Mobilemind

That last post on the Wii and SecondLife was supposed to be a quick puff-piece, but as I mulled it over it grew and grew until I split it into two with this opinion post as the second part. Personally, I think something good is brewing with Second Life, but first we're headed for (already in?) a goldrush that will be followed by backlash, similar to the era when companies rushed to establish a presence on dial-in line networks likethe Source, and CompuServe, and Prodigy, and America Online, (and others- anyone remember GEnie or Minitel or ...) . It was relatively cheap and tremendously popular to build-out forums and email lists and knowledge bases there, but it all got eclipsed by the internet + the web. Second Life also just feels too "siloed" for my tastes, with no good way to interact across worlds (yes, I am aware of various SL mash-ups). The virtual worlds and games reek of the multiple ID's problem of the early 90's. I remember when you were really cool if your business card has like 6 email addresses on it. I also agree with folks suspicious of the hype and over-the-top "me-too" crowd it is attracting now, again like the AOL-era landgrabs. Here's some good quotes and interesting data I found on a quick web news search:

More often than not, you'll hear that "Second Life" boasts millions of users. But the truth of the matter is that no one knows how many people are using the service other than Linden Lab, the company that hosts "Second Life."

According to Clay Shirky, a faculty member in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University who's made a four-month study of Second Life's audience, the number of regular users is well under 200,000.

Virtual worlds may indeed play a big role in the future of the Internet. But for the moment, the talk far exceeds the actual worth of these services-- at least in business terms.

If fewer than 200,000 people are regularly using "Second Life," it's not the best marketing tool. And though virtual worlds are certainly a means of long-distance communication, it's yet to be seen whether this makes sense — in the long term — for anything other than fun and games.

So many companies are entering "Second Life" because it's the thing to do, because the press gives virtual worlds so much attention.

Source: Is Corporate Mania for 'Second Life' Just a Lot of Hype? As for the Wii, pretty cool, but then so was the Magnavox Odyssey that Dad brought home in '73 to spoil all 5 of us kids. Does anyone else miss video games that included real dice, poker chips and plastic overlays you had to tape to the screen? We eventually got an Atari 2600, but never bothered with Colecovision, Mattel Intelvision, Sega and the lot that followe-- including the very first PlayStation released about 21 years later. Dang I'm old.

Labels: second life, simulation, technology, virtual worlds

Add to or view the (0) comments    external links to this post

The Association for Computing Machinery (acm) publishes eLearn, an online magazine about Education and Technology. Just a few days ago they published Another Life: Virtual Worlds as Tools for Learning, by Jay Cross, Internet Time Group; Tony O'Driscoll, IBM; and Eilif Trondsen, SRI-Business Intelligence.

Quite a coincidence, since I unknowingly published an entry about that here last month. Given this article and the interest emerging amongst members of the Masie Consortium, I think SL and Virtual Worlds are going to be a big trend this year, and maybe even a big elearning reality. Earlier this week, I learned of a forward thinking bank in Europe that is also looking to Second Life as a means to support its training efforts as it expands. I'll share more on this as it develops