A Conversation By Economists About AI

I had the pleasure of attending a "Sharp Viewpoints" event on my old employer's campus, where Dr. Kevin Hallock, university President, hosted two economists with expertise in AI, UVA's Anton Korinek and MIT's David Autor.  The subject, AI and The Future of Work, should concern us all.

I hope not to misrepresent what I heard, but all three experts on stage consider it inevitable that AI will continue to advance rapidly and that it will disrupt careers in fields such as Finance, Computer Science, and Accounting. These have been popular majors for my former students. The scope of the disruption and what happens to wages, as AI takes on more white-collar tasks, remain to be seen. Korinek cited a ninefold increase in the capacity of AI systems annually, from a 2.5x increase in efficiency times a 4x increase in capabilities. 

Korinek warned the audience that we have a small window of time to prepare for resultant changes without chaos in the economy, though Autor felt that if we were to see a gradual loss of a profession, which he called "generational," our economic health could be sustained. He did warn that nothing on the scope of 10% of jobs lost annually could be tolerated without an upheaval. 

Both speakers likened gradual change to, say, automating trucking. The industry would slowly shed human drivers over time, because prior investment in vehicles and warehouses can't be profitably junked overnight. As older drivers retire, however, gradually fewer young people would enter the field and robots would take on the work of moving cargo on the highways. 

As for me? Whoever or whatever does the driving, I still prefer trains for 90% of the hauling, with a truck doing the final leg of the journey. 

The mood was cautiously optimistic, but I'm no optimist. My dad loved being a long-haul trucker. He was not as happy when he ran a wholesale produce company, though that enabled him to put away some money for when he retired. He preferred "the Road" to the security of a desk, and he passed that love of highway travel on to me.  Driving have him a purpose. Yet dad, in retirement, did not begin to write poetry, learn Greek, or play golf. He watched TV and was bored while living on his social security and investment income.

Something the speakers did not address to my satisfaction: if we do have a future without nearly as many jobs for humans, what do many people without side interests or hobbies or talents do with their time? I'm not a good model: I've stayed more busy than ever since leaving full-time employment.

I ask my question, a Humanist's response, assuming that some sort of basic universal income would arise; Author prefers not a monthly dole but a universal basic investment fund for every citizen, beginning at birth. 

Without it, I suspect we'd have some sort of Butlerian Jihad of the mass unemployed, to smash the data centers, and frankly, I'd support smashing them if the alternative meant vast numbers of destitute folks existing alongside a tiny elite empowered by AI. Our speakers did note how this sort of future could emerge, endangering democracy. I'd argue it already is emerging under the broligarchs of Silicon Valley and our current Administration.

Yet with income for all in a jobs-free future, we might have a lot of folks on a dole, not hiking or painting but watching TV and not contributing to our civilization. In my darkest hours, I also think we already have that, without a dole in the US. 

It's better to have a purpose. I didn't hear much discussion of "what does it mean to be a human?" in last night's one-hour chat. Of course, that sort of discussion has been going on among philosophers for millennia, even before Socrates began to question people at Athens' Agora. 

Both Korinek and Autor did fear a rise in inequality, as wages might fall while AI-copiloted productivity rises. That said, everyone agreed that we will have new jobs emerge, some of them related perhaps to newly found leisure time. Autor reminded us that 100 years ago, 38% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today under 2% do. But a person in 1926 also could not image the types of careers many of us now have. Nor did they have our concept of leisure time. A video-game developer's career would have been as alien as a Man from Mars.

Fair point, but when (according to them, not if) AI and humanoid robots replace most human labor, including game design, what will most of us do to find a purpose?

What will colleges do? Korineck, bless him, as well as Hallock, upheld the value of the Liberal Arts for coming to grips with essential and enduring questions. Autor, while nodding to the value of liberal education, said he'd be more "crass" to note that a college degree also means more income and professional training. I don't disagree with him, yet marrying some careerist coursework to a passion for something seems wiser than choosing a "safe" major in a field that bores you.

The even left me unsettled. If the future they predict comes, I'd begin by having students read Plato's Republic and The Federalist Papers with me, for two explanations of what a society can do to organize itself against chaos.

If you want to see a video of the talk, UR recorded it. Thanks to Fred Hagemeister at Richmond for sharing the link.

VWER Educators Discuss the Linden Discount

Location: Back in Second Life, Briefly

On August 15, I guest moderated the VWER meeting and decided it was time to chat about the new tier discount in SL, to see what others think or are doing.

The complete transcript of our meeting can be found here. Meanwhile, it's safe to say that a few "wants" emerged from our meeting, even as Linden Lab reinstates its discount:

• An educational continent: this was on the Linden radar in 2010, before the company suddenly fired its staff who supported education.  We'd get a lot of synergy from proximity, and we'd also be able to rent parcels smaller than an entire sim, in a setting with others like us.
• Linden staff tasked to support education: As in "full-time and on-call." The software vendors I deal with, as I pay them far less annually than what we'd pay in discounted Linden tier, have these helpers by the phone during US business hours. Many at the VWER meeting felt that Linden Lab could afford concierge service for education, too.
• An educational portal online: It's just an embarrassment to show educators and administrators the socially focused SL Web site, let alone the racy content of Marketplace. We need something that looks like education, not reality TV.
• Fixing permissions for group builds: We need a new level of permissions so that student builders (who graduate) can not only transfer content to a team but cede "Creator" setting so the content can be exported, backed up, and linked for builds.  While we are at it, how about some off-world backups of the IP we create?

