How Embrace Second Life's Inner Niche? Ask the Crawl-Space Dude

Location: Study-Break From Grading Finals, Butt in Chair

The numbers are trending back down for the number of private regions in Second Life. I cannot speculate about the temporary rebound we were seeing for a few weeks, but soon SL's region count will be lower than its ebb in February 2014.

Let's assume, for a moment, that the venture with OnLive's SL Go client, the coming of the Savior called Occulus Rift (praised be His Holy Name), other improvements by Linden Lab, and other efforts by the newly hired CEO do not stem the ebbing tide.  What then?

I agree with a remark made at New World Notes by CronoCloud Creeggan:

Nothing wrong with being a niche. We live in a finite world, the myth that growth is infinite and can continue forever and that triple digit yearly growth is required for 'success' has got to go. There's nothing wrong with finding a niche market and making steady money off of it, year in and out.

Other than the limited-population OpenSim Grids or walled gardens like InWorldz and Avination, who DOES what Second Life does? Activeworlds? PC Only. IMVU? Just a chat room with avatars. Cloud Party? Gone. High Fidelity? Still mostly a gleam in Philip Rosedale's eye. Unity 3D? Beyond the scope of most faculty and hobbyist developers.

Garry's Mod? Exactly how much technical knowledge does one need to run that thing?

Let me know what else does what SL does: a sandbox for user-generated content that purports to be a metaverse. I'm waiting.

That's the brilliance of finding a niche. If only Linden Lab would exploit that. Others do.

In renovating a house currently, I found myself completely unwilling to undertake needed work in the crawl space. I have done such work before personally, raking out ruts, putting in a vapor barrier, sealing around wires and pipes, installing subfloor insulation. Most HVAC and plumbing companies--mainstream all--would not touch my latest crawl space for a price I can afford.

Enter a local firm called CrawlSpace Ace, whose owner told me that they found a profitable niche, dirty work to be sure, and cornered the market. They do not want for business. Read this thread for contractors to see why, but read it during the daylight hours. You won't sleep well otherwise.

So what would Linden Lab have to do to think like a crawl-space contractor? The improvements  listed early in this post would help. Then they must retain the loyalists. Eventually, they have to lower tier. 

All that has been said. Yet if a crawl-space contractor can make a go of it, an IT firm in The Bay Area certainly can. We are still waiting.

Some Numbers to Ponder

Though I did get an A+ in the one statistics class I was forced to take (and perversely, enjoyed immensely) I'm no number-cruncher.

So I "ran a few numbers" today, while watching the verbal pie-fight at NWN about the Linden Lab terms of service and how it might be influencing content creators.  It would seem to me that a better test of Linden Lab's success or failure would be how many new content-creators are coming into the platform. A few high-level departures now won't do much, in terms of establishing a trend.

There is a clear trend to ponder in SL. I pulled these figures from Grid Survey's rankings of private estates in-world:

Date/ Number of private estates / Change from previous entry

10-18-10 / 24791
10-31-11 / 24432 / -359 regions
10-14-12 / 21504 / -2928 regions
10-13-13 / 19582 / -1922 regions

I suppose there's comfort in the smaller decline from 2012 to 2013.  What does the overall trend portend? At some point, there will come a tipping point. What the Lindens do when their world is no longer profitable enough to satisfy their Board remains as mysterious as anything else that comes from their offices.

Linden TOS = Theft?

Location: State of Shock

The new Linden Terms of Service raised many hackles at today's VWER meeting, which I agreed to host as Kali was away.

Note the clauses here:

"you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content"

I'm glad I'm done teaching with Second Life. Never again. And the Lindens must have good lawyers. Vassar still has content there; the new TOS means that Lindens could use Vassar's logo or re-sell it, if one applies the TOS literally.

Yet another reason to set up one's own grid and distribute the work under  a Creative-Commons license.

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.

Leaving Las Vegas: 6 Years in Virtual Worlds, Farewell

Location: Grading Finals

During the Spring Semester of 2007, this fool rushed into Second Life, something he felt would not only change education but the world beyond. Virtual worlds looked like a utopian technology with lots of zealous folks ready to evangelize the masses.

