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.

Grandpa's Box: My Thoughts on the Future of Our Computers

Location: Using Obsolescent Computing Tool

I don't know how many of my friends among Second Life's digerati are in contact with young people on a daily basis. I am, and I am stunned by how fast they are abandoning the personal computer.

The other day, I got a briefing from a Writing Consultant who works for me. She reviewed our Writing Center Web site and, while polite and praising the content, noted that the organization is all wrong for a student audience. "I no longer use my laptop," she admitted. "The iPad is my primary computer."

Much of our content, developed over many years and going through a vetting process with several bureaucratic levels, is all wrong.

It has happened with hyperdrive speed, this shift.  We are not an engineering or arts school: our students reflect typical affluent users.

Should I cheer at this funeral?

Iggy in the Confessional Booth, Before St. Steve

As a Mac-OS fanatic, I take no comfort in Apple's victory with portable devices. Windows-users, we are in the same boat, because the iPad is no Mac. Or Windows PC.

It's the anti-Mac, or better still, the final realization of Steve Jobs' dream of 1984: a sleek and closed-down platform with an elegant interface, but where one pays a price: Apple controls every damned thing. The iPhones and iPads are also hip examples of industrial design, just as the Mac of 1984 was no bulky (and sturdy) IBM PC of the sort I then owned. The IBM was for office-clones who had reluctantly given up their Selectric typewriters. The Mac was for artists and freaks.

It was a machine with a personality. Over time, it acquired a soul after Jobs' hammer-lock on hardware design was yanked away. Except for Extensions conflicts before OS X. But we won't go there...Jobs' "second coming" swept away the Old Order.

Jobs is a man with Olympian ambition and an insanely great idea or two: his ideal factory would take trucks of sand in one end and ship out computers at the other end. He wants to own the whole system. Henry Ford was smiling from plutocrat-heaven when he looked down at St. Steve.  Tim Wu understands this well in his book The Master Switch. Wu takes some well aimed swipes at Jobs.

Sorry, Steve. I really adore your OS, but I'm thinking of backing Google with an Android purchase. And--horrors--I think I'll be playing Mass Effect on an Xbox 360.

Confession #2: I'm going to buy that in several months, mostly to play the latest Mass Effect.  Let's give the Devil his due; Microsoft kept their corporate wet-blanket culture off the gaming division, and out of that we got the Kinect.

Trouble for Granda's Box

My "Nerd-Night" tabletop RPG group consists of one Mac-guy (me) and a bunch of Windows-based gamers who get away from their MMOs to go "old school" and roll some d20s. Some of them own console games, but not a one uses a smart phone or tablet.

They are dinosaurs as surely as I am. They don't get why the next generation of computer users are eschewing desktop systems for portable devices. I, on the other hand, get it.

Millennials want to always be in touch with their hive. They need self assurance and confirmation of their choices, and they do their social planning on the fly. That's impossible from a tethered desktop or even a laptop. I've yet to see more than a scattering of students use a laptop outside, as university promotional photos often show. Instead, they compute as they walk across campus. Give them data glasses that look just like sunglasses, and they'd use them too. Just don't make them stop, even for a nanosecond.

I recently had an epiphany that the wider culture is also getting it when I saw this Scott Adams' cartoon.

My buddies and I are Dilbert. My students, the young fella.

I don't know how Apple's closed system will fare against the Android OS from Google. Poorly, I secretly hope. But as a Microsoft-hater, I am also pleased that Windows will be the biggest loser of all. The company, except for its Kinect, has been no innovator in recent years. Was it ever? Steve Balmer has the cool-factor of Dilbert.

Whatever our desktop OS, I think we old timers with our grandpa boxes will look back at the System Wars of the 1980s and 90s with nostalgia. Like many other hobbies I embrace, from model-building to boardgames about World War II, the rest of society has moved on and I'm in this eddy of forgotten time.

I see a future in which content creators will use powerful computers in some form. The rest of the public--the consumers--will want to be close to the Machine. Machines as easy to use that they are ubiquitous, a part of our bodies.

It's what Sherry Turkle of MIT has called "always on, always on you" technology. Get ready for it.

But I still don't own a cell phone...my "dumb phone," a pay-as-you-go model, expired in April.  It won't be missed.

Digital Story: "Dirty Internet"

Minds out of the gutter, please. Mike's runner-up entry in the competition talks about how dependent we all are upon these "always on, always on you" technologies (the term is Sherry Turkle's).

We use the Net as we do air. And what would happen were the service to be interrupted? That, readers, is perhaps the one aspect of the technology that frightens Mike--and me--more than does our addictive usage.  On to the story!

Mike got no extra credit for pandering to my Clint Eastwood obsessions.

No Exodus to Virtual Worlds for These Millennials

Location: Glued to Keyboard, Working (not Gaming!) on a Fine Spring Day

On reading Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World, once again the types of Millennial I teach are nearly uniform in their disdain for a cultural migration to use avatars in our lives and work. I think my students represent a majority view of career-driven and affluent US college students. I’m told that our campus is not that unique.

