baseball. My coisin Tom stopped by with his two girls (both <5 yrs old). They got a kick out of the Mii creation, where I’d use the Wii-mote to manipulate Mii’s while they stood by the television pointing to different character features. Throughout all this time, my parents and sister-in-law were cheerleading from the back row, while my brother, cousin, nieces and I all played various games. Eventually Grandma got into the mix (she used to be quite the bowler back in the day) to throw a strike or two.

I guess it was just being in the home I grew up in, but I started to think back to my days of Atari with my brother, and the similarities between the gaming experiences.

I don’t know if this was standard, but our Atari came with COMBAT, a large collection of mini-games (enter Wii Sports). We also played a lot of Target Fun, another collection of accuracy-type games (enter Wii Play). After looking back over my collection of Atari Games (yes, they are actually sitting in two shoe boxes here in my office with an Atari 2600) and looking at the collection of Wii Games out there now…the similarities are almost scary. The Wii is also primed to see a bunch of new input devices released over the year, similar to the Atari wheel controllers, the single, cockpit style controller, and other game-specific devices.

I’m starting to migrate from very long, time-intensive games to shorter games that can be played in quick bursts. The Wii seems to be embracing this type of gameplay, and hopefully will continue to release family-friendly, fun games that can be experienced in <30 minutes.

FYI: I found this while Googling for this post…I’ll probablly try and get this going on my Wii today after work. This could open up a whole new channel to short, fun mini-games on the Wii.
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/wii/

Ubisoft is publishing a couple games for the DS that will act as language coaches for both French and Spanish. This is great news, but I’m somewhat curious why a few of the major game developers (Square Enix, Ubisoft, others?) are targeting the Nintendo DS with their educational game efforts? I won’t argue with the fact that it’s the best handheld platform available, but why not release these as PC, downloadable games maybe? That seems like a much better approach to get these games into colleges and high schools around the country. Let’s hope they can do some sort of port.

I installed Spam Karma today…it has so many options my head is spinning. I *think* it is working, but it’s hard to tell. I guess I’ll give it a few days to collect some garbage and see what happens. It does appear to have a neat feature called “Karma”, which rewards people who regularly comment (I’m unsure how that works right now). We were hoping to impelement some type of reward structure for students who comment regularly on class blogs a few semesters ago, but couldn’t quite pull it off in time.

I’ve had Google Analytics registered for this site, but I never ran the copy+paste on my index page. Hopefully this won’t take as long as installing and configuring Spam Karma.