Six years later, grading what may be my last-ever student projects about virtual worlds and somewhat wiser, this educated fool wonders why SL did not change the world or even higher ed. I've written elsewhere about why SL failed to become that "3D Web" of yore.  Meanwhile, the bandwagon has moved on, the cheerleaders yelling "hurrah!"and "higher education will never be the same!" for MOOCs.

I'll sum up what I've learned about utopian narratives and would-be transformative technologies here, based on not only the last 6 but the last 25 years of studying and writing professionally about technological change, especially that which generates legions of enthusiasts.

1. Look past the message to the messenger
2. Wait for results unless you are an entrepreneur or venture capitalist
3. Be a trailing-edger
4. Find community locally, not just online
5. Consider what students have in their hands

Lesson one: Look past the message to the messenger

I first head about Second Life in a story from Wired. That is not a sedate or juried publication; it's the Popular Mechanics of the digital era. Ever the sucker for flying cars and moon bases, I decided "I need to get in early with this technology," not considering that one company, with a closed platform not built for education, held the cards. I trusted the vision of Magic Koolaid provider, Philip Rosedale. Linden Lab's corporate culture and Rosedale's wandering vision both disappointed this educator, along with many colleagues.

Who is pushing MOOCs today? College faculty members? Technologists who embrace the new without considering pedagogy of large classes with little or no contact with faculty? Right-wing lawmakers eager to dilute the power of those "tenured radicals" supposedly in charge of Higher Ed? Boards of Visitors eager to promote a school "brand" without a clear sense of what it will do to curriculum, staffing, or the long-term value of that "brand"?

Ask yourself, and take a deep breath before jumping on the band wagon.

I do wish I'd looked past the euphoria about virtual worlds in 2007 to see who was cheering most loudly.

Lesson Two: Wait for results, unless you are an entrepreneur or venture capitalist

I was not in virtual worlds for the money. As noted just now, I wanted to be in on "the next Web," as many were then pitching SL. In 1993, when I first saw a moving weather-pattern on the Mosaic browser in Dickie and Cindy Selfe's lab at Michigan Tech, I knew I was seeing something historic. In 2007 I thought so again, without applying the very critical-thinking skills I teach my students.

From 2003-06 or so, it made sense for venture capitalists to take a bet on this new technology. It might have become the next Web. Educators, however, need to always place sound pedagogy ahead of tech, which is a suspicious I have about the euphoria over MOOCs at the moment. I saw that same brand of enthusiasm for MOOs in the late 80s and early 90s, literary hypertext a bit later, glove-and-goggle VR from the 80s to the present, and of course, virtual worlds.

While one might reasonably claim that virtual worlds are going to become significant culturally, I'd suspect lots of Magic-Koolaid drinking by an educator who claimed SL will ever again be more than a niche-product in years to come. AJ Kelton of VWER rightly called SL "The AOL of virtual worlds" to the disdain of several Linden Lab staff. AJ was correct, and the Lab staff in question now work elsewhere, after being fired during the first stages of Second Life's ongoing and palpable decline.

Bottom line for me: waiting to see if SL lived up to its hype would have cost me nothing in 2007, and would have saved me time. Had I first taken a class in-world in 2009, I'd have been ready for the myriad frustrations and technical issues that bedeviled a product that seemed very much in Beta up to that point.

Lesson Three: Be a trailing-edger

During the summer I spent with the Selfes and their grad students at Michigan Tech, Richard "Dickie" Selfe, co-founder of that school's CCLI humanities lab, along with wife and fellow scholar Cynthia Selfe, once told me only to adopt trailing-edge tech for teaching and learning. The Selfes were among a group of 1980s pioneers with personal computing in the classroom, and Dickie's lab at MTU was a playful space, with stuffed animals, a coffee machine, snacks, and weekend gaming sessions with Doom and similar titles.  I'm sure that at Ohio State they continue this practice, so influential to young scholars of writing pedagogy in writing-intensive curricula.

At every step, while the Selfes liberally experimented with leading-and-bleeding-edge applications, in the classroom they proceeded more carefully with undergraduates. The older technologies were stable, easier to support, and grounded in best practices for teaching.