Dare I claim a surprising Neo-Luddite response in this rejection of virtual worlds?  Irony of ironies: as a decided Neo-Luddite, I see occasional use of virtual worlds as an environmentally sustainable alternative to academic conferences, expensive brick-and-mortar training, and even some forms of cultural tourism. Our driving is wrecking our planet's ecosystem. The less we do, the better, and I welcome all forms of telepresence as alternatives to "commuting to the office." We're more likely to power our grid with alternative technology, or at least clean the point sources at power plants than we are to tidy up billions of tail-pipes emitting poisons.

But enough of my fears; there are plenty from the students for one post. The finest negative response came from this writer; it is nuanced in a way many others are not and I think it shows what I’ve intuited among the Facebook: Yes, Games: No mainstream of Richmond students.

I don’t ever see myself using a virtual world, but that could just be because of my current situation. In college, I am constantly surrounded by my friends and love talking to them and spending time with them face to face. I don’t picture myself wanting to spend ten hours a day online in a virtual world, instead of laughing out loud and talking to my real life friends. In addition, my opportunity cost of spending more than two hours a day online is too great. I would be failing all my classes because I would be giving up time to study to be in a virtual world. I cannot afford to essentially waste my time not being productive. I also do not like the idea of anonymity online. People can create avatars that don’t look anything like them and pretend to be someone completely different. While people can be misleading on Facebook, I know I only communicate with my friends, people that I know in the real world. Virtual worlds can be very private and people do not meet the people in real life with whom they are making alliances and friends with.

Here are a few other voices from their class blogs, almost all negative:

“I do understand that there are many people today who are already deeply involved in virtual worlds. I am not one of these people. Perhaps, because of this, I am biased against such worlds. I would much rather spend my time talking with my friends or furthering my education (getting my parents' money's worth).”

“In my experience, games (even MMOs) are something that is outgrown.  I know many of my friends (myself included) who played consistently throughout middle and some of high school and then left due to lack of extra time or lack of interest.”

“An overwhelming majority of college-aged kids view virtual worlds as time wasting, unproductive, and nerdy addictions reserved for the socially inept.”

“I’m sorry, but I will never spend hours interacting in cyberspace, nor will I allow my children or my children’s children to join the exodus to the virtual world.”    

“The current generation (The Millennials) is almost entirely preoccupied with social networking. ‘Facebookers’ as we are sometimes called, we would rather use virtual realities to connect with old friends from back home, not to escape the confines of daily life. So instead of being active users, we may participate maybe once or twice a week, giving us no reason to participate in the exodus.”

“What he describes is something so artificial and unnatural. There are many gamers out in cyberspace right now who want to escape their lives and transform into something they are not, however I am not one of them. The main issue is of avoidance and denial. When you assume these fake identities then you are essentially in denial of your own life. I don’t think its healthy not to deal with the issues present and escape to a virtual world.”

One contrarian voice notes “I think that our bias as successful college individuals also blinds us from other populations that use games to escape from their circumstance.”

This is my opinion as well. My students cannot imagine the modern version of Emerson’s “quiet desperation” of many individuals who seek escape, or those who see themselves empowered to do things not possible in real life. Those may be artists working in a new medium, explorers of simulations not possible here (to one blogger, I cited Ancient Egypt or the interior of the human heart as examples).

Another student was kinder to Castronova’s ideas:

We all want to be challenged and overcome obstacles in order to feel good about ourselves. Additionally, we want to have fun, to simply enjoy our existence and be happy. As Castronova puts it “helping people find happiness may involve something other than giving them the things they currently seek” (88). This is what these online games promise.

One student who feels good about virtual worlds stands apart from the rest and says a great deal about what they don’t see:

I could jump into a virtual world right now.

No, really. All I'd need is a secure income. I could be there 24/7, easy.

As I looked around the classroom when this question was asked, I had the feeling I was the only one who felt this way. Some of you are probably shaking you're heads right now, thinking "You're crazy," but I'll tell you why I can do it.

For one, I'm used to it. Sitting in front of a screen for hours is easy to me. When I'm not at class or with my friends, I'm plopped in front of the screen. Furthermore, I'm used to synthetic worlds. Being in a fake world with filled with real people who don't look like themselves is normal to me. I don't find it weird.

Secondly, just about everyone is already engaged in a digital world, whether they realize it or not. We've really already migrated over in Facebook. My best friend once told me, "The more friends you have on Facebook, the fewer you have in real life." And as someone who has over 400 Facebook friends, but less than 10 real friends she can actually trust, she would know. She's in her own world where she has lots of friends that are easily accessible no matter where they live, where she thinks other people care about what her status is, where all her photos are of her looking perfect, and where she only has to care about what she wants to.

Here’s how I answered a different student, and my response could have been to them all:

Your comments echo many in the class. I understand your disdain, but the number of generalizations is enormous here. I applaud you for admitting your bias.