Great ideas, all. I am not holding my breath.

Though I personally think it's too late to bring education back to SL, or even reversing the continuing loss of land-mass in the once popular virtual world, if the Lindens are serious about it, these steps would help.  There are other choices out there beyond OpenSim; Educators now can export virtual-worlds content to worlds employing Unity 3D content.

Historical Precedent: Mobile Computing & Our Unease?

Location: In front of a large screen

image credit: U Penn Library Exhibit, "John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer"

It's a common complaint that any mention of virtual worlds has ebbed in the popular media, and one reason given has often been the shift to mobile devices and tiny screens. Certainly that describes my students' preferences for online devices: about 90% of the e-mail I get from students comes from their phones.

I have met stiff resistance from colleagues wedded to desktop and laptop computers when suggesting that we need to make mobile computing the focus for our efforts with virtual worlds and more. For some historical precedent about this, consider an argument put forward by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.  In this, Markoff clearly realizes, as Tim Wu did a few years later in The Master Switch, that some technologies overturn entire industries and ways of communicating:

Indeed, the hallmark of each generation of computing has been that its practitioners have resisted each subsequent shift in technology. Mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, PDAs--at the outset of each innovation, the old guard has fought a pitched battle against the upstarts, only to give in to the brutal realities of cost and performance.

As Moore's Law makes our hand-held devices more powerful, I suspect this will happen again. For the latest shift, it will mean that something the size of a smart phone will be our primary computing device on the go or, when attached to  virtual keyboards and easily accessed monitors, nearly everywhere else. Here's a picture from the year 2023:

You enter your office and look at something like a large-screen television hung on the wall above the desk. You speak a login keyword. The phone, linked to the global data-cloud, remains in your pocket as you begin to work, using gestures in the air while in range of the television's scanner.  Windows for e-mail, a spreadsheet, and a calendar appear and you move them around with your hands while you issue voice commands. To input text you simply speak, and the voice-recognition software in the phone translates this to text. You finish just before a face-to-face meeting with colleagues, and walk down the hall. In the conference room, there's another big television, and with voice alone, you begin to talk. The notes taken in your office appear on the wall.

I will be a very late-comer to mobile computing, when I get a smart phone this fall. I don't fancy my iPad all that much, finding it must useful for quick browsing to, say, check the weather or read an e-book.  That may well change. For the longest time, Markoff notes, printing was one of the biggest hurdles for personal computing. When these puzzles get solved, such as providing big screens and input devices for mobile computing carried in a pocket, progress happens rapidly.

In a world with haptic and voice interfaces, as well as a robust data-cloud, we should get ready to say farewell to both desktop and laptop in fewer years than we might imagine. Then, imagine the students' gesture of neurotically clutching their smart phones to see as antique as clutching a magical talisman.

The Linden Discount: 7 Desires by Educators

Location: VWER meeting

Last Thursday, VWER covered the contentious topic. On Friday, I reached out to the Linden, Zeeshan Linden, whose name appeared on the invitation letters received by several at the meeting. To date I've not gotten a reply.

So here is the list we generated:

1. Make an official statement.
2. Define what an “educational or nonprofit sim” means.
3. State who is covered: Existing owners or those like my school who left?
4. Clarify length of required contract.
5. Permit those returning from an OpenSim grid a one-time OAR import to SL.
6. Designate an official LL contact for educators and non-profits.
7. Waive set-up fee for those educational and non-profits who have left SL and return.

The full transcript of our meeting discussion, running many pages, can be found here.

My campus did not receive the offer, and our former island manager is not planning to ask. He notes that we are unlikely to have any budget or support available, even at the old rate.  Faculty are simply not using virtual worlds at my school, and my own work with classes will probably end this semester. I'm on tap to teach a different range of classes for the next few years, with topics that do not lend themselves to using SL or OpenSim grids.

That is not the case at other schools with active programs, so Linden Lab should say something officially, and soon. Their delay and arbitrary offers only deepen the suspicion of those who continue to pay tier for educational and nonprofit sims in SL.

The Dream of Reason (Again) in OpenSim

Location: Virtual House of Usher

With some instructions from Jokay, I was able to configure the Firestorm OpenSim viewer to log right into the build of Nevermore, transported (far as I can tell) seamless from hosting by Reaction Grid to Jokay's new host.

The transition was really smooth, though Roderick rezzed as Ruth (quickly fixed).  I've now saved his usual outfit as an outfit, replete with skin, shape, hair, AO...something I've long done with Iggy in Second Life but just forgot in OpenSim.

My plan would be to use Jokay's grid as my Lifeboat in case the looming changes in the SL viewer render our campus desktop Macs and PCs unable to run their latest client.

Stay tuned for more about the plant to use SL, one final time, for what may be my last hurrah in virtual-worlds teaching: my final exam suing the SL build of the House of Usher simulation/improv for the History of Cyberspace course.

The Sweet Smell of Desperation

Location: Looking at barrel and refusing to be bent over it again

As Linden Lab gradually loses landmass in its virtual world, as shown so graphically in Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey data, the Lab turns again to a dog it kicked repeatedly in 2010: educators. Hamlet Au broke the story that the Lab is "quietly" reaching out to selected schools and nonprofits who lost their 50% discount on the Lab's exorbitant tier rates: come back, and you will get the discount again. According the Hamlet, the discount works as "a full private island for $1,770 per year, or $3,540 for two years."

