Blogging the SLCC: A Futurist's View of Second Life Education

“Today I’m going to tell you the future and show you how to tell the future,” said Sarah Robbins. Her methods have more to do with taxonomies than tea leaves, but in a very impassioned presentation, she outlined a method of thinking about changes in virtual worlds and their implications for education. “We’ve been in reaction mode,” she said. "And that’s natural. But we should be in a different mode, tea leaf reading mode. We are the ones who make the future of how this mode of education works.”

A Futurist’s View of Second Life Education

Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins

I’m making no small promise of this presentation. I’m a researcher and academic. I’m also in marketing. Today I’m going to tell you the future and show you how to tell the future.

We are a room of ass-kicking educators. This is a big deal to me. I’m in English, a rheotorician. We’re not a real exciting bunch. In general academia is very private. You don’t share with your students or other educators. Administrators are your arch-nemesis.

Second Life has changed that. This is the proof. We’re all here working together. This is huge. And it’s more than Second Life. We study student-centered pedagogy. And that’s not small. WE emphasize collaboration over competition in our classrooms. And that’s not small either. We’re international, which is something we take for granted. When You’re from Muncie, Indiana, where the biggest conversation is do you raise cows or pigs, the international presence is huge. We’re innovators. And we’re interdisciplinary. Education isn’t happening in silos anymore. My job is to get everybody on campus excited, to get the stodgy professors and the techie professors together. It’s the first time these different departments have had to work together and share something like an island.

In the last couple of years, we’ve tried to read the signs and feel out where SL is going. We’ve dealt with changes. We’ve been in reaction mode. And that’s natural. But we should be in a different mode, tea leaf reading mode. We are the ones who make the future of how this mode of education works. But there’s a lot of us who are innovators. And it’s not just SL, it’s collaborative learning, interdisciplinary learning, student-centered learning. That’s why we’re all here.

People think, “I want to take my students to a world where someone can show up naked and then we’re going to buy an island.” We take that risk.

I’ve been in SL for 18 months. That’s like dog years, but there are people who have been there longer and some that are just getting in and doing things I’ve never seen. We can make this something that’s niche and weird, or we can make it a point where 20 years from now, people look back and say “That’s where it all changed.”

My goal is to make that change. I always look at the mechanics of communication and education. That’s where education comes form. What I’ve done is a crazy taxonomy of the 10 characteristics of virtual environments that I think are most important.

•    # of Users
o    Single
o    Multi
•    Dominant form
o    Text
o    Image
•    Non network or local
•    Persitant or non-persistant
•    Stigmergy, you can affect a change in the environment that someone else can see
•    Public or private ownership of objects
•    Identity
o    Static
o    Custom (SL)
o    Conditional (earned in WoW0
•    Public or private access
•    Relationship with users
o    Collaborative
o    Antagonistic (pvp)
•    Relationship with environment

Everytime someone joins, they ask how do we keep people off our island. It’s a natural reaction, so we talk about access.
    [graph where x axis is limited access  to free access and y is limited relationships to freer relationships.)
    If we go to limited access with a closed server, we have a tight common bond and a small community. ON the other side with free relationships and access, you have larger communities with looser social bonds. You have people in your friends list that you don’t really now.

If we have free access and free relationships, that’s SL now. If we have free access and limited relationships, that’s LinkedIN. If we have limited access and open relationships, maybe it’s because SL is more expensive.

If you have a persistent world without stigmergy, that’s WoW. It’s there, but you can’t do anything to it. If you have both, that’s SL. If it’s stigmurgic without persistence, it’s like Bingo. You can stamp your card, but the game has  to end. Without either, it’s like a chat room.

If we had to start paying for prims again, that moves toward less stigmergy. You end up with a world more like WoW, less creative, less collaborative.

If the dominant form is image based in a collaborative environment, we can build together. If it’s image-based and antagonistic, it’s like most video games. If it’s collbaroative and text based, it’s a Wiki. If it’s text-based and antagonistic. It’s Word.

The more we move toward image and voice, text kind of goes away. We’ll probably see an increase in collaboration, which is what most people like about it. If you’re on an island with no voice, you’re in an immersive Wiki. I often make the argument that when SL was primarily text, it was just a big immersive Wiki anyways.

We have control over how this evolves. We have control over whether we use voice or not. Because the Lindens are so reactive, we have the choice of what tools we want and how we want the environment to grow, whether we want private islands or whether we want to link our islands together to create an education continent. Whether we want an under-13 grid.

There are implications for each one of those education taxonomies and how the environment will grow. There is no better or worse necessarily. It depends on where you want the environment to go. Like if we could have more groups. Right now I have to leave a group to join a group. I have to make hard decisions all the time.

We are here, so we see the future. We teach people. We know what’s best because we’re the ones down in trenches teaching students, so we should be taking charge of this growth. So we make it. We’re the builders, the coders, the developers. We need to stop reacting to the way things happen, and start making things happen.

This for me, putting these ideas on charts, helps me see what-if, what-if, what-if. That’s how I see the future. I hope you’ll do the same.

Q&A:

Q: Brautigan: One interesting thing I noticed when you were commenting on the persistence of things, that reduces with voice.
A: Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about with the implications for education. Instead of just reacting to voice, Whooo, voice!, we need to think about the implications. Voice is great for voice, but if you’re creating notes for students to go back and look at it, text might be best. And it’s not necessary to always use the newest technology.

Q: What are your opinions on what’s so far been done in k-12 education? Most of what I’ve seen has been focused on universities.
A: IF you need an example, just look at GlobalKids. They’re overcoming the digital divide. They’re not only teaching technical skills to kids who will need them for the rest of their lives, they’re talking about important issues. We’ve got to stop coddling kids and telling them what we think is important to know.

Comments

[Nobody Fugazi]

Excellent point on voice.

Bad answer about Global Kids; the digital divide is too ambiguous a phrase to toss out like that. 17.8% of the globe is connected to the internet - 82.2% are not. That would be a digital divide. Teaching skills is an education issue in this context.