Where is everyone in SL??

A friend recently suggested that every time he's in SL, there is no one around (despite the fact that LL records approx. 444,000 logins per week, which is an average of 63,500 or so per day).
Whenever I log in, there always seems to be between 30K and 55K in-world at the same time (this is up from what... 14K in spring 2006?). Anyway, it seems like a ton of people... so where is everyone??? For those of us who have to on occasion explain things to newcomers and/or naysayers, I did simple math, and it explains things a bit.

Currently, there are 3,952 sims on SL's main grid (http://www.slmaps.com/). This means that if evenly distributed, 50,000 users would result in about 13 users per sim. There are sims/areas that attract many times that number, so the likelihood of finding more than a few green dots in any one location is small. Education builds tend not to attract 'hoi polloi.' Hence, lots of emptiness.

I am not SL's biggest apologist (there are certainly things as an educator that I wish a competitor would come along and fix), but when folks tell me, "SL is boring, " I tell them (with a smile), "So is your course website." Maybe I'm not right 100% of the time, but I've seen a lot of course sites, and looking through them is about as exciting as watching KillDisk zero out a 300GB HDD.

SL MAP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Second_Life_map.jpg

The claim of "no one is there" was put forth by Wired magazine, and a lot of journalists have continued stories along this line because it's easy to replicate the results: Go to Second Life, find no one... and find a bunch of companies pulling out en masse (as reported on APM's MarketPlace on 22JAN08). Their criticism is likely valid for the business world, which wants to put product/service ads & content in front of users. If users are mere vapors, then money spent by companies to use SL (which, all things considered, really doesn't chew up their ad budget too much I suspect) might be better used elsewhere.

Anyway - it's easy to be a critic. As an educator, I'm interested in SL not for the bazillion people I can bring to my plot of land, but what it means for the couple dozen students in my class.

Top 10 List Why (another take)

by Jeremy Kemp

Here is a starter list:

• Increases student engagement
• Allows rapid prototyping of learning objects
• Offers a flexible narrative
• Gives exposure with public relations and marketing
• Replaces place-based schooling with place-like settings
• Positions your school for next-generation media use
• Suits the needs of autism-spectrum learners
• Connects you with a vibrant community of educators already involved
• Provides a setting for experiential learning
• Helps teams gain skills with life-like activities

I started a wiki page if anyone wants to add/edit:
http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Why_Second_Life

Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University

Top 10 reasons to use SL

Forward by Ed Lamoureux. Original post by Chris Swaine) (May 07)

Reasons to use Second Life in education

Learning Environment

As an alternative learning environment, it provides:

• an alternative and potentially neutral space away from the 'traditional' classroom, which can be socially inclusive for those learners which the formal establishment has woefully failed.
• enables real time interactions and global alliances which are not constrained by traditional 'location' based environments .
• In 20 years time, we will laugh at what we now call a VLE [Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle etc etc] as being very quaint and 2D!

Support Networks

• Formal and informal, multiple support networks - from peer to peer through to trusted intermediaries - through to synchronous and asynchronus communication channels
• Collaborative space. One of SL's huge benefits is the collaboration - both for learners and educational practitioners

Learning & Teaching Dynamic

• Enable all learners to experience a greater variety of teaching and learning styles - fab for kinesthetic and audio visual styles!
• Can help to blur the distinction between the role of the teacher and learner.
• Different opportunty for greater range of interactions with the teacher
• The traditional role of the teacher and the learner can become blurred, which potentially puts the learner more in control of their own learning [andragogic /heutagogic approaches]
• Allows different learning styles to be deployed and adopted - especially for kinesthetic and audio visual learning styles.

Assessment

• Alternative environment to support formative and summative assessment - from RARPA [recognising and recording progress and achievement in non accredited learning - http://www.aclearn.net/display.cfm?page=1290] through to virtual portfolios
• Fabulous opportunity to showcase work in an interactive 3D environment rather than a 2D website, or though paper portfolios
• Help learners to become more actively involved in designing and carrying out their own assessments.

Personalised Content

• Enables a 3D environment for curriculum areas from marketing and PR to fashion and design, languages to retail.
• Allows another technology solution to be deployed [working on the premise that the technology should support the learning and teaching and not the other way around!] It is also 'just another tool' that a teacher [or learner] can deploy as part of any learning episode.