My experiences in 2007-8 in SL, and then in 2011 with OpenSim's Jokaydia Grid, taught me the dangers of being on the bleeding edge. My students and I bled. Only Jokay's personal help saved the final exam in 2011, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth for teaching with OpenSim. As for SL, only by 2009 was it stable enough for a class to appreciate. That class was, ironically, my last one to focus on the technology, rather than using it for a single project.

Today, SL as a product is fairly stable, and critical and scholarly work about virtual worlds has emerged to guide our pedagogy. One would be far better off starting today as a SLer with students, given these two changes. Those on the bleeding edge, however, get cut by it.

Lesson Four: Find community locally, not just online

My years with the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable have been good ones, and I cherish the faculty contacts I have made there. That said, the weekly meetings and constant advice did not compensate for a lack of interest in virtual worlds on my campus. With other innovations, from our Writing Consultants program to First-Year Seminars, we meet in person and I have lunch with folks in the flesh. There is no substitute.

Our technologists all had avatars before I did, but they never convinced more than a handful of faculty to try SL. The learning curve, the oddness of avatar-based education on a residential campus, and the lack of incentives for faculty all worked against us.

In the end, SL was an experiment that failed at Richmond. When Linden Lab renewed the 50% discount for education (if you ask the right person!) we declined. Why spend even $150 monthly for a product that might be used once every few years by one faculty member? Meanwhile, our technologists have other more tasks, from supporting Blackboard and other meat-and-drink software to  new initiatives with mobile apps.

Mobile may turn out to be the "new shiny object" for education, but it's not a niche application for students. As for MOOCs? I will wait to see comparative studies of students' learning outcomes in them and outside them. That should have been done for virtual worlds.

Lesson Five: Consider what students have in their hands

The transition to smart phones as students' primary communications tools has changed everything for us. While laptops abound, students use them like big phones: never plugging in the AC adapters, perching them in nooks where Millennnials gather to collaborate, plastering them with stickers to personalize them. I suspect that with a better keyboard, students would do their content creation on fast tablets, since we have ubiquitous and fast wireless everywhere on campus.

None of that I could have foreseen in 2007, since I did not even slow down enough to consider how poorly SL would run on many laptops, especially those not hard-wired to an Ethernet port or plugged into a AC outlet.

Even with desktop connections, students loathe SL's lag. I saw that last week in the finals. Perhaps server-side baking from Linden Lab will make SL run better on what my students still use for content creation--laptops--though not on phones, where virtual worlds simply cannot display with any sort of grandeur.

But by then, Iggy will have left the virtual building.

Coda:

I'm thankful for an experiment of six years, even if the experiment failed. At least virtual worlds generated two publications for me, as well as a forthcoming anthology I'm co-editing with some chapters about virtual worlds. I don't write the rules, but publications and teaching evaluations are the currency of academia, despite the best wishes of utopians that it be otherwise.

It is always possible that my teaching load will shift again, and my Chair and Department will call on me to teach my course about the history, culture, and future of Cyberspace. In such an event, Iggy and his students will be back. Look out.

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 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.

Linden Lab & Customers

 

Location: Bizarro World, Clearly

In what other community would rotten treatment be construed as part of a utopian dream? In reading recent posts about sim-closings over at New World Notes, I detect an evangelism that has all but vanished in academic circles whenever SL comes up as topic.

I'll keep an eye on Fearzom and my old parcel, maybe even do a walking tour since sim crossings no longer work well enough for a road trip. It's interesting what denial can do for a former darling of the mass media.

To quote a CEO in Bizarro World, "me lose customers and business! Company do great!"

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.

Spaceports Saved, ISTE Island Closes

image credit: Scott Merrick's Flickr Photostream

Today, welcome and sad news in one dose. First, the International Spaceflight Museum was saved, by the action of "a higher-up Linden" than the staffer who denied Katherine Prawl's request to restore her sims. See the comments at New World Notes for more details.

Thus one door creaks open while another door slams shut. Alerted by a Tweet from Jokay Wollongong, I discovered that the island for The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) in Second Life will close as of March 1.

