Second Life

[Joel Bloch]

One of Stephen Downes' principals of good software design is that good applications are simple. Blogging and twittering are popular, at least in part, because they are simple. There seemed to be some debate in the Eluminate discussion on whether Second Life is simple. I, of course, wouldn't know since I don't have a fast enough video card to use it, but from what I've seen is that Second Life has a high learning curve and that may be its greatest limitation.
Many applications have died or didn't evolve because they were too complex for many people to master it. If you think of Second Life as a form of literacy, it needs to be mastered by many people before it will become effective. Just like writing novels was. One of my favorites was interactive fiction, a form of hypertext that many people discussed but few practiced. Every discussion seemed to be about the same 2-3 authors. If you didn't like these authors, there was not much else to read. Today, I rarely hear about interactive fiction.
One of the principals about connectivism is that the larger the network the more powerful it is.Having a few people, even very creative one, using the technology won't push it forward.
I don't know enough about the architecture of Second Life to know whether the difficulties are built in the way it is designed, but until lots of people are teaching in Second Life, writing about their experiences, and developing new ways of using it, Second Life will not develop much as a learning environment.

[Vance Stevens]

Hi Joel, thanks for joining us in these sessions and sorry no one has responded yet to your provocative post.

I think personally that Second Life has reached that critical mass where it has shown itself as an excellent pertri dish for immersive language learning.

I've tried to document some of these developments here: http://sl2ndchance.pbwiki.com/

PBwiki are making it hard at the moment to reach that site. First, there is something benign on the page that wants to run scripts (lots of embedded media, don't know which one is causing the problem) so you may have to allow scripts to run in order to see the page. And secondly, PB Wiki is upgrading all wikis to PB Wiki 2.0 and for some reason want wiki owners to intervene in the process. I haven't had time for this game, and I noticed just now you have to click through a silly notice now (since like yesterday) to gain access to the wiki.

It's probably hard to see the point in SL if you haven't been able to go there. I sometimes wonder myself having been there MANY times. The environment needs to become easier to navigate and build in. But that's sure to happen, so this seems likely:

There will be something LIKE Second Life, a MUVE of some kind, that will have captured the attention of second language learners and practitioners ten years from now, because there is so much potential here for creating environments rich in language input which could speed acquisition, in large part because there are real people there, interacting with one another. These two things, the immersive environments and real interaction, don't happen in any other virtual world to the degree possible with SL.

Vance

[Joel Bloch]

Vance Stevens said:

Hi Joel, thanks for joining us in these sessions and sorry no one has responded yet to your provocative post.

I think personally that Second Life has reached that critical mass where it has shown itself as an excellent pertri dish for immersive language learning.

I've tried to document some of these developments here: http://sl2ndchance.pbwiki.com/

PBwiki are making it hard at the moment to reach that site. First, there is something benign on the page that wants to run scripts (lots of embedded media, don't know which one is causing the problem) so you may have to allow scripts to run in order to see the page. And secondly, PB Wiki is upgrading all wikis to PB Wiki 2.0 and for some reason want wiki owners to intervene in the process. I haven't had time for this game, and I noticed just now you have to click through a silly notice now (since like yesterday) to gain access to the wiki.

It's probably hard to see the point in SL if you haven't been able to go there. I sometimes wonder myself having been there MANY times. The environment needs to become easier to navigate and build in. But that's sure to happen, so this seems likely:

There will be something LIKE Second Life, a MUVE of some kind, that will have captured the attention of second language learners and practitioners ten years from now, because there is so much potential here for creating environments rich in language input which could speed acquisition, in large part because there are real people there, interacting with one another. These two things, the immersive environments and real interaction, don't happen in any other virtual world to the degree possible with SL.

Vance

[Joel Bloch]

Thanks for responding. I enjoyed the course very much and I look forward to the unconference. I was interested in MOOs a number of years ago and there was the same problem.Building a MOO was potentially interesting but there weren't enough interest to develop the MOOs as a learning sight. I was at a presentation by Chris Hill here in Columbus that you were remotely present at. It certainly looked interesting for certain kinds of learning but its usage needs to spread beyond people who are technologically savvy and patient enough to work with it. I don't know enough about the architecture of SL to know how well you can build upon the work of others to make it easier for newcomers to create spaces. In 10 years,there will be something we can't even image.