Unsolicited Advice: Social Media in Virtual Worlds

Location: Talkin' to The Man

There's been a good discussion of integrating social media richly into Second Life, as Linden Lab uses Avatars United, recently acquired from Enemy Unknown AB (read Tateru Nino's account of this purchase).

Many SLers have been saying "meh" about integrating social networking and Second Life. It took me a while to see a reason for it, but I came up with one: the 25-group limit.

I understand the role that groups play--a key one--in enabling access to items and land in-world. As (I believe) Pathfinder Linden explained to us at a Roundtable meeting, every time an avatar crosses into a new parcel the server checks access rights and more. Having, say, 100 groups would create terrible lag. But a social network outside the Lindens' asset server would not induce any lag at all.

Imagine checking group notices, updates, and more on a prim-based terminal inside SL. What if I could log in with my avatar's virtual laptop to get landmarks and other information handed out not from an in-world group, but posted to Avatars United? Any Hippo Technologies Vendor can do this already.

What if..if..the assets handed out by the social network site could be used in any compatible virtual world?

Whoever figures out how to do this will deserve a great deal of credit, and will have a lot of money in the real-life bank.

Reaction Grid Meeting Goes Well for VWER group

Location: Late to the Party

Today a group of educators met in Reaction Grid, the second outing beyond Second Life for the Virtual Worlds Roundtable. I was teaching a class, so Iggy Strangeland logged in after the meeting ended. Without a landmark, I still found the crowd easily: they were the big cluster of dots on the Reaction Grid map.

Several regulars at our weekly meetings were around, as well as GeoFrank from NASA. Many of the new Reaction Grid folks had customized their avatars very effectively; if only I could figure out where Olivia Hotshot got her blue skin--nicely done and right out of Cameron's Avatar.

What impressed me about the gathering was its size: although regions in Reaction Grid can only support a dozen avatars, give or take, as many as 27 avatars were present, by meeting in an area that bordered two regions. The Reaction Grid team was on hand to build a "chat bridge" between the two areas.

I've not had time to even look at the chat transcript that reached me after the event. I'm quite impressed, however, that so many of us could make it in-world, not crash, and not worry too much about our hair.

My only glitch was a freeze that led me to relog after I teleported to the meeting site.

We walked around afterward to see GeoFrank's rocket-garden, Viv Trafalgar's land with its amazing giant flowers, and Olivia's meeting area itself. As a DIY sort of fellow, I like Reaction Grid's start-up feeling. The rough patches will smooth out in time, as I've seen in Heritage Key since last fall.



This was truly an historic day for the Reaction Grid and its team.

A Blast at the Chronicle's Second Life Coverage

Location: Mixing a Drink (of water--Mama taught me no Martinis when you are pissed off)

Marty Keltz of The Virtual Worlds Story Project poked me with a stick today, when I was already testy. He let me loose on "After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds" in the usually well informed Chronicle of Higher Education.

So visit the story and watch the fur fly. Marty, if we meet in NYC or Richmond and you are drinking man, the famously secret great Martinis at Thai Diner II are on me. If you are not a drinking man...you drive us home. And his partner in TVWSP, Jenaia Morane, gets her drinks on me, too, for her riposte, "Ignorance Abounds."

Here's my reply to Mr. Young:

The author does a disservice to those of us who have worked hard building immersive simulations in Second Life. That said, I'm not a fanboy of Linden Lab (though I have taught four classes using their world and in networked classrooms since the early 90s). It takes time to teach well in SL, and it's advisable to spend at least a semester studying the world before bringing students in.

So I want to note, first, where Mr. Young gets it right.

First, the author understands the power of simulations, which is the most compelling application for virtual-world technology.

Bravo. Young's also correct in stating that educators "need more control than Second Life gives them." Much of the blame for that rests with the company, not the world itself.

Here Mr. Young misses a really key part of this story.

Too often since the short-lived "media hype" era for SL ended in 2007, Linden Lab has taken its education customers for granted. Examples abound. They don't understand that many first-year students outside the US are 17, not the minimum of 18 needed to create an account. While ramping up system-requiremnents to look more like higher-end games, the company doesn't consider the systems that students will use to connect to SL. Doing so on a typical student laptop via wireless can spell disaster. They have not provided educators with ways to back up our simualtions on local equipment, except for a laughably expensive "enterprise solution" or third-party clients of limited utility.

With OpenSim worlds, for all their warts, a school can host its own virtual world and control its own IP.

Mr. Young could have written a far stronger indictment of this particular virtual world's shortcomings, however, had he not shown his lack of skill in SL and, say, taken a look at the fine (and not so rosy) study of experienced users just released by the New Media Consortium:

http://www.nmc.org/2minute-survey/virtual-worlds

It's painful when a reporter shows his "noob" status. He states--and this had me alternately laughing and groaning--that "I regularly get stuck between pieces of virtual furniture, wander around aimlessly looking for the person I'm trying to meet up with, or lose patience as I wait for my online avatar to walk between virtual classrooms."

That, Mr. Young, is your fault, not SL's. I learned such basics within my first semester with SL. My students last term had those "level one" skills down in...two weeks.

There are many reasons to doubt that virtual worlds will soon attract a large number of faculty. But The Chronicle should have sent someone "in-world" who at least possessed enough skills to avoid his own bias about using the interface. I'm not angling for that job...I'm too ticked by Linden Lab. But at least, as I teach my writing students immediately, one begins analysis by noting one's biases and lack of expertise.