Scott Merrick's blog makes it clear that while ISTE will lose a region, the organization's virtual-worlds initiatives will not end. Scott notes that "The task force that examined options recommended two of them to the ISTE administration and and they accepted one, which involves rental space for ISTE" at Eduisland and a new ISTE region at Jokaydia Grid.

ISTE has long been a major player in the SL educational community, and it provided a popular orientation spot for new student and faculty avatars seeking to avoid the freakshows of the public welcome areas.

Now ISTE appears to be making the same moves I saw in my survey of educators: a smaller spot in SL to support educators and a larger one outside it.  This will save ISTE money, while maintaining their work with 3D immersive learning, given that tier fees for Jokaydia Grid run about 1/12 of what one would pay Linden Lab for a similar product that does not offer offgrid backups.

Thus, the SLexodus continues. Go by ISTE Island to thank them and bid them a fond farewell.

Poll Results 2012 of Education and Land Use

Here we have the results from 35 recipients who took the poll. Last year, I did leave the poll open longer, and as a result in 2011 I had 104 responses.  Perhaps this poll might have included the option that one respondent noted, namely "we own the same amount in SL as we did a year ago."

I like that idea, but I wanted to 1) repeat the questions as posed last year and 2) abide by the nine-question limit that Vizu provides for free polls. Here are the 2012 results:

 
And the 2011 results:

 

I hesitate to draw conclusions from a small sample size of 35, for a poll advertised on two e-lists related to virtual worlds. The data suggest that more people are paying out of pocket and more people in the past year, as compared to the  year before, have given up land in Second Life after the tier-discounts for education and nonprofits ended. 

I do not know who to interpret the "own no land" results. It's possible that many of the respondents are new to virtual worlds and have not made a decision. They may, in fact, be sharing parcels or islands with others, a result that is little changed from 2011.

An educator in the VWER group suggested that I poll educators again in the summer, when the two-year contracts for reduced tier end.  I would also like to know where educators have do their work, both in SL and outside it. Some questions worth asking:

• Do those remaining in SL use mainland parcels? University islands?
• Where are they going? To OpenSim grids? To Unity 3D and Jibe? Somewhere else?
• What factors most contribute to their decisions about renting server space (or hosting it locally) for a virtual world?

Across the Great Divide: Four Months in Jokaydia Grid

Location: A Foot in at Least Two Virtual Worlds

I realized an anniversary had just passed, from a post here in late October 2010 that marked my first prim rezzed in Jokdaydia Grid.

Now I am preparing my presentation, "Lessons Hard and Wonderful From A Faculty Member Pioneering in OpenSim," for the upcoming VWBPE conference. This post also lets me organize notes for tonight's VWER meeting, where my colleague Kali Pizzaro will lead us in a the discussion "Across The Great Divide: Sharing Across Grids."

What have I learned as an OpenSim pioneer that can apply across grids?

• Travel before deciding. I made a mistake of rushing a class into Second Life in 2007 without enough time spent exploring, attending events, meeting other educators.  This time, I avoided the mistake by visiting a few education-friendly grids before signing a lease.
• Friends can make a grid. I opted for Jokaydia Grid because some friends and colleagues were already there, and that made sharing content very easy.
• Hair and skin do not make a grid vital. I love the inexpensive content in SL that makes educational work go faster, but let's not blind ourselves to what makes a grid vital. SL was vital, after all, and perhaps more inventive in the days of Linden World and Primitars.
• Study how different OpenSim grids are from Second Life. Here a post at the VWER site may be useful. In it I share the lessons as a new builder on a new grid.
• Build to share. I want my content to be free. That means making everything myself in a way that can convey across grids for our emerging constellation of hypergrid-linked educational spaces. It means releasing any scripts I manage to make, or photos I take, or assignments I write, to the community under Creative-Commons licensing.
• Read all of a grid's fine-print. I love the (for now) closed Third Rock Grid, InWorldz, and what I recently found in OpenLife, and I'd considered opening the Usher simulation in one of these grids until I found out hypergridding to be a fast-maturing technology. Then I limited my search for a post-SL home to grids that are not closed.  You will need to make a basic decision: closed grid with vendors, such as Inworldz? Open grid with mostly other educators and limited content, such as my home? Other fine-print items will include the tier fees. Are they fixed or an introductory rate for a grid's beta-test era? Can you lock in a good tier as a pioneer?
• Backup is key. Here I mean literal backup of files and regions. Not all grids allow OAR backups, something I insisted upon for my new virtual home. Most, including SL, will permit Imprudence to export items made by an educator. That was important as I began exporting content I made from SL for Jokaydia Grid.
• Share outside your new grid. I am planning to open Usher for tours soon, and part of that will involve a Web site were source files may be downloaded for importing into other compatible grids. It's easier to download from a colleague's site than to travel to a grid to look for content.  I'll issue all of it under a Creative-Commons noncommercial license. 
• Burn no bridges. "Iggy said that?" you may well ask. I've been venomous about Linden Lab's treatment of educators, and I regret that (a little). Now that the lab has a new CEO, I'll follow his actions but also very much remain part of SL. It's still the best place to meet educators in large groups. That may well change, and SL will be "the old country," to use a term Lalo Telling. (mostly of InWorldz) mentioned some time back.