Flexible Curriculum

• Enable the curriculum to be more bite sized and delivered anytime - anyplace - rather than the institutional and non flexible 9-5 Monday to Friday.
• Can link home/school – home / college
• Help to provide flexible learning pathways
• Enable learners to co-design, manage and access the curriculum in different ways

Downsides

Responsive Infrastructure

• Technical specifications for running SL are still very high for many users to effectively use SL to support learning and teaching. Therefore, there is a risk of supporting the 'digital divide' - those that have - and those that have not.
• E-safety - this is more about education that setting up yet more barriers [which I.T. departments revel in "How can we make it not happen"!] - but for organisations it is still a real issue from firewalls to learner safety.
• Connectivity - not all places have a decent broadband connection

Evidence and Evaluation

• I would very much doubt there is much robust [robust = key word] evidence yet that virtual worlds DO support learner retention, achievement or attainment. However, I also have no doubt that it is only a matter of time before that starts to filter through. The fact that the community is now over 6.2 million worldwide and at any one time over 20k are in-world suggests that something is good - and it isn't just sex!

Inspection Frameworks

• Certainly the UK, Educational inspectors through OfSTED just couldn't cope with Second Life - they can barely cope with the concept of email! Therefore, there will continue being a struggle using this technology as inspection is a major driver [along with funding]

Designing in Second Life

by Jeremy Kemp

When "designing" an education island, there is something to be said for NOT designing the island but rather designing a scaffold for orderly growth.

Funny thing about Second Life is that tricks"residents" into a false sense of permanence. Great height, thick beams and a sturdy foundation on a building, for instance, has the effect making it seem more real and long lasting. What is "permanence" when you can keep a skyscraper in your napsack and create mountains in a few seconds?

The initial impulse for educational designers seems to be recreating a campus-like space. Campus landmarks, appropriate greenery and land features closely resemble an idealized version of the home office. Makes sense. The administrators feel comfortable, its good PR and photographs well. It puzzles me why the "old timers" cringe at this obvious early stage in the campus evolutionary growth.

This may be very appropriate in the early days when your work is mostly PR and consensus building with the campus community. You SHOULD build something recognizable out of the shoot to introduce your ideas, but will it help students learn in the end?

Well, no. In fact, using up your prim budget and filling your campus with best-in-class structures by professionals seems to move in the opposite direction. You may have wasted budget on marketing and PR that might be better spent later in projects to build community. And students may eventually be put off by gorgeous buildings that they themselves can never match.

"Enemy of better is best" may be the watch word here. Why discourage would-be student architects by hiring professionals out of the gate? Less is more, especially once the hype bubble fades and we put down press releases and pick up the teaching.

There certainly is no shortage of builders who will put up a gorgeous "Virtual University" facade. And our campus will be added to the growing number of Desert Isle academies.

Nope, campus building is NOT a game of 3D architecture but rather a challenge in social engineering - not of terrain and prims but of community scaffolds. Don't ask "how much time will it take to 'build' my campus" but rather "How many people can I gather to build their own campus?" Or "how can maximize the social impact per meter of land assigned?"

That said, there is a compelling argument that several learning objectives could be met best if SOME of your campus is lifelike. Plopping newbies down in a bizarro landscape increases cognitive load, decreases learning time-on-task and may even reduce transfer of the lessons learned to other situations. See (Sweller,1988; 1994) (Chickering, 1987), (Goldstone & Sakamoto, 2003)

I would assert that several traits are essential for a successful launch and staying power:

• An explicit structure for physical expansion
• A complimentary blend of SL and web-based social tools
• A pedagogically informed set of realistic structures (taking minimal space and prims) with intentional social scaffolding
• A coherent User Interface with helpful clues for navigating, teleporting, etc.
• Spaces designed for both formal and informal learning
• A generous sandbox

At San Jose State we are experimenting with a peer mentoring program and offering paid assistantships to a handful of socially engaging students and credit to the larger number of experimenters.

Please DON'T go out and spend a lot of money hiring fancy designers until you have a good idea what you hope to accomplish pedagogically! The age of instant PR from screen shots and machinima is rapidly ending and we will be asked more emphatically to "show me the learning!"