 "Please, oh please," Linden Lab might have added. Here's why educators should reply with a firm "no thanks."

• Fairness to All Customers: Why should some educators get this discount, and not others? While vendors in education do offer volume discounts, it is unclear if the new educational offer applies to potentially large estates: a cap-and-gown version of the Lab's Atlas Program.
  
  I'd prefer across-the-board cuts for all customers, something the Lab apparently cannot do.
  
• Focus on Entertainment, Not Business or Education: I've long felt we made a mistake in thinking that SL would be amendable to education. We educators thought of Linden Lab as just another software vendor.
  
  When the educational discounts had existed in an earlier era of Second Life, the preferential treatment made sense, as educators were then a sort of "halo" customer for a product the purportedly would be a "disruptive" technology intent on changing the world.
  
  Today, the Rosedale/Burning Man dream is long gone. SL, under CEO Mark Kingdon, tried to enter the enterprise market and failed, even as the Lab's educational team was fired and the discount for educational and non-profit customers ended. I'd hoped that Rod Humble, with his impressive Electronics-Arts pedigree, would at least restore some sense to an unsustainable revenue model based upon extracting tier payments from a declining user base.
  
  Instead, since his coming the Lab has clearly been milking SL, not even featuring it as one of four "shared creative spaces" on the Lab's page that points to potential investors and employees. Meanwhile, SL has chased the social-gamer market, with advertisements looking more and more like IMVU's. Marketing counts here. One look at the Lab's images for "what is Second Life" show beautiful people often in romantic embraces.
  
  I really like this whimsical and sexy image by Strawberry Singh that the Lindens use as the default on their site's home page, but it would elicit laughs in the classroom and worse in the IT conference rooms where purchasing decisions get made. It illustrates how far the Linden Lab strategy has shifted, and I don't think a granting agency or IT department would look at today's SL and say "here is your $150 per month, prof. Go play with Victoria's Secret pixies."
  
• A Company and Platform Out of Touch With How Millennials Communicate: I polled my current section of 16 first-year students. Not one brought a desktop computer to campus, and only three own one at their home.
  
  My residential campus is not typical today, with full-time undergraduate students who don't commute. That said, many of my current students are also computer-science majors. They use mobile technology for everything: laptops for making content and phones plus, increasingly, tablets for communication. SL does not play well on many laptops with wireless and not at all on phones and tablets, barring a third-party viewing with limited functionality. The platform is wedded to the desktop computer that remains popular with the sorts of users who can swap out a video card on a weekend. Students can't do that with laptops, and our labs, where desktops remain available, are not set up for that sort of on-the-fly upgrades.
  
• No Sense of the Academic Year: Like the sucker-punch of 2010 this current offer comes, once again, in the midst of the US academic and fiscal year. Budgeting decisions are tricky to time but don't get made, short term, in March or October. The Lab needed to give educators more warning time in each case.
  
  
• Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me: Why should we trust these guys? Here I will turn to a few educators who responded to Hamlet's post. I called the treatment of educators a "buggering" and a wag named A.J. summed up the Linden offer as "Come back. Join our dying world again." Ken Hudson, whose Border-Crossing project had attracted such acclaim before moving his work to Unity 3D, and, notably, still gets promoted on the official Linden Lab wiki, noted that "I love that LL believes we all forgot how they dicked us around. We didn't."

We've not forgotten, Linden Lab, the whip-sawing policies that marked the 2010 buggering. Many of us have moved on, and it's likely my last-ever semester using virtual worlds for a class project.

So, no thank you and thanks for all the prims.

Linden Lab's Project Shining and Educators

Location: Valley of Disillusionment

Of the many vexations with Linden Lab, no other exceeds my anger at their inability to understand how the US academic calendar works.

In October 2010, they threw us all for a loop when they decided to jack up tier for educators in the midst of our fiscal year. At the time, educators reacted with confusion, shock, and finally, justifiable anger. Since then, even SL stalwarts have noted the decline in educators using Second Life with their classes, as evidenced by the dwindling of college & university sims, posts to the SLED list, and lower participation in meetings such as our VWER group.

Now, with the mix of classes I teach, as well as research interests, shifting,  I prepare for what is likely my last-ever use of a virtual world in the classroom. I've planned a suitable finale at the Virtual House of Usher, but then I read the Firestorm Viewer blog, noting an easily overlooked Linden Lab announcement from June 2012 about "Project Shining."

On the surface, the switch to "server-side baking" will reduce one of SL's vexing problems of avatars not rendering properly. That's of interest to every category of user. For the technical details well explained, I point readers to Inara Pey's post on this topic.

Yet once again, the Lab prepares a massive change to its viewer software without considering what educational institutions might do mid-term in a semester. Project Shining will apparently roll out this month, just in time for my students' final examinations involving Usher.  For some schools, it will mean more and finding a Plan B viewer that works on a few computers: lab software often gets changed over summer and winter breaks. This is one reason my school, even during SL's honeymoon era when our IT staff had avatars, never installed any viewer on our lab images.

Now these folks, like many IT staff nationally, have forgotten their SL flirtations and have focused on the new (and more promising) shiny object, mobile devices.  No way I could get an SL-based project on their radar.

Yet thanks to the good will of Evelyn McElhinney of Glasgow Caledonian University, Usher returned to Second Life, with the structure of the House built at Jokaydia Grid and many props added from SL builders such as Morris Mertel and Trident. I've been shopping for a combat system too, all of which would support the hard-working, long-suffering content creators of the virtual world. They are probably the only group to suffer more than educators from Linden changes. Every time a server-code update breaks a script, it means more work for them.