Wherever we travel, and whatever direction this technology takes us, the lessons of our old grids should convey. Good luck as a pioneer, settler, or happily settled resident!

VWER Grid: A New Start For Educators

Location: VWER Grid

AJ Kelton worked very hard to get 15 of us onto the new grid, hosted by Reaction Grid, to hear guest speakers John "Pathfinder" Lester and Jokay Wollongong.  The transcript will be a lively one.

We broke our old record of attendees, and the grid proved stable for "native" accounts and Hypergrid visitors.

This is looking more and more like the future for educators. For those who call OpenSim a desert, I'd add "I think we have an oasis."

And for those who claim the avatars and gear don't match SL, I'd say "give it time. A lot of clever folks are building and sharing their content, just as we do at our K-12 schools, colleges, and universities."

With Jokaydia Grid ramping up past 80 sims now, with over 1000 educators involved, more oases are on the horizon, not mirages. 

Big Visions, Little Visions, Second Life's Failure

Location: Hollering, at the Rebel Yell

I've written, at the VWER site, a long analysis of Second Life's failure to become the sort of disruptive technology that Philip Rosedale envisioned.  I'm thinking of Tim Wu's term for technologies that create entire new industries building a system to replace older forms of communication.

Other than a smug image of my avatar and a Philip-Rosedale parody-bot at the Burn 2.0 arts event, I think--think--I kept my snark in check.

I hope my claims about SL are not mere sour grapes over the end of Richmond Island in SL and the departure of so many educators from that technology.  It's premature to say we victors write the histories, because educators are still using SL and will, while OpenSim is very much a pioneer's environment. Moreover, Linden Lab might still recapture a niche market they are losing now and make their metaverse the standard-bearer.

That I doubt. Read the article and I'll explain why.

Pulling Down The House of Usher: Manuscript Found In a Prim Bottle

Location: Madeline Usher's Writing Desk

My Dear Edgar,

I write these words in haste before the doom that has befallen the House of Usher overtakes me.

I arrived in reply to Roderick Usher's urgent summons. And to think that this mansion was a vital, if troubled, place but a year ago. There remained no more than the shell of a ruined home when I made my uneasy way across the causeway!  And, like the shattered head of Shelley's poem, round its wreck the lone and level sands stretched far away into the primordial distance, an empty horizon of blue as though I were far above the earth.

After I plucked up my courage, I made my way into the House and ascended to the pitiful remains of the second story, where I found quill, ink, and paper to write this letter. Shattered bits of furnishings and structure dotted the landscape. What had become of the Ushers?  The family's parrot, an African Grey or perhaps Norwegian Blue, it being hard to discern in the fading light, greeted me.


"Awk! Run for cover! Run for cover! Blimey! Guv'nah Linden gets the island soon! He raised the rent! No more prims! Awk! Run for cover!"

Fed some strange hope by this warning, as well as by the bird's clever manner, I implored it, "Where are my friends, Roderick and Madeline? Shall I see them again in this wretched house?"