--J

- Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University

SL's #1 problem for .edu is...

by Jeremy Kemp

...not sin (porn, gambling etc.)

...not accessibility (tech reqs, tools for the disabled, complex interface)

...not disruptive strangers (griefers, unaffiliated interlopers, etc.)

...not commercialism and corporatization

...not legal issues with Intellectual Property and the legally questionable Terms of Service

But the MOST troubling feature of this setting for education is the lack of affordances for reflective learning and asynchronous tools in support of learning communities.

Many class sessions in SL seem to wander into the realm of decorative chat.

But the vast majority of online learning at the post secondary level is NOT synchronous. Here at our university, only a small percentage of faculty add a chatroom tool to their LMS designs.

Students who flock to distance learning for flexibility and time-shifting are loathe to set aside a specific time for meetings - especially nano-band activities like instant messaging. I just can't imagine spending ALL my students' time in SL parking their avatars an nyawning through excruciatingly slow chat interactions.

Blending RL synchronous meetings and online asynchronous reflective activities such as threaded messaging and project work seems to be the most successful model. I've used the "book ends" approach in my elearning classes from 2002 on. Students meet for a longish in-person session on campus, arrange teams. This also allows for in-person pre and post assessments and also public speaking training at the final session. Students get the face-to-face benefits but are able to spend less time on campus tied down to a schedule. Each mode has its strengths and their work is tightly integrated RL/online.

So virtual environments for learning represent a two-legged stool when used by themselves. We benefit from an engaging feeling of presence and also from the visualization and modeling. But the missing third leg of the stool is reflectivity. The platform is woefully lacking ways to integrate in-world learning with existing distance learning tools for reflection such as threaded messaging, blogs, portfolios, assignment structures and assessments.

In my own class work, I'm struggling to create a multi-modal experience where my students may choose how they devote time to the class. Grading is a pain: How do you assign grades for a team when 1/2 of the members want to meet in-world to give chat presentations while the others cannot commit to meeting times and prefer building on their own and leaving items for the others to work with?

Does anyone have advice for instructional design in a multi-modal setting like this? For connecting your previous LMS instructional designs with this new synchronous-centric tool?

Ideas?

Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University
SL: Jeremy Kabumpo

Underlying pedagogical assumptions (Editorial)

by Owen Kelly

I find it interesting the way different strands of different threads can come together sometimes in an entirely personal way and trigger off something else entirely.

For example:

• People have been worrying about the right clothing to wear when appearing before your students in an SL class;
• Mechthild Schmidt leapt on someone she thought might be commercialising Teen Sl, when I read the post as indicating that a bright teenager was using Teen SL to rehearse his life as an adult;
• Kimberley Hampton has just wondered if anyone has "created a collection of workshop materials that address this topic, specifically how to teach in SL?" and would like to publish it;
• Birdie Newborn has just challenged Chris Swaine, saying that "the underlying assumption of your argument, Chris, seems to be to corral Second Life into traditional guidelines" while she thinks that "SL offers wholly new potentialities".

These all tie together for me into a topic that concerns me: what kind of pedagogy does Second Life support, or (more interestingly) what will happen to pedagogy once it has been metaversed?

Almost everyone in SL is a prosumer in Toffler's sense of the word: their consumption and production are inextricably intertwined. This necessarily includes their part in the production of the comunal meanings that they in turn consume. This must be especially true of so-called virtual worlds like SL where the very existence of the world is a communal fantasy: an act of communal production that is at the same moment an act of communal consumption.

This means that everyone in SL is (to one extent or another) self-educating (we can throw in terms like micro-learning, informal learning, if you like) and that puts a large burden on almost all traditional notions of pedagogy. In a knowledge economy mediated by digital interfaces you should be able to claim prior-learning credits for all the PlayStation games you have become familiar with.

I have several specific reasons for raising these general points now.

1. We have just finished a project in SL called Semano Semano, which was a pedagogical experiment that I have documented in two interlinking essays here:
- http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/15/semano-semano/
- http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/25/second-life-a-component-in-a-vle/

I would be very interested to have any reactions or comments either here or on the site itself. (Please note: I am not suggesting that our work is either interesting, important or right; merely that it is interesting and important to me and I would like to share it because I think it may be pointing in an interesting direction).

