Virtual Learning Worlds

I did what I assumed most instructors do (and later found out most don’t): created a survey for my students and allowed them to anonymously dissect my class. Students are required to complete ‘official’ instructor reviews (SRTE’s) but they don’t dig into the level of detail I’m after.

To get an idea of my course and the content I covered, see the syllabus and the blog.

The first interesting piece of data:

I blogged about my initial reactions to the blog module a couple months back. Aside from the Podcasting assignment, I thought the students really didn’t quite get what I was teaching or enjoy it all that much.

Speaking of assignments, the big winner was the podcast creation assignment. The video assignment received many votes as well. The trend I noticed in the overall survey? Students like to DO stuff. Assignments that required research, analysis, compare and contrast, basically a lot of writing did not fare well. In Second Life it was the sign creation assignment and for the virtual teaming module it was creating a team web page.

The virtual world module took a beating. The reason? Second Life. I’ve already blogged a bit about this, but the students just despised the environment. Most understood the interesting aspects of Second Life (the commerce, the social aspects, the possibilities), but the technology that drives SL simply got in the way. I’m close to creating an assignment involving a comparison of World of Warcraft and Second Life as part of the virtual world module for my summer course. I’m curious how that will go over. Because this is my area of interest professionally, I really questioned students on how to make the virtual worlds module better. Aside from WoW and “ditch Second Life”, the students didn’t have a clear idea on what would make the module better.

Luckily I have from now until July to think and reflect on this experience and hopefully come up with an engaging virtual worlds module. Stay tuned.

In a brief timeout from writing my literature review for my thesis, I decided to checkup on some old RSS feeds I rarely have time to keep track of these days. Good ‘ol Terra Nova had the usual collection of interesting posts, but one caught my eye that pointed to a Washington Post story. The quote I’d like to point out is from a psychologist, David Greenfield, from virtual addiction dot com:

The time your son spends on the computer is time that he’s not reading a book, not creating an original ideas, not jogging in the park, not interacting with people and not improving his social skills. He is putting life on hold.

Two things immediately jump out.

1. Not creating original ideas? Hmm. The amount of ideas I’ve come up with WHILE playing games like Ultima Online, Warcraft, Halo, GTA, Tonti, or countless other games spawned (at the low end) interesting conversations with friends or (at the high end) ideas my organization has been able to roll directly into software development or instructional materials. Even Cole’s seen the light while watching his daughter play Webkinz.
2. Not interacting with people? Again, hmm. Last time I checked, games are a highly social activity. Whether you’re playing MMO’s, skirmishes in strategy games, multiplayer FPS, competing over console networks, gaming with friends in your TV room, talking strategy on message boards or simply talking about games over lunch with your pals…I kind of assume all these are social activities, right? Do the skills you learn interacting in this manner translate to ‘traditional’ social skills (if there is such a thing)? Maybe, maybe not. But I’ll tell you what they do transfer to: collaboration in virtual teaming environments. I should know because I’ve been doing nothing but reading and writing about virtual teams for the last month for the thesis.

Gaming addiction is an issue that merits real attention and concern. But if you’re going to tread down that path, get your facts straight.

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.