Is Second Life 100% experimental?

If you were running a business and your clientele rose from 3 million to 11 million in just one year, then people would be buzzing about you too. That’s what has occurred on Second Life (SL) in the 2007 calendar year.

Maybe there’s been some buzz about Second Life (SL) in distance education circles for awhile now but the massive increase in users is fueling some new excitement.

If anyone is clueless about SL, a quick read of the wikipedia article on the subject would be useful before continuing on with this blog post.

I have been a casual SL user for the last couple of years. Recently a colleague of mine (Thanks Louise!) has had her first experience with SL and in discussions she brought to the forefront some of the most common concerns that distance educators might share about SL:

1. SL is very heavy on the ‘social scene.’ It appears that a great many people in SL are here to meet other people with intentions or striking up more than just a casual friendship. This type of environment could be a distraction to educational pursuits.

2. SL has a very steep learning curve. New users start off at Orientation Island. It can take almost 20 hours to complete the island tasks in order to be reasonably proficient with the SL interface. Being a long time gamer, when I joined SL, I skipped the entire Orientation Island experience and chose to figure out the interface by trial and error. However, I fully understand that non-gamer type people would probably find it very frustrating to proceed in this manner. Orientation Island therefore is a must! However, what distance course can afford to have 20 hours allocated to it on the front end for students to learn a software tool? OUCH!

If I were teaching a graduate-level distance course that required synchronous student-to-student interaction and was on the topic of technology in education, then I would be tempted to run it on SL. The up-front investment of the steep learning curve might be worth it in this special case (i.e. a requirement for synchronous interaction on the topic of education technology). I can see that a dozen students having voice discussions in an immersive world using their custom built avatars could really be fun and could really stimulate some interest in synchronous simulation technologies. However, if I were teaching a graduate-level chemistry course that required synchronous student-to-student interaction, I would not invest the time required for every student to climb the steep SL learning curve. I would choose something like Elluminate Live for my synchronous activities. Elluminate's learning curve is a much more gentle slope. (Not to mention the fact that the potentially distracting 'social scene' is avoided.)

Despite this conclusion, I can’t help but feel that SL has enormous potential to develop into something more useful for education purposes as time progresses. I'm just not sure how much 'time' will be required. Two more years? Ten more years? Who knows. For now, I view it as 100% experimental - it is simply an intriguing social simulation environment.

Are you in SL? What do you think about reality, or the potential, of SL from a distance education perspective? Please leave a comment below.

Also, if you want to look me up in SL, my avatar’s name is EricT Nastula. See you there!

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The Facebook Addiction

Have you tried Facebook yet?

I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of months now and it is time for me to write something about it in this blog. After thinking about the Facebook phenomenon for quite some time I have to admit that the allure of Facebook for me is that I can be a voyeur and an exhibitionist at the same time. (Get your mind out of the gutter here… while I explain.)

When you’re on Facebook you ‘collect’ friends. At last count I had 88 people on my friend’s list. Honestly, many of them are not ‘friends’ per se but more so acquaintances. However, Facebook doesn’t have any tools that discern the level of friendship you have with someone on your list, so ‘friends’ is what everyone is called. Now these 88 people have Facebook accounts and almost anything they ‘do’ on Facebook gets streamed into a news feed that I can monitor. So every time one of my friend’s joins a group, posts a photo, comments of someone’s wall, post’s a note, charges their status, etc., I can be notified. Now do you see what I mean by being a ‘voyeur’? I can ‘watch’ what all these people are doing on Facebook. So with little effort using Facebook, I can take notice of the fact that my friend Leo was dejected that the Toronto Maple Leafs missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs without even talking to him in real life (*grin*).

So that’s the ‘voyeur’ part of the equation… what about the ‘exhibitionist’ part. That comes into play because I understand that this information sharing on Facebook is a two-way street. I know that if I put a picture of myself on Facebook that all my friends will have access to it. For example, they’ll know I went to that party last weekend if I put the pictures on Facebook. So it’s a way for me to broadcast news to my friends (and acquaintances) in a global shotgun-like fashion.

So you might ask ‘are these the only ‘pay-offs’ when using Facebook?’ No. Here’s a list of ‘payoffs’ that I feel are addicting people to Facebook.

1. You can find long-lost friends. For example, I found a cousin of mine who I had lost touch with. Now I can ‘watch’ his Facebook-life and interact with him on there easily, despite being hundreads of kilometers apart. Big Pay-off.


2. You can feel popular. For example, I’m in a race. I’m in a race with my wife to see who can find the most friends on Facebook. Every time someone asks to be your friend on Facebook or every time you ask for someone’s permission to add them to your friend-list and they say ‘yes’, you get a pay-off. This tangible endorphin-loaded shot of ‘I’m popular’ courses through your veins. Pay-off.


3. You can feel loved. For example, you can feel the love come right through the computer screen when a friend of yours posts a photo on their Facebook that includes you in the picture and then tags it with your name. Your smiling face is now found on someone else’s Facebook photo album and there’s often a nice caption to the photo saying how great/fun/happy your are, or at least were, when the photo was taken. Another example happen to me when I was sick with a cold the other week. I updated my status to explain my illness and a friend of mine spent an actual real-life non-virtual American dollar to send me a virtual Kleenex Box Gift on Facebook. She sent me a virtual gift on Facebook to cheer me up. I felt the love. Pay-off.


4. You can use Facebook as a type of event-invitation software. You can create a real-life event such as ‘party at my place’ and then invite a sub-set of your Facebook pals to it. They get an event notice and they can RSVP directly on the personalized Facebook event page. Much easier (and more fun) than a long series of emails and/or phone calls. Pay-off.


5. You can pipe your blog’s RRS feed directly into Facebook. So if you are already a blogger, you can integrate your efforts with Facebook. Now all your Facebook pals will be advised when you publish new blog postings. Pay-off. (Now if Facebook could do the same integration with Flickr then that would be a big Pay-off to the photographers of the world.)


6. You can join groups of like-minded people. There are many social groups on Facebook. For example, the local watering hole that I frequent has a group. So not only can I interact with the regulars in person at the bar, but I can also embarrass them virtually by putting funny pictures of them online on Facebook. Pay-off!

So there’s a few pay-offs that I can think of. One point I haven’t touched upon that is certainly giving Facebook momentum is that you can do all of the above with great ease. Facebook is dirt easy to use. The interfaces are intuitive, the system is very reliable technically and the functions do what you think they do. So kudos to the Facebook team…. this social software is definitely giving MySpace a run for its money.

Do you use Facebook? Can you think of a Pay-off I haven’t listed above? Do you have an ideal for using Facebook in an educational setting? The readers of this blog would love to hear any comments you might have about these issues. Click ‘comment’ below. Oh and I almost forgot… do you consider me a ‘friend’ or ‘acquaintance’, if you do please add me to your Facebook friend list. I want to win this race I have with my wife HAHA!

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