Today I briefly attended a follow up to the Eduserv Symposium, Virtual Worlds, Real Learning, Revisited which was an entirely ‘virtual’ event conducted in Second Life (SL). My attendance was cut short by an incident involving a laptop and a three-year old upon which I won’t elaborate…. I did manage to rejoin the event towards the end.
The event today was, essentially, a seminar, with a 5 or 6 ‘panelists’ and a varying number of audience members (maybe peaked at around 25 – difficult for me to say). Before the event Eduserv had given out full instructions about a ‘queueing’ system, designed to prevent everyone talking at once. When I joined the seminar, around 15 minutes late, this had been abandoned and a free-flowing chat was in progress. At times the chat system hit the same problem all such applications seem to do, which is that there were several threads or conversations mixed in together and it became difficult to follow.
At one point, one of the audience asked a question which made me sit up and take notice. The questioner wanted to know if people were looking at the avatars and virtual world surrounding them or if they were just reading the chat ‘history’. By this point I had enlarged the chat history window to the point where it obscured the rest of the virtual world entirely. This was the moment I wished I was using a better chat system – something more like Skype for example. To be fair to SL, it did attempt to cope with considerably more than Skype’s maximum of 10 participants in one chat session. Having said that, I found that the chat tool in SL is woefully slow if you’re in the middle of a flowing discussion – on my pretty powerful MacBook I found myself watching my keystrokes crawling across the input box. And my enlarged chat window was semi-transparent so that I could still see avatars doing that comical ‘typing in air’ thing which indicates they are ‘chatting’ (I imagine I can change this behaviour, but in the heat of the moment I didn’t want to go hunting for the switch).
I’m still very skeptical about the value of SL in education or e-Learning. Nothing in the discussion has made me feel differently and today’s experience, my first ’seminar’ in SL, just made me think back to the days when the early promise of ‘virtual learning environments’ began to pall and we realised that the integrated VLE was not generally better than the sum of its second-rate component tools, and that we might be better off just selecting better tools.
If I hadn’t run into an unfortunate child/laptop proximity event, I would have asked what the panel thought of the significance or otherwise of SL for distance learning. As I blogged before, the guys at Eduserv have already proved to me that SL can definitely play a part in delivering conferences – allowing a worthwhile degree of participation for remote delegates. I think SL has some real potential as a virtual meeting space – perhaps when the text chat gives way to voice (in development in SL) then we’ll start to see something really interesting.
Technorati Tags: chat, distance learning, Eduserv, efsym2007, learning, Second Life, Skype, Virtual worlds, VLE
I hope your memory for avatar names is lousy. I was the person who asked the question you refer to.
The 3D-ness of it all was largely academic, except I guess you knew if the speaker was a panellist or in the audience.
The main use I derived from seeing people is that I could see them typing and click to pop up their profiles.
The value of the event (and it improved a lot when the brakes came off) was the meeting of people who perhaps could not have reached out to each other in real life. I think I’ll blog about the experience later in the week.
It was a fine effort but, as you say, so s-l-o-w. And speech wouldn’t have helped. Apart from anything else it would have revealed me to be quite unlike my avatar.
No names – no pack drill
I find the etiquette of avatar/real names confusing – I noticed that one of the panelists referred to another panelist by their real-life name rather than their avatar’s name – I’m sure this must be an SL faux pas
I appreciate the effort that Eduserv are investing in this – and I’m still slightly awestruck by how well the Symposium went in terms of its use of SL as an extension to the conference.
By ‘meeting of people who perhaps could not have reached out to each other in real life’ are you referring to an empowerment of anonymity, or at least of alter-ego?
Nothing so smart I’m afraid. I was just thinking that I, who am reasonably well connected, was in a meeting with geographically dispersed people, including someone from the British Embassy, someone from IBM, people from Nature and, of course, a host of academics and the Eduserv hosts. And others, of course but I didn’t read every profile.
To replicate that in real life would have taken organisation, travel and expense. Plus the courage to participate, etc.
The anonymity bothers me a bit. I think Art Fosset knows who I am. (And I know who he is.) I actually blogged about it I think…
http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/2007/01/when_second_lif.html
I find the anonymity aspect off-putting. For some years I maintained several personae online in different contexts. This was largely an issue of self-confidence. Now I use my real name wherever I’m able to. It keeps me honest!
I even know who Arte Fosset’s real life person’s other, secret avatar is….
In brief: I’m a journalist and I found people much more amenable to approaches from a young woman than from a bearded old male. I always come clean if asked or if things look as if they’re going to get weird.