Second Life Under Review
I got into work early today and went through my stack of snail mail. I get a free subscription to a couple of trade magazines (mostly because their advertisers pay for everything, so take it for what it’s worth), so I usually throw them away without looking at them since I don’t have time to read them as much as I would like. There was a review in the Dec 3 print edition on Second Life that confirms some of my beliefs about the environment, so I thought I would post it for all to see:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9044800
Many people in my field would argue that virtual environments are the next cool technology and everyone is going to be using it for formal education. After spending the last 3 or so years really understanding how humans acquire knowledge, the notion of using a virtual environment for programmed instruction in my opinion leaves a lot of holes due to the flawed nature of the environment. In fact if true learning is a desirable outcome and performance is a metric used to assess learning, there are some points to address that specify some causes of performance problems:
- Lack of Skills or Knowledge
- Lack of Motivation
- Flawed Environment
- Improper Incentives
I’d like to address the issue of flawed environments. In a reality setting in a typical classroom, a flawed environment plays a huge factor. Examples of this is an improper student seating arrangement, or physical conditions such as temperature control, outside noises, etc.
In a virtual interface, Human Computer Interaction design (HCI) must be addressed in order to get all plausible users involved. I think most of the appeal of Second Life is that it’s an environment designed by people in their 20s and 30s because that’s the type of users expected to be there (I think teenagers are also targeted). Apparently according to the article above there are some text size issues and interface issues that need to be worked out.
Lastly, because SecondLife is primarily a virtual social environment and not a lecturing environment, interacting with other people is a key issue. While I do admit that it has potential, I don’t think SecondLife has formal programmed instruction at its core. Like real life, there are distractions, people who don’t play nicely, people trying to make a buck or two, and even worse, developers who don’t know anything about instructional design trying to invoke a learning experience on trusting, believing participants.
Due to the nature of real world learning environments and the already surmountable problems and flaws with learning spaces that exist in reality, shouldn’t educators be concerned with fixing reality before thinking that virtual reality will solve ALL issues?
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