"Nevermore! Nevermore! S'blood run for it! Try OpenSim! Try OpenSim! Awk!"

In despair I looked for a way out, but an angel of destruction followed at my heels. I realized the fate of the upper stories of The House of Usher. As I explored, I began to hear the noises of stone grinding upon stone, and as I looked on, the last standing walls began to fall! Oh, the sound of breaking leaded glass, the heritage of the Ushers for many centuries, ground into dust! Oh, the rending of the floors to reveal the awful horror of the crypts below!

Then, a spirit came and made a dire warning.


"Traveler, flee this cursed place. My doom is to tarry here until the last prim has been taken and the curse placed upon this land by the Lindens enacted in full. You have a future before you, until the dreadful and dolorous day of doom, when you too shall rot in the hungry earth! Flee, fool, flee the Reaper for he is at your back this very instant! Flee!"

In some ghoul-haunted hysteria from the works of Byron, I stumbled into the crumbling and rat-specked remains of the Ushers' ancient crypts, hoping to find surcease from the incredible destruction above.

But there was to be no rest for my tormented spirit, alas!  The devastation of the House and all its heritage continued apace, stone by stone they crumbled and vanished into the deep places of the world, as if some cavalier god were putting them back into a cosmic inventory of loss of suffering.

Oh me! Oh Usher! But wait...

A flask of laudanum! I drank deeply, as the House continued its awful decomposition. Amid the swirling debris from happier days, I swooned as the drug eased my nerves...and my last vision of Usher was of Roderick and Madeline, silhouetted against a nightmare sky.

Shall I never awake from this delirium?  Make haste, Edgar, for I fear I am entombed with phantoms.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,

Ignatius Onomatopoeia, Esq.

Has it been really that long?

Location: Still out in the cold - frozen rock solid

Its almost two years now. Two years from the last days of a colourful time of weird experience, good humor and exploration, but also of deep friendship, loss and grief.

My time on the grid was a wild rollercoaster.

it opened a door into another world opened to me, giving me insights into the world of a bunch of the most amazing people I have ever met and I am still happy, that the contact to most of them is still as stable as it used to be in those days. It was a time of exploring, thinking and planning. We build things that were mostly useless, but that entertained us and brought people together that would normally would have run past each other in the highly unlikely event of meeting in the street anyways.

It broke the routine, was new and fresh and we gave a piece of ourselves to others offering them new insights on their current ways, maybe changing some thoughts for the better even.

We were silly and hilarious. We wore Gorillasuits paired with Russian uniforms, or raided jails to bust out family members only to stop on the village center for a square dance.

Under the sign of the hand we enjoyed an extension of our regular existences which enriched our lives in a way, which would have most likely never been occurred without SL.

But things were cruel too. People we thought we understood turned against us from one day to the next, disappeared without another word, or even worse died in real life never to be seen again and deeply missed.

The prejudice that SL would be some kind of game, still clings hard to the minds of people who haven't tried and understood it, yet i repeat it over and over again, "Second Life" has its name for a reason. We did not want to escape, run away or whatever those people tried to find as a reason for our using SL; no, we just extended our experience to an area normally locked to us.

Its almost two years now. Two years that also drove me nuts over and over again with Linden Lab not willing to act. Years of lost inventory, crappy server performance, money disappearing to nowhere, running around as Ruth and a lot of other problems that were never addressed and most likely never will be.

Since I am always having a hard time resisting Iggy's requests, I willed myself to write something about my SL afterlife and found it incredibly hard to find an introduction to this topic. Looking at what I have written now gives me more the impression of an epitaph to the avatar formerly known as Tenchi Morigi.

Honestly, it kind of is one. I ended my regular visits to the grid in August 09 and have returned only twice since then. I have followed the regular coverage of this blog and was sad that the difficulties we foresaw in 07 already are now coming to full effect, most likely doing irreparable damage to the concept of virtual worlds in the future.