The last time Usher ran for my class, I used my Jokaydia Grid's build, soon to be packed up as a final OAR as I end my work in OpenSim as well. Jokay's grid has moved to OSgrid and I've not yet logged on to check if my Plan B works. Expect an update here, and soon.

Thus I'm not sure we'll use Second Life for the exam. Expect an update on my decision after Jessica Lyon of Firestorm meets with VWER members later today, to talk about what her team is doing to be ready for the big update.

Cloud Party Customization For Avatars

Location: Shiny Canyon

I'd been away from Cloud Party for a while, but a conversation during yesterday's VWER meeting spurred me to log in during the meeting.

I'd heard of but not tried the virtual world's new customization features. At login, I found myself in a welcome area, and wearing a new basic avatar greatly improved from the one I'd driven before.

Cloud Party's little smart-phone icon was drop-dead easy to recall after time away,  unlike many aspects of Second Life's bloated interface. I did not recall how to get home, but a navigation app on the phone, much like a maps tool for a physical phone, got me to Shiny Canyon in one smooth teleport.

Back in my stylin' pad there, I decided to try the customization features now in CP. First, I found it hilarious that unlike SL, where most male avatars are hulking body builders, my CP avatar was a skinny white guy. I'm no Hercules in real life, but farm work has made me rather burly and skinnier in the middle. So I buffed CP Joe Essid out to match the actual one.

The process greatly resembled SL's customization features, one aspect of SL that I found students mastered quickly. One can also save outfits and looks, as in SL. The lag was negligible as I did all this from within Firefox. Soon areas of outfit creation will merit a spin. I do not know what "movement" does, for instance. In the hair settings, I rather enjoyed the "stubble" feature for the beard. With hair removed, the avatar got the same swarthy look as this blogger.

Enter, Guido... rather like me but younger. There is no geezer-slider in CP's custom features.

At the VWER meeting, educators were too quick to dismiss Cloud Party for its name and lack of community. I'm not so sure. Despite a name I don't like all that much, anything that runs this well in a browser merits a close look. And without Facebook logins as mandatory (I still use mine) and  a working virtual currency plus marketplace, this world deserves more press from educators.

I'll have to have a try with the in-world building tools, rumored to be difficult. I'll also have to see if the ability to connect islands to make contiguous regions exists, also as rumored.

Shiny Canyon will never be the same.

Channeling My Inner Geek

Location: Google Sites

Once again, I'm stepping into the fray to teach first-year students in my seminar Cyberspace: History, Culture, and Future. I get my share of geeks in the course, which is wonderful fun. Today I worked on an "about me" disclosure for the syllabus. It will be a romp, with Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and the Second Life House of Usher simulation as a final exam project.

Setting the tone is everything for such a class, from scaring off lazy-bones who won't want to exert themselves and luring in my fellow geeks. I think my description, that follows, does pretty well. I only forget to add that "Han shot first" to solidify my geek cred.

About Me 

I'm a Richmonder by birth and a lifelong geek, free-lance writer, hobby farmer, model-builder, and non-computer gamer (board games and role-playing games). I lived in Spain after college and have traveled a good deal overseas, especially in the U.K. In Spain I was attacked by a pack of wild dogs while reading James Joyce. Knowledge of Jack London's Call of the Wild saved my life, whereas Joyce provided no help at all. I now advocate that everyone read a lot.

In terms of my tastes in futurism, it's either dark stuff like Cyberpunk and post-apocalypse or, on the brighter side, Star Trek (original series) not Star Wars, please, save for Lucas' original films I & II. I'm decent with graphics, basic Web design and HTML coding, and hacking farm and older computer hardware. I fool around with cars, some of them quite fast, and I used to street race until it nearly killed me enough times to make my brain mature.

I listen to a lot of music, often loud and mostly on CDs or vinyl; I also rip tunes from these tactile media and make playlists, though I find ripped music on tiny devices tinny. I'm fond of first-gen Metal, Glam Rock, old-time music, some Americana, traditional country, and electronica by artists like Brian Eno. I don't have time for most TV or pop culture of the present era. I am easily bored but if interested in something, I will recall every detail for years. I cannot code my way out of nested loop. Facebook is for saying respectful things to family and stupid things to my friends. I am not very professional online.

The best student evaluation I ever got read (about a lit course on Invented Worlds) "this class is crazy, but Doctor Essid is just the man for the job."

Though in terms of birth-year I should be a Boomer, I find that generation smug and entitled. I was young enough to think I could ride my bike to Woodstock, and Vietnam was something that adults fretted about (until my older brother got drafted). After seeing America peak in 1969 with the Apollo 11 landing (I'm serious) I watched the slow slide of things, coming of age in the dreadful 70s with other Gen Xers, when everything sucked except Led Zeppelin.

As I grow older and crankier, and though I have published an article about Millennials and online engagement, I find your generation's online habits bizzarre, overly serious, and frightening. Worst of all, I consider most of you addicted to those little boxes in your palms constantly. I have a flip phone and don't text. If I don't know who is calling by voice, I also do not answer.

Stay the hell off my lawn, too.

Unless you have read Jack London when I call the dogs out on you. Hint: find the alpha and challenge.

Shift of Emphasis at Blog...or the End?

Location: Looking at shockingly bad 2007 avatar photos

Now it can be told: little is happening that interests me professionally in virtual worlds. So what to do?