Before we judge these individuals, we might try better to understand them. As noted in class, Richmond students are, in many cases, from sheltered and loving families who provide support and care.

It is very different beyond the campus gates, even for many in your age-group; in fifteen years, as a virtual worlds researcher, I will be most curious to see how the Millennial generation regards escapist entertainment online.

I disagree with Castronova's thesis; I think virtual-world use will increase among all age groups, but there will be no exodus. Usage will be as a casual and occasional escape or for limited professional purposes such as simulations for technical or military training and meetings.

Reality will instead become more and more difficult, under the strains of environmental damage, political gridlock, resource scarcity, and economic stress, and we'll learn to take better care of the real again as we strive to fix the things generations before yours broke.

My biggest hope for you Millennials is that the researchers who wrote Millennials Rising are correct: yours is the next "Great Generation" able to collaborate, remain cheerful, and solve problems without the slack and cynicism of my Gen-X peers or the narcissism and greed of the Baby Boomers.

Maybe if your peers stay in Reality instead of making the exodus, you can accomplish great things. Maybe you'll even use Facebook to organize your efforts!

Do My Students Need a 3D Web?

 
Location: Certainty

image credit: Raph Koster, of Ultima Online, Metaplace, and more, via Cory Doctorow's Flickr Photstream

"No," seems to be the uniform answer. The reasons say a great deal about the directions in which virtual worlds may not evolve. I put the question of "why haven't we gotten something like Gibson's immersive Matrix?" to my first-year seminar class.

I'll paraphrase the answers the came back:

• Immersive engagement is best saved for when it is worth the extra work / software / time
• Students prefer easy applications done "on the fly." In other words, they don't need an avatar to check the weather or send a short text to a friend or a relative
• The less hardware needed, the better. Any rig like Case's would be tedious to use and hard to carry. An iPhone or similar fits into a pocket.

Would my students use a 3D experience? The answers here are complex. Yes, this group argued, for immersive gaming.  I don't know that current levels of virtual-world technology, with so much user-generated content, will ever enable that level of immersion. At best, they might make work for a class more fun.

We should look to other types of game-environments if we want something akin to Simstim or Case's rig. As I'll report soon, two technologists from a major defense contractor who spoke to VWER recently argued exactly that.

Will those emergent forms of 3D engagement replace our 2D Web? If my students are correct, no. It would, however, open worlds for gaming and for meetings, an ironic realization of Castronova's thesis that work and play will merge in the decades ahead. 

A Visceral & Negative Reaction to Virtual Worlds

Location: Pondering

Reading Hamlet Au's interview with Rod Humble, Linden Lab's new CEO, coincided with an event in class that merits some prognostication.

I've long called for a new name for the product, but I fear that Linden Lab and other VW makers face more of a challenge than that.

Mr. Humble will need to figure out a way to earn the trust of more Millennials, if that's a demographic LL wants. I encountered a visceral, rather angry reaction from a small group of 18-22 year olds today after one student simply asked "what is this Second Life thing you research?"

A short, non-evangelical reply of mine followed, explaining what I've done in SL and now am doing in OpenSim. I noted how embodiment leads to more participation at meetings than does a teleconference, and I explained how a literary simulation in a virtual world expands the notion of reading to a different sort of participation.

A heated but interesting discussion followed, mostly about how the avatar masked a person behind it and could lead to increased mistrust. Something about having an avatar mask and another name pushes so many buttons in my "typical" group of bright, careerist students (one exception, a blogger/gamer in the class).

Paraphrased reactions:

• Our generation wants transparency
• How do you know the person behind the avatar is who they say they are?
• This will *never* fly in a business setting, especially if someone comes to a meeting wearing a set of wings or a raccoon head
• Even a setting like Protosphere, with business-only avatars (I got a quick screenshot) is not serious enough and could lead to mistrust.

Etc. etc.  I could argue that they'd change their minds after a few weeks using a virtual world, but the class is not even remotely related to the topic.

I get this negative reaction in every class that hears about virtual worlds. I hear similar stories from colleagues at different sorts of schools.

Maybe we educators are wrong about these spaces. They'll have to be photo-realistic and connected to real-life identity, even more surely than a Facebook profile, for them to reach widespread adoption. For Gen-Xers, however, that sounds too boring to contemplate. We were used to identity being in flux.

It might help if young people learned to relax and have fun again. And that is not only the voice of a grumpy geezer, but a voice that inverts the usual "you young folks need to work harder!"

Yet I've never seen a more serious generation of students, in 25 years of teaching, than these. And they are sheltered. That worries me, because even with complete transparency and apparent knowledge of others, you can be cheated and abused.

Sad to say, but they'll just have to discover that without a virtual world.

Update 2/10/11: Students e-mailing to say how much they enjoyed the debate: good sign of more to come.  Also fixed spelling of "Visceral."  I had "Viscereal": strong cereal, indeed, these debates.