But what has this to do with my SL Afterlife. Well after SL I tried out several ways of socialising and have to say that no platform offers such an easy an uncomplicated approach to that like SL did which is a real loss (I would love to be proven wrong there). It seems that there is no real alternative, and all possible alternatives are far from the "social quality" SL once could muster. So the subject is currently completely off the table for me. Well you could meet me online, but that would mean a 70-year-old Orion slave girl charging at you wielding a bath'leth in STO. Yes I am playing Star Trek Online at the moment since I always was a Trek girl and looked forward to it, but the style of communication and socializing is in no way comparable to what SL had to offer. That shouldn't be a big surprise, since STO in fact is a game while SL is not.

I admit that I woefully look back to those days and wished that people were a little different, LL a little less greedy and me a little more motivated. The time I spent in SL was great and surely not wasted, but reading the coverage on it and talking to the people I am still in touch with they will remain a memory to be cherished rather then an epoch to be continued.

Going back to sleep
T

Pulling Down the House of Usher, Part II

Location: The Painful Part

Well, it's half-done. In fact I rather like the effect of seeing the demolition in slow-motion. I began with the outer walls, linking parts I'd missed the first time around, then taking them into inventory.

Next I began to delete prims not made by me that were simply textured flooring and other easily replicated bits. I could remake them later. Then copies of things already in inventory were deleted. Slowly I'm returning Beeble Baxter's prims from the House. I'm concerned that some of his non-shared items may be destroyed with the Richmond sim vanishes.

When the demo is finished I'll run a Koinup slide-show of the process here.  Still, it's not the most fun thing I've done in SL.

I know some of you have read Poe's story and have a question about how I might have ended things.

I'd been tempted to make the whole build physical, then unlink the sets. That would replicate the drama of the end of Poe's tale.  At the same time, I wanted a copy of it as it stood in inventory, just in case we ever set up Usher again in Second Life rather than another grid more amenable to educators.

Maybe I'll rezz the shell again from inventory, make it collapse into the water, and burn any remaining rubble: good way to say goodbye to renting server space from Linden Lab.

Pulling Down The House of Usher, Part I

Location: Second Life House of Usher Visitor Center

It began with the Visitor Center. I'm not quite up to bringing down the House today.

When the walls returned to my inventory, I took a last look at the fireplace.

I think I've done a decent job with my own in OpenSim. Goodbye, fireplace. Get into that folder, ravens! And take that skull and bones with you. Slide show and student projects, in you go!

I think I've done enough. I'll leave the House up a little longer if you want to see it. TP to the site of the Visitor's Center, hop in the balloon, and look around. I'll be pulling down the House next week. The entire island will vanish by the end of the month, as our university ceases any operations in Second Life.

After that, you'll want to visit Jokaydia Grid to see the new version of this simulation. I plan to set up a little center for pedagogy on Nevermore Island, dedicated to the hard work my students in SL did. In 2011-12, after a pause caused by Linden Lab's price hike for educators and the resultant rebuilding, I'll return to OpenSim with a batch of first-year students.

My first-years this semester will have the option to explore a game or virtual world for final projects, in a class about the history, culture, and future of cyberspace. But there will be no required work in SL. Never again, I anticipate.  If a student chooses to explore Linden Lab's grid, I'll be on hand to mentor him or her. But beyond that, my efforts will be elsewhere.

Iggy Strangeland Visits InWorldz

Location: Desert Island Welcome Area

Ruth again! Unlike Second Life, however, mentors were awaiting my sad Ruthy arrival at this up-and-coming grid.

I got directed to a newbies store, and a well-stocked one, by an avatar named Doctor Gascoigne. Uploads of textures are free, so I equipped Iggy with my usual T and Jeans, then found some hair and shades. He's a bit of Andy Partridge from XTC, so I'm playing that band--one of my favorites--on iTunes now.

The result of this ramble will be a piece for the January 2011 issue of Prim Perfect, where I do features on non-SL grids. So far, InWorldz is indeed promising. It seems a major stop for those leaving SL or simply branching out. InWorldz residents are in the midst of their Winter Festival, so if you don't think snowballs are painful enough to toss at the Lindens who so badly screwed up this annus horribilis in SL, go over to InWorldz for some actual wintertime fun.

More on this grid soon here, but here's a note: a grid passes my Tophat Test when I can adjust a worn prim-based item. I found a topper and made it fit right away!