Does MIT’s “Sixth Sense” mean SecondLife makes no sense?
As a long time user of SecondLife and passionate advocate of its potential for learning, I’ve been mulling a heretical thought. Perhaps the reason there is mainstream adoption lag of SecondLife and other virtual worlds (VW’s) is as much to do with the formula not being right yet – they are too Web 1.0. Perhaps they will only take off when people figure out what Virtual World 2.0 should be. Perhaps there are useful parallels we can draw with e-shopping 1.0 and e-learning 1.0.
TED: Technology Entertainment Design
The idea took shape somewhere in the intersection of two excellent but unrelated resources: a thrilling talk on the wonderful TED talks site from Pattie Mae and Pranav Mistry of MIT Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech and a tweet from Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins reporting a comment at the 3DTLC conference which asked: why wasn’t there more to virtual worlds than avatars and islands?
From 1.0 to 2.0
Let’s forget education for a moment and look around:
e-shopping 1.0 to 2.0: So many of us shop online it is easy to forget that the initial predictions of the high street being replaced by virtual malls didn’t bear out. The truth is more subtle – online complements and supports face to face retail. Web is great for research and comparison but quite a lot of items we want to be able to pick up and feel before we pay for them (perhaps back home online). So this is blended shopping. And yes of course there is very successful distance i.e. fully virtual shopping but arguably we needed to do blended as a transition. And the blended shopping will remain.
e-government 1.0 – 2.0: e-government was a vibrant topic in the UK in the early noughties: new forms of citizen participation, changed perspectives of society etc etc. Of course virtual citizenry didn’t happen but blended citizen services did. Living in the UK all government services have excellent websites, sometimes accessed through a portal like Direct Gov.
e-learning 1.0 – 2.0: following on then, the initial paradigms of e-learning as replacement or displacement of traditional learning didn’t materialise. A VLE or LMS like Moodle is far more likely to be used by a UK university to complement the face to face learning (40% of undergraduates and 60% of those attending a post graduate course in the UK do so part-time) than to replace it. Again it’s blended that wins out. The e-service needs to be complementary and supportive of what people are already doing. It needs to help them solve a problem and that usage will prevail over any number of alternative activities which educators could suggest for the students.
Virtual worlds 1.0 – 2.0
An immediate parallel for SecondLife and other virtual worlds is they are currently perceived within an alternative / replacement paradigm – in this case of the ‘real. The ‘virtual’ is a portal which you pass through to a world of avatars and islands. It’s not here, it’s somewhere there. The Nintendo Wii makes the virtual membrane semi-permeable but it really amounts to a more engaging interface for their game.
The video begins to hint at how the power of the web can bring about a range of services which form a virtual overlay of where we already are and help us do what we wanted to do – it is a blended virtual service. The point is carefully made in the presentation that although they have no plans to manufacture this as a device, it would be eminently possible to do so.
Back to SecondLife. At the moment, for want of choice, we tend to think ‘virtual service’ = involving virtual worlds. Perhaps, as choices grow, we will be interacting with our real world in increasing number of virtual ways – iphone app + google maps Streetview to find that bar around here somewhere etc. If I was learning Italian, dropping in on virtual Rome for some practice with native speakers would be a great enhancement to my learning after class. If my class teacher had been using Google Streetview of Rome on an interactive whiteboard, I would be even more likely to look for virtual post class practice.
So, SecondLife is probably too VW 1.0 but it is hard to know how to change it right now. It is still the best option available to the masses to explore the art of the virtually possible. However, the use people ultimately choose to make of an artificial virtual world may be less to do with how successful Linden Labs are at enticing you in, and more to do with a comparison with all the other virtual experience you are having.