The exodus of educators seems ongoing and inevitable. I no longer recognize the promising world online that, in the picture above, had me thinking that we were on the cusp of a revolution. While our VWER meetings used to pull in 30 or more in a week, we now log about 13, that luckiest of numbers.

And the topics are recycled too often. And so would mere whining on this blog.

Iggy is not in Second Life at all, save for a weekly meeting of our Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable and a single use of Usher in the Spring semester.

Choice One: this blog changes with the times. Tech on campus has raced past the era of CPU-intensive virtual worlds to what students hold in their palms.  I would hate to just write about mobile technology so I'd expand to technoculture with an academic focus. Virtual worlds would crop up from time to time, as the situation merits.

Choice Two: End this blog to focus on the campus ones that look at writing. I'm working on an anthology about online communities, too, and most of them are not related to virtual worlds.

So by January I'm going to face a tough call about "In a Strange Land," the blog I began in 2007, when our local daily paper tried to shift with the times and ride the brief and fleeting hyperbole about Second Life. They failed. So did Second Life, in terms of changing the culture of how we work online.

Stay tuned for that decision (if you are still reading this). If the current crop of Doomsday predictors are right, on Dec. 22 I won't have to make a decision.

What Simulations in Education Would Santa Bring YOU?

Location: VWER venue

It will be a fun meeting tomorrow, with the topic "Tell Santa: What Simulation Do YOU Want in STEM, the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences?"

Cue the ho-ho-ho music, cause I'm your Santa Claus as seen on TV.

I hope to publish a list of what we've never seen in any virtual world or have lost, such as the King Tut exhibit in SL's build of Heritage Key. That was a stunner.

Can't make the meeting and would like to suggest some simulations? Post 'em right here and naughty or nice, you may at least get your wish heard!

Patterns and Creatorverse: Speculations

Location: Linden Lab Web Site and New World Notes

At New World Notes, I have been eagerly watching, and contributing to, both the discussion about Patterns and the one about Creatorverse.

Now VWER will ponder what these mean for educators. Watch the videos first for Creatorverse, and then Patterns:

A few stabs at what all this may mean:

• I am fond of the term "shared creative spaces" that CEO Rod Humble employs. But creative for whom? Shared by whom?
• Creatorverse, as an iOS app, will give K-5 teachers (in particular) new tools for sharing content. My wife really likes what she sees there. Linden's signature product, Second Life, cannot be used in K-5 and even an "over the shoulder" use means getting the application approved by the censors and finding a rig hefty enough to run it well.
• Creatorverse looks drop-dead easy. Ease will mean adoption, since both SL and OpenSim clients are too complex for my wife's  setting. Teachers don't have time.
• Patterns may be easy, but it needs hardware similar to Second Life to run. My own MacBook Pro does not meet the specs. Not good.
• Patterns also looks a lot like Minecraft. What will distinguish it and lead those in Minecraft to switch? Those  not using it to choose Patterns first?

More on what educators have to say, in light of the VWER discussion, soon.

What Educators Want in a Virtual World: All

Location: VWER meeting, Aug. 2


Late in July, I published my lists of wants for in-world features and technical features for a educational virtual world that I would build, had I time and money enough. Then I put the issue before 23 members of the Roundtable. Here is their list of wants:

• Cross-platform & mobile friendly
• Non-mesh build options
• Cross-world travel and inventory control
• Accessibility for users with visual and hearing impairments, such as easily visible icons, as well as text-to-speech and speech-to-text support
• Media on a Prim (MOAP), including Flash support
• Integration with Kinect & similar interfaces
• Ability for students under 18 to access content (with my caveat of "freedom of, and from, adult content)
• Better system for notecards
• Working economy where content creators can be paid for their work but as JeanClaude Volmar warned us, "Just don’t make the economy so tightly coupled to the creator to render objects useless like it is in SL."
• Avatar puppeteering and webcam support
• Better permissions systems to allow more flexibility with collaborative builds

It seems we do "want it all," and many VWER members want a virtual world as a primary tool for teaching.

As readers know, I tend to agree with VWER participant Alan Sandalwood, who noted "I worry that we would try to do everything in VW; It’s a tool to be used judiciously."

My own students say a version of this: "what's the point? Our parents pay high tuition to be taught by a PhD in a classroom." For them, VWs are worthwhile for limited simulations or a field trip to see content otherwise unavailable. Other educators will use the technology differently and, in many cases, in transformative ways.

To read the Aug. 2 transcript, click here.

Who IS a Virtual Worlds Educator?

Location: SLED List

It may be easier to say who is most assuredly not.

A few weeks back, a colleague in VWER asked me "who is an educator" in a private IM.  I replied "well, if you teach at an accredited school..." but then I realized that some folks provide education to others in informal circumstances.

A story about Saj, one of my best students ever, came back to me. Saj is an Indian national who graduated to become a well known economist. He credited his considerable talent in mathematics to informal tutoring done, at a dining room table, by a retired professor who would work out equations by hand for a dozen Indian boys.  The teacher used recycled "green bar" computer paper for the teaching, and one by one he would write down equations and solve them for a horde of pupils who watched and memorized. They had a hunger to learn: Saj learned his "maths" by this method, and he had to watch the professor's work upside down, since Saj was the newest pupil and could not get close enough at the table to see the equations in their proper orientation.

So an accredited position does not an educator make, the material or virtual worlds.