BTW, "RIP Second Life" is, as we'd say "in world" a lame link to have.

Some Thoughts About "Mainstream" Faculty and Virtual Worlds

Location: New Media Consortium Web Site

Hamlet Au recently posted some interesting statistics from Alan Levine and the folks at New Media Consortium. The findings show a prevalence of educators in Second Life, with only a scattered few in other virtual worlds. The study also reveals how hard it may be to get more faculty to join us.

Why Aren't More of Us In-World?

I know that on my campus, I'm one of three faculty who have taught with SL. A fourth made it an optional part of the class. And only one of us is using SL this term (for a single assignment).

I have hundreds of colleagues. Almost all of them use Blackboard. Several dozen use wikis and blogs. Granted, only a handful use GIS data or similar applications. In those cases, however, the application is essential to a colleague's research agenda.

Why no more of us in SL? Let's dig into some of the NMC findings with a graphic that Au did not reproduce. This graph charts answers to the question "What is the number one barrier to broader adoption of virtual worlds by your institution?"


I'm taken by the 91 respondents, 33% of total, who responded that the "learning curve" for virtual worlds is the number one hindrance.

After 3 years in SL, the clunky user interface seems easy enough to me, but I still am a dolt about scripting, the deeper aspects of the "advanced" menu, and more. And, to be honest, I have no intention of learning them. There's not enough reward, professionally, for my taking the time to learn them, and my personal time is too precious to spend on that.

None of the respondents in the NMC survey noted specifically that a lack of incentives and rewards blocks wider implementation, but I suspect that lay behind a number of the "other" (18%) responses. On my campus, I get as much credit, in my annual review, for the 20 hours or so needed to design a new course over the summer or the 30 or so I spent last year on curriculum review as I do for the 400+ hours a year I spend in SL or writing about it. My time included going to meetings like our weekly Roundtable, exploring the metaverse, building an educational simulation, teaching with SL, and blogging about it.

Sure, SL is a lot of fun. But 400 hours? Time is not infinite, and I'm planning to spend less time now in SL and even blogging, after my "personal audit."

How many scholarly articles have I not written in the past three years because of that missing time? At least two, beyond the one I have written about my work in SL. Even for those of us who do not have tenure, publication is the currency of Academia if one wishes to change jobs.

So please don't be cranky at me if I refuse to join you in the latest social-networking application, virtual world, etc. I'm going to spend my "SL time" reviewing articles for a forthcoming anthology on virtual worlds. My evaluators will understand that and reward me.

Perhaps--I have mislaid the reference to an article on the topic--this is why schools without so much publish-or-perish pressures, even on non-tenured faculty, and with a strong teaching mission have fared better in virtual worlds than have the Ivies.

Schools without such pressure to look good in national ranking have the luxury to try these worlds out. Monetary costs (only cited by 6% of respondents) are, unlike temporal ones, low in virtual worlds.

But, Wait. Other Tools Take Time to Learn, Too!

Mastering SL is more akin to designing Web pages than learning to use them well. The only reason SL was fairly simple for me is that I used it to play, too, my first year (and still do, a little). Most of my peers do not, and as Dan Holt and I have both discovered, a semester of learning would be wise before bringing in a class. I'd claim that several are needed before a faculty member can begin to design anything beyond rudimentary content.

First, other classroom tools with more shallow learning curves, such as wikis, blogs, micro-blogging, photo-sharing, and the like contribute mightily to student multimedia work. And in many cases, support and discussion of them is as close as my office hallway or the library. For many applications, students know already how to use them. When I mentioned that I could join my current course virtually next month during a conference, every student in class had a Skype account and knowledge of the application.

For virtual worlds, I must rely upon my online community for discussion and advice. The folks I collaborate with know a lot, except for one thing: the culture of my school. Moreover, the serendipity of a chat over coffee still works better for me and many of my colleagues.

Second, SL sometimes seems less like a tool to make a project (especially for non-builders!) than a subject for good work, as in my students race-and-gender-switch assignment in SL or the "Saving Isis" project in Heritage Key.

But I could, in my field, just as readily study race-and-gender biases online with the flat Web. It might not be so intriguing or immersive, but it would far, far easier.

So, Why No Broader Use of Other Virtual Worlds?

In Academia we have broadly available ways to connect to our peers in specialized fields: e-lists, academic conferences, journals. All build community, and in the galaxy of virtual worlds, only SL offers that, so far, though Reaction Grid seems to be gaining traction.

Beyond community, there's the utility of features in SL that simply work better than in any competitor's world (and across platforms). For all its warts, SL features working groups, maps, consistent teleports, prim-items that work consistently, and (perhaps most importantly) premade content for sale or even for free.

My ability to quickly purchase a Mystitool table-and-chair system at a Roundtable meeting, using the Xstreetsl portal, let the meeting go on. I suppose in another virtual world I could have made a bunch of plywood cubes to sit on, or our avatars could have just stood up. Either would "break the metaphor" that makes the world immersive and, in various ways, would not have lead to a smooth meeting of 40 people in the same way as a very impressive scripted table and chairs did.

So designers, take heart! Given the lack of time and rewards that educators face, most of us will never become fluent builders and we'll need such good work by others. One can still lead productive classes in SL without making a single cube, but to do that locales for study and inventory become essential. Even freebie items let me class change race and gender well enough to study those aspects of identity.

For now, we educators remain a small part of virtual worlds. Until the software gets more intuitive, we'll remain a small group. And until other virtual worlds offer SL's community, we'll mostly be using the Linden product.