Is Second Life a Learning Environment?

I think Clark Aldrich's point is that Second Life is not a good institutional learning environment (government/private school, corporate) … because of the variables the educator cannot control:

1) Attention interruption

2) Testing that cannot be gamed

3) Advanced/secure programming & data storage

4) Portability

5) Intellectual Property and Copyright theft

etc.

I believe an open source, 3D, peer to peer, programming with IDE and full class library, “packaged as a platform” solution would address most of Clark’s concerns. The best contender, that I know of, and that I know is in experimental use by the military and higher education, is Croquet sponsored by the Croquet Consortium.

http://www.croquetconsortium.org

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project

Why Interactive 3D?

I believe that the strength to be found in 3D environments has already be researched and summarized by Janet Murray in “Hamlet on the Holodeck – the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace”. In that book, she traces how, for each new medium, technology changes the communication medium content, authoring, and the communication medium’s structure, information, size, duration. The techniques to influence the mind are, in turn, formed by the limitations of the physics of the medium. From oral tradition to song/poetry/verse, to parchments as memory aids, to the codex, to the novel, to radio, to movies, to TV, to computational 3D, each style, genera, and techniques are formed by the physical limitations of the medium. The “novel” explores personalities and their relationships. The “movie” explains by action (you don’t want someone just explaining by talking in a movie but showing you). The radio draws on environmental sounds, metaphors, and visual vocabulary to sway the imagination.

Murray says that interactive 3D teaches by explaining the “process” of the dynamics of an environment that changes over time. It’s hard to explain in just words, pictures, or movies how the intricacies of the interdependent actions and reactions work in complicated systems described by “systems theory”. These systems can be found in social interdependent dynamics as well as the ecologies of the physical world and as also in the interdependent dynamics of past discoveries and the changes in the world of knowledge within every discipline. It’s hard to rewind a movie and run it a gain with a few different choices made in the beginning.

Note that each medium doesn’t exclude the prior art but usually incorporates it. One should also expect 3D to allow one to use text or 2D as easily as 3D or the efforts will seem feeble. Murray shows that each new medium in its genesis was a poorer copy of the prior art and took about 20 years of experimentation to get its own feet and techniques. (Novels can pan and zoom but movies can do it faster.)

I suppose the holodeck in Star Trek could have been just 2D. Somehow I think that would have made a very different story and very different lessons for the characters. Going the other way, why couldn’t the bridge and its controls for controlling the whole ship have just been a holodeck? Have “who you need”, “what they say”, and your own “controls” everywhere you go. No more “can’t get to the bridge” by broken lifts. The 2D controls they used were just as “virtual” and subject to the same “bugs” (so the story goes).

Someday we will control whole companies by manipulating them within visual representations of them. ERP and accounting systems are just text & 2D representations of models of the company. But you must admit that they are rigid, easily outdated, and very poor shadows to try to represent the moment by moment dynamics of a modern company and their dynamic working environments… competitive, legal, global, social, labor, etc.

Today, “processes” change so fast and new process constantly created by large social groups, that text and 2D just can’t keep a person informed fast enough. That’s the motive behind the BIM (Building Intelligence Modeling) process. Blueprints just aren’t fast enough anymore to keep all parties informed of all the latest changes by all parties in the time it takes to build a skyscraper or any other large building project.

3D lets you create on model and the story/presentation/teaching-material changes (including its scope and focus) by simply adjusting the camera’s point of view. This is similar to how movies/TV change the story by changing the camera’s point of view, but with the participant in control of the camera and hence the in control of the story.

For example, if the environmentalist groups actually simulated the process of destruction, economic impact, all environments affected, alternatives, groups, individuals, and personalities involved and their unique interests, you might be more informed than by any other medium. We’re talking about such things as the “serious games” studied at the “Serious Games Summit”.

3D’s best use will be by simulations to, first, document processes, then become “practice-ware” to gain skills in the environments, and finally as “predictive-ware” when predictive mathematical models take on visual form, substance, and a life of their own that can more meaningfully interact with our own lives. Controlling and defining “processes” in complex, ever shifting, win-lose, interdependent environments and their related economies while absorbing and evaluating massive amounts of feedback, is what many of today’s youth are learning in MMORPGs.