But what makes  you NOT a educator? In the recent SLED-list discussion of Linden Lab's decision to offer SL through Steam, many participants fretted about rising graphics requirements for the virtual-world client. Then one soul chimed in:

"Game gfx have always been scalable. Just for the few that plop down a couple  hundred dollars on a new GeForce will gain the full experience.  Best $200 I ever spent!"

Easy for him to say! Imagine an educator telling students, "to take the course you must own a desktop PC and have this graphic card, or buy one, for something you will never, ever do again while enrolled here."

I have begun to reply to this SLED participant several times by e-mail, but I don't think I could do so politely.

Clearly, this person has not recently taught at a college, where nearly all students employ laptops of various, and usually middling, sorts. Nor has this person taught at any K-12 schools, where budgets are strained and computer replacement cycles run in the five-year range. While volunteering at one middle school in our city, I found that to order a replacement USB mouse from Central Office took six weeks.

Sure. Drop in a new graphics card, class! While a professional might spend that amount for a desktop upgrade...let's be serious. This is not the voice of any educator I know.

So let's try this an a definition: an educator is someone who not only works in an educational setting, be it a lecture hall or a dining-room table. An educator also understands the facts on the ground in these settings: what students need, what they can or cannot do, their level of motivation.

I am sure that a student like Saj would find the money to buy a new graphics card, if that were what he needed to excel in his studies. But most of my charges? It would mean dropping the class at best, grumpily slogging along and slamming me in my evaluations, at worst.

Now here, from the same discussion, in the voice of an educator:

"Interestingly the lowest res graphics game ...Minecraft...is incredibly popular...I don't think kids expect good graphics as much as they expect engaging learning, challenges that are relevant to their lives and acceptance that the world today (Google and the information repository it can search in your pocket) is different from the world 50 years ago (where you had to remember a lot of stuff). "

A new graphics card is a pain in the butt; engaged learning will pull the learner alone to all sorts of challenges, including those posed by rapid technological change.

Bringing SL Back to the Conference Room?

Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Celia Pearce image from her Web site
Tom Boellstorff image by Olivia Hotshot

I'm pleased that VWER will again host Tom Boellstorff, author of Coming of Age in Second Life, and Celia Pearce, author of Communities of Play, will be guests at a special meeting on August 30, 12:30 SLT. To teleport to the venue at Bowling Green State University in SL, click here.

Tom was an excellent guest before, and we'll all put questions to him in a voice-chat event hosted by AJ Kelton. I'm reading Pearce's Communities of Play now, and I'm looking forward to the two scholars next project, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method.

This time, with two noted scholars and a venue that could be comprehensible to those without avatars, I have offered to show the meeting in one of our conference rooms on campus. Faculty and staff should then see the potential of virtual worlds for the sorts of meetings that would be hard to arrange and moderate on the fly in real life.

Given my experience with conferencing software, I also feel that virtual worlds offer a better venue that encourages less passivity. There is something powerful about embodiment, even as a cartoon character, that gets folks to talk back in a meeting.

From Scratch, Key Elements for an Educational Virtual World, II

Location: VWER meeting

In my last post, I focused on the in-world features of an educator-built virtual world. Next week we'll debate that as well as this second big aspect of design: technical requirements. My suggestions for a virtual world that would please students and not hurt faculty evaluations:

• Laptop + Wireless: Desktops are as dead in dorms here as are land-line phones. If an application cannot at least run on a laptop untethered from any cables (power cables too: students travel light) the application may as well not exist.  Students will seek out a desktop work station for projects requiring high-end apps, but the don't and won't own such. Try requiring students to visit a lab a few hours weekly, outside of class, to log into a virtual world many would find "creepy" anyhow. I'm glad I'm not you when evaluations are given.
• Fast, Easy Start: the world must be drop-dead easy to install. No tweaking the viewer, no need to upgrade video cards. It must work right away to retain the attention of students and protect the course evaluations of their faculty.
• Cross Platform: The Mac OS has jumped on my campus from 5% in the mid 90s to at least 40% two years ago. I now hear, but don't quite believe, it's at 70%. Clearly, any virtual world for students in higher education must work on a variety of operating systems and types of hardware, thus:
• Browser Based: Cloud Party's use of WebGL as its basis trumps Second Life, which in its current form is nigh impossible to run in a browser. Making the world browser-friendly eases the leap to tablet computing, if this part of the market does replace the laptop for many users.

What have I forgotten?

From Scratch, Key Elements For an Educational Virtual World

Location: Thinking Cap in Place

After my few posts about Cloud Party and Glitch, I began pulling together a list of features that I'd want in a virtual world if I had unlimited funds and time to build one myself.

I plan to put this list of features to the vote with colleagues in VWER, before we hold a meeting about "What I learned from a silly game called Glitch" early in August.