2. The fourth League of Worlds conference will be taking place in Sweden at the end of October (The first 3 were in Helsinki, Finland; Melbourne, Australia; and Boone, North Carolina. The fifth is scheduled to be in Mexico.) This conference arose from the kind of concerns that I am outlining here. If you are interested then you should find details at www.leagueofworlds.com This year we are planning to hold a shadown conference in SL and I will keep the list up to date with news about that.

Both 1 and 2 are attempts to wrestle with the question of how pedagogy will radically change in a world of self-training prosumers (of whom our teenage entrepeneur from Teen Second Life might be a good example). I suspect that we ignore this question at our peril.

And I teach in outfits borrowed from Zorro or the Matrix depending on my mood :)

Article on teaching styles in SL

by Carol H Tucker

In Second Life Insider:

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/05/23/teaching-styles-in-the-sl-community-case-study-asl-hairmakin/

What can SL do for Education?

An SLEDitorial by Chris Swaine

Learning Environment: As an alternative learning environment, it provides:

• an alternative and potentially neutral space away from the 'traditional' classroom, which can be socially inclusive for those learners which the formal establishment has woefully failed.
• enables real time interactions and global alliances which are not constrained by traditional 'location' based environments.
• In 20 years time, we will laugh at what we now call a VLE [Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle etc etc] as being very quaint and 2D

Support Networks.

• Formal and informal, multiple support networks - from peer to peer through to trusted intermediaries - through to synchronous and asynchronus communication channels
• Collaborative space. One of SL's huge benefits is the collaboration - both for learners and educational practitioners

Learning & Teaching Dynamic

• Enable all learners to experience a greater variety of teaching and learning styles - fab for kinesthetic and audio visual styles!
• Can help to blur the distinction between the role of the teacher and learner.
• Different opportunty for greater range of interactions with the teacher
• The traditional role of the teacher and the learner can become blurred, which potentially puts the learner more in control of their own learning [andragogic /heutagogic approaches]
• Allows different learning styles to be deployed and adopted - especially for kinesthetic and audio visual learning styles.

Assessment

• Alternative environment to support formative and summative assessment - from RARPA [recognising and recording progress and achievement in non accredited learning - http://www.aclearn.net/display.cfm?page=1290] through to virtual portfolios
• Fabulous opportunity to showcase work in an interactive 3D environment rather than a 2D website, or though paper portfolios
• Help learners to become more actively involved in designing and carrying out their own assessments.

Personalised Content

• Enables a 3D environment for curriculum areas from marketing and PR to fashion and design, languages to retail.
• Allows another technology solution to be deployed [working on the premise that the technology should support the learning and teaching and not the other way around!] It is also 'just another tool' that a teacher [or learner] can deploy as part of any learning episode.

Flexible Curriculum

• Enable the curriculum to be more bite sized and delivered anytime - anyplace - rather than the institutional and non flexible 9-5 Monday to Friday.
• Can link home/school – home / college
• Help to provide flexible learning pathways
• Enable learners to co-design, manage and access the curriculum in different ways

Downsides

Responsive Infrastructure

• Technical specifications for running SL are still very high for many users to effectively use SL to support learning and teaching. Therefore, there is a risk of supporting the 'digital divide' - those that have - and those that have not.
• E-safety - this is more about education that setting up yet more barriers [which I.T. departments revel in "How can we make it not happen"!] - but for organisations it is still a real issue from firewalls to learner safety.
• Connectivity - not all places have a decent broadband connection

Evidence and Evaluation

• I would very much doubt there is much robust [robust = key word] evidence yet that virtual worlds DO support learner retention, achievement or attainment. However, I also have no doubt that it is only a matter of time before that starts to filter through. The fact that the community is now over 6.2 million worldwide and at any one time over 20k are in-world suggests that something is good - and it isn't just sex!

Inspection Frameworks

• Certainly the UK, Educational inspectors through OfSTED just couldn't cope with Second Life - they can barely cope with the concept of email! Therefore, there will continue being a struggle using this technology as inspection is a major driver [along with funding]