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 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.

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!

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.