• User-Generated Content: The killer feature for virtual worlds used by educators. We can make and share our creations in a world that is, essentially, a big sandbox
• Collaborative Permissions: Creators can transfer full ownership for shared builds so backups and exports are possible. Mixed-permissions builds in Second Life are a nightmare
• In-World Building with Simple Tools: Again, for collaboration this seems very popular with educators
• Offline Building with Professional 3D Tools: For advanced builders with 3D modeling skills
• Local Hosting Options: Educational Institutions like to own their hardware and make backups frequently
• The Illusion of a Contiguous World: World maps are available for Glitch, most OpenSim grids, and Second Life. In Cloud Party, to my knowledge no map is available
• Several Means of Travel: All virtual worlds include point-to-point movement such as teleportation.  Those making simulations in a world, however, should be able to turn that feature off, so participants are forced to walk or ride to a destination. Second Life manages this well with settings for parcels and regions
• Freedom of, and From, Adult Content: This will be contentious even among educators. I'd suggest that pornography is not needed in an educational world, but adult content, such as art-museum nudity or discussions of sexuality, is necessary for many educational purposes
• Simulations Tools, Including a Physics Engine a Combat System: My students asked for this again and again in reviews of my House of Usher simulation. In realistic simulations, bad decisions have consequences.  Avatars in these settings should get tired, hungry, injured when appropriate. They might be able to "level up" for accomplishing goals in a course or assignment. This idea got suggested in Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World and I like it a lot
• Simple Help Tools: Glitch wins on this. The designers' humorous approach to FAQs and the Pet Rock charm me every time I log on.

What did I forget? Sound off!

A Closer Look at Glitch, Reloaded

Location: Cebarkul and Far Afield

I will admit, in starting this post, that some of the material was probably in the pre-Beta Beta (or whatever the heck it was) that I played. But I'm liking the following aspects of Glitch. I'm assembling ideas for a future VWER meeting in which we actively plan beyond Second Life and OpenSim, to the features of the virtual worlds we educators would design.  My last two trips to Glitch have been far better than what I experienced last year and earlier this year. I noted, in my entry about Cloud Party, that the side-scrolling interface and lack of realistic avatars were detrimental to my fun.

But Tiny Speck, who makes Glitch, have added depth to the game by giving players more information in an as-needed and funny way. And a little house to call home. So here goes with the features I like so far:

References at One's Fingertips: An Encyclopedia is available even before the player enters the world. Glitch's cute backstory has some surprising complexity. Thus the entry on the Giants helps a great deal, given the game's location: in their giant heads.

I was able to find out a bit quickly about the paths open to players, because a Glitch (the name of our little peopleoids) must chose a series of linked skills at some point. With the reset I'm back to level 2, but I'm thinking that as before, I'm going agrarian with skills related to animals and plants. Note that one's Pet Rock gives hints. Mine suggested that I become a "Porcine Pleaser" when I clicked the "show me" button below, even as it gave other advice about how to become a more effective Glitch:

There are oodles of skills in Glitch. but from the Web profile for each player, a refresher of what the Glitched learned and can do is as easy as clicking the timeline, as I did for one of the first skills I acquired, Animal Kinship I. Each accomplishment can then be Tweeted. I did that for my Hen Hugger badge. I know the world stopped on its axis when that Tweet appeared.

Simple and Clever Menus: Compared to Second Life clients, with their dizzzying array of choices, Glitch's are straight forward: a "player" menu with a character's stats and links to content, and an "imagination" menu (shown at the start of this post), with choices for learning skills and going on quests.

In comparison, it would take a Type A Cyborg to love the menus in Firestorm, let alone its "Advanced" menu.

Everyone Gets a Home Base and Collaboration Reaps Rewards: For now at least, all Beta accounts in Glitch include a home street. My Pet Rock told me that if I can get other Glitches to collaborate on projects on my home street, I get more benefits and bonuses.

For educators, collaboration is a key to Constructivist pedagogy. So any online environment that fosters it would be preferable to one fostering competition.

Humor that is not Cloying:  Way back when, the Lindens had snowball fights with residents in Second Life and have a shared account called "Pony Linden." Once at VWER John Lester (then Pathfinder Linden) showed up as Pony and explained that Linden employees took turns as Pony to greet and entertain newcomers, even offering rides.

Those days are long over and Pony Linden's account was sent to the glue factory.

Conversely, in Glitch my Pet Rock and every darned menu pokes fun at me and itself.

And, yes, there is a Shrine to a giant named "Pot." I thought I had imagined that last time:

Round of belly and capacious of stomach Pot is the Giant of Prosperity, with dominion over anything edible, cookable, munchable or nibbleworthy. Pot himself is not munchable. Do not attempt to munch any giants.

Every time I log out of Glitch, I'm warned "Wait! You were just about to win the game!"  I think that in terms of learning what a good virtual world should offer, I have already won. I'm far from an overarching theory about why I so like Glitch, in much the same way I liked Metaplace. At this point I only have a suspicion. Glitch lacks the gravity and gore of "serious" gaming, the festering drama that is today's Second Life, and the frenetic chase-the-monkey of most side-scrolling games.

There's some stoner magic at work in Glitch, some parody of Philip Rosedale's dream of a perfect online world. By not taking itself so seriously while fostering collaboration and non-violence without earnestness, Glitch charms. That may be utopia enough.

Like Jilted Lovers?

 
Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

image credit: Grizzla Pixelmaid at Flickr


I forget who at one of our VWER meetings told AJ Kelton, aka AJ Brooks, that he acted like a jilted lover when Linden Lab fired its education team and hiked our tier prices. But the simile is apt for me too; it explains some of our community's enthusiasm for Cloud Party, noted in my last post. There's not much at Cloud Party yet. When you cannot sit on your new couch, that shows we have a ways to go. But the will to "go" is there.

Slowly but surely, my own wonder and love for Second Life drained away. For students it was too hard to learn, too slow to use on wireless and their laptops. For me, it meant 200 hours of development for The Virtual House of Usher, a project that we ran a few classes through before my co-developer lost his job, our island closed in SL, and I needed to move on to other pursuits.

I get as much credit, and probably more, in my annual review for a published article. I could have written a few in those 200 hours.

Some of the reaction by SLers trying Cloud Party's new virtual world is predictable: soured on Linden Lab's mismanagement of a once-revolutionary online space, we either wish to punish the Lab or simply try some competition that is easier to master than the largely DIY spaces of OpenSim grids.

At our most recent Roundtable, I found myself spouting these words:

"I have come to hate Linden Lab and don't want them taking my money any more." You can read the rest of our exchange here in the transcript.

I did not get crucified by the assembled educators for saying this. Few SLevangelists were present, so the remarks were civil as we discussed what "special sauce" SL still has. The answers? Good content and community.

Linden Lab is repsonsible for neither of these. Stability, a third common answer, is their doing, but Cloud Party offers that one already with only a few weeks since they opened their world in open beta. The other two will follow.

So how can a firm such as Linden Lab win back our trust? To continue the romantic simile, they cannot or cannot in any span of time worth noting. If we look for exceptions in the history of technology, there is one.

It took decades for Detroit car makers to woo back those jilted by their crappy 1970s cars.

Linden Lab did not sell us a Chevy Vega or similar lemon. It sold us a lovely but doomed Corvair Monza and refused to listen to customers who bought into that dream or decided that they really wanted a Mustang instead. Recent efforts, such as Linden Realms or Wilderness, brought only yawns from our group of educators.

Clearly, Linden Lab lacks Detroit's time and government support. If Cloud Party flops, it's just a start-up firm, but Linden Lab's failure would make big news, even in media outlets that have at best sniggered, and mostly ignored it, since 2008.

Why Cloud Party Matters To Educators

Location: Shiny Canyon, in Facebook!

A great number of pixels have been used to praise or critique Cloud Party over at Hamlet Au's New World Notes. True, one needs a Facebook account, and sacrifices anonymity, to use the service fully. Anonymous logins are possible at the link I gave above, but they only permit limited interactions and the avatar's experience and content--as far as I understand--do not persist.

Here are some reasons I think Cloud Party represents the next generation of virtual worlds:

• No client: this is key to mass adoption. For educators, it means that a student only needs a FB account. That means about 100% uptake for my students.
• Real life ID: for Millennials, that too is key. They find virtual worlds "creepy" because, to paraphrase most of my 100+ users, "you don't know who is on the other end of the wire."  Their faith in authenticity may be naive, but it's strong and consistent in this demographic. Blame it on 12 years of "Internet Safety" classes rammed into their heads by schools.

• Users such as "Pussycat Catnip" argued, with me and others in a long string of commentary at Au's blog, that one key aspect of enjoying SL is being able to assume a new identity. For her, Cloud Party's link to Facebook "makes it useless for anyone wishing to explore concepts like identity or self expression." Frankly, that matters little in how I've used virtual worlds, save for the House of Usher simulation, which is a one-off assignment with roleplay.
  
  Fretful administrators at colleges and universities will like the seeming transparency of Cloud Party as currently configured, though I suspect that "Cloud Party" to be only a marginally better name than the tainted "Second Life" moniker. I'd have preferred "New World" or similar, but Cloud Party goes not purport to be an educational tool. Nor did SL; we just took to it, and so did many others with some very different interests and intentions.
• Easy UI that looks bound for mobile devices: Desktop rigs are the choice for serious games for serious gamers. They are not my students or colleagues, however; gamers here are a very small, and disrespected, part of the student body. When mainstream students do play games, they are more likely to pick up a console or play a casual game on their mobile devices and laptops.
  
  Cloud Party exploits the metaphors of mobile computing nicely.
  
  The Control Panel, shown here, looks like a smart phone and, when opened, provides small icons straight out of the world of mobile computing.
• Perfect Timing. Educators screwed over by Linden Lab's mid-year doubling of tier have been looking for something easier to use than OpenSim. I think something like this new virtual world could do the trick. My Avatar looks like a newbie refugee from The Sims Online, but I can live with that. Building is very much like SL, from what I see. Linden Lab needs to be worried...very worried.
• Storm Clouds? Right now, unless a browser supports WebGL, it won't run this virtual world. Nor will iOS devices. I am searching for a app to try it on my iPad.  Android users may have more luck. But for now, the majority of computing on my campus is done with laptops on wireless. About 70%, at last report, of new students bring Mac OS laptops.  On my MacBook Pro, Cloud Party runs very well and the fan never comes on, as it does constantly with SL running the Firestorm viewer.
  
  I hope that Cloud Party pursues access to all tablet OSes, though one wonders if Apple and Microsoft will open their mobile OSes to WebGL; on a phone Cloud Party would not be useful for more than texting. A tablet might be too constrained for building, but given my limited experience, my iPad's screen is plenty big for moving and chatting.  Much of Cloud Party depends on right clicks, so that would need to be fixed for mobile users.

Now for the experience: In two visits, I completed the basic and build tutorials and got a free house in a region called "Shiny Valley." Easy enough for veteran SLers. What about those new to virtual worlds? The tutorials were excellent, better than what I found in Second Life and more akin to my unalloyed joys of the first hour in Glitch. My interest in Glitch waned, I admit, because of the lack of realistic avatars and its side-scroll interface.

Here I am being greeted by Gwenette Sinclair, one of the new neighbors.  I know, it's The Sims kinda-sorta. But shiny!

We immediately went to YouTube to watch this R.E.M. video:




It's nice to feel happy about this shiny new virtual world. I hope the happy dance continues. Come by Shiny Canyon for a visit.