I’ve never yet had that conversation with Tony O’Driscoll about virtual worlds, though I caught up again with my colleague Claudia L’Amoreaux (Second Life), and I’m hoping to have that conversation with her. Tony just pinged several of us bloggers to mention his forthcoming workshop on virtual worlds (I’d never have thought to ask, myself), and I was going to chide him for never having that call with me (this serves, eh?), but I did find his 10 minute video on learning in virtual worlds with his list of seven sensibilities:

1. The Sense of Self
2. The Death of Distance
3. The Power of Presence
4. The Sense of Space
5. The Capability to Co-Create
6. The Pervasiveness of Practice
7. The Enrichment of Experience

That’s the list I’d been hoping for, talking about the unique affordances of virtual worlds. Though, of course, now that I see it, I have to quibble.

You may recall that I’d previously suggested that the unique affordance was the collaborative co-creation, his number 5. When you need to collaboratively create in 3D, it’s a great potential. If only in 2D, it might be better with a collaborative drawing tool with VoIP. Not that I know any, off hand. Still, the overhead is daunting.

Let’s go through the rest of the list, however. First, I’ve already blogged about self. There may be something there, but I’d argue that’s only true for the long term, not short-term learning situations.

The 2nd one, distance, isn’t unique to virtual worlds, but is true for many forms of distance learning.

The 3rd one, presence, I’m not sure I really get. Sure, you’re co-located, but how is that uniquely different than with a webinar? Unless it’s the virtual world, but that seems to be what the next one is about…

4 is about space, about having a 3D world. Which is cool, but what’s unique about it? It’s only valuable, I’d suggest, if your learning objectives involve 3D (which can be true, and then virtual worlds are very powerful, as had been demonstrated).

6 talks about practice, and Tony cites the fact that folks are regularly asking each other “how do you do x?” However, I wonder if that isn’t an artifact of the difficulty of figuring out how to do 3D building (which is mostly what you do, at least in Second Life). You do have to be a learner, but much of it is how to use the world, rather than specific learning objectives! Granted, it’s immersive practice, but you can get that from (serious) games.

7 talks about the enrichment of experience, but it seems to tap into two of the previous points, the self and the 3D. The example is people being able to dance together from a distance, but I don’t see this as a unique element.

So, the 3 main things I see are 3D, self, and co-creation. Which can be quite powerful, but not generically, again it’s instead for objectives that have spatial components. At a cost of substantial overhead in getting setup and capable.

I can’t be at the workshop since I’m not attending Training 2008, so what have I missed, Tony?

On this contrarian theme I seem to be on, I‘ve been a nay-sayer on the virtual worlds phenomenon (and Tony O‘Driscoll hasn‘t returned my plea to give me his perspective, so while I respect his opinion and know he‘s into them, I don‘t have his take). I previously talked about the fundamental learning affordances I saw, including co-creation of representations and dynamic behavior. And I was afraid that the overhead in achieving the ability to do so was significant unless you could amortize the investment over a long period of time.

What I haven‘t taken into account, due to my own ‘learning alone‘ style, is the potential social elements. What I‘ve heard is that when players can customize their character to represent themselves, accurately or not, they invest themselves more in the interaction. This social element, then, adds a layer to the situation that I hadn‘t accounted for. Whether it‘s Second Life, or any of the other environments, isn‘t the issue.

So I‘m willing to be wrong on these worlds, but I still harbor a suspicion that once the novelty wears off, we‘ll cut to the fundamental learning affordances and find that we still need to bring down the barriers to co-creation of representations . Your thoughts?

A number of years ago I was involved in James Burke’s great Knowledge Web project. In organizing it, we were using Active Worlds, a 3D virtual environment. We’d stand around in this gorgeous room, each with our avatars, and text message each other. It quickly became apparent that the virtual world added nothing.

The new virtual world buzz is around Linden Labs Second Life. I had a look, but wasn’t overwhelmed. Now several colleagues are involved in it in significant ways. Both have experience in (and passion for) learning through technology, and I may have to rethink my take on virtual worlds.

It helps to know that, based upon Marcia Conner’s book Learn More Now, I’m a solitary or, at most, small-group learner. So, as I’ve maintained in the design of games, when your learning objective is interpersonal is when it makes sense to use a social game and a social world.

Through my teaching, particularly the learning theory course I’ve taught this summer, I recognize the constructivist value of having learners negotiate a shared understanding. That hasn’t benefited from a virtual world (except for a novelty factor, a Hawthorne effect, which I suggest will wear off and a new gimmick will be needed). Up ’til now, a discussion board or chat room had all the necessary affordances.

However. A colleague just passed me a link to this video (you’ll most likely have to scroll down) about the New Media Consortium’s space in Second Life. And in it, I saw something I hadn’t really thought about. Most of it was the standard “places to meet”, events, and some nooks and crannies to explore, but…
…that’s not what interested me. What’s interesting is that it is easy (apparently, I didn’t master it in my exploration) to create new things. So you can make models or representations and share them. THIS is a major benefit. Now we can share 3D representations and discuss them.

I’ve suggested in the past that the operating system metaphor I really want is ‘magic’, where I can make things happen with spells (scripts) or buy tools if I have money rather than time. Not to go into that here, but at least in a virtual world we can now make that true. Which also makes true that we can reach a new level of collaboration. And that is interesting!