Week 4 - Blog Posting #7 -Second Life

I want to start this blog posting by stating something outright: I am a digital native, a technology nerd, and a gamer. I have been these things for the vast majority of my life. Should a technology be useful and well-designed I am often one of the first people to embrace and champion it. I do not have a fear of technology, nor do I have a fear of gaming and virtual worlds.

With this said, I hope that the following criticisms will not be brushed off as judgments from someone who is not open or comfortable with technology, as I have heard them brushed off in the past.

In short, it is my belief that Second Life is not, in its current state, a strong tool for education. The idea behind Second Life, that of an open world in which users can create the content they need for the purposes they have, is a legitimate one. However, Second Life itself is not technologically at a stage in which it is capable of doing the tasks we as educators need it to do at the quality level we need. It lags behind other applications in functionality and in the end often distracts, instead of enhances, content.

What is key in selecting any delivery method for information is choosing a medium that does not detract from the information. In my experiences with Second Life, the medium (Second Life itself) has always gotten in the way of what I was trying to do in this program.

To start with, Second Life has a steep learning curve that one must overcome in order to use it at all. Avatar creation and customization is unnecessarily complicated and could stand to learn from more intuitive systems such as the character creation in the game Rock Band, or the digital avatar creators for use with the Wii or Xbox 360 gaming systems. Learning to move around in Second Life and interact with places is counterintuitive and, to put it bluntly, difficult for no good reason. I cannot imagine it would require many resources to make a better account/character navigation system, and yet Second Life continues to use an outdated and clunky one.

The program itself just does not run well. Lags and glitchs have been commonplace every time I have used Second Life. Insufficient care and/or time has led to Second Life to exist as program that we just accept runs poorly on even the most advanced computer systems with the fastest internet connections. As educators, we must acknowledge that asking our students to fight to use a buggy program is going to cause many of our students to disengage from the content we are trying to teach. For a student already disinclined to do homework, being asked to use a program that doesn't function properly is only going to make them even more inclined to give up on their work.

In addition to a tendency to be buggy, Second Life simply is not visually detailed enough to do and show what Second Life supporters have pushed that we can do/show with it. In an earlier assignment with Full Sail, I was asked to work in a group to make a short video on visual art and Second Life (the video can be watched here). I explored a number of Second Life art exhibits and with all of them came to the same conclusion: Second Life currently is not advanced enough to show enough detail to make it a useful tool to show artwork. With art, the ability to view detail is key to the experience. Second Life does not render 2-D and 3-D images at a quality in which detail is represented and/or programmable. I would be poorly serving art students by trying to tell them the Second Life gallery experience was even remotely as valuable as a real life gallery, or even a digital slide.

In the end, while Second Life is not a true failure, it does not currently perform tasks as well as other digital mediums, such as chat programs like iChat and Skype, digital slideshows and video, and Flash files. While at some point Second Life may evolve to a level where it is useful for many tasks, currenly it spreads itself too thin and is, as a result, not particularly strong at any of the vast number of tasks it claims one can use it for.

The news media, who in the past have lauded Second Life, are starting to change how they feel about the program. Time Magazine recently collected a list of five websites it suggested avoiding, and Second Life made the list. Frank Rose wrote an excellent piece two years ago in Wired Magazine noting that the hype of Second Life for marketing businesses and products was significantly overblown. There is now some broader support to the thought that Second Life is an interesting and forward-thinking idea that has not been well-realized.

I have no doubt that virtual worlds will become more important to education in the future. I just do not belive that Second Life, with its substantial limitations and questionable quality, will be the program that becomes the future for virtual educating.

References

Rose, F (2007, July, 24). How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life. Wired, 15.08, Retrieved August 26, 2009, from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep?currentPage=1

(2009. February, 26). 5 Worst Websites. Time Magazine, Retrieved August 26, 2009, from http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1638344_1638341_1633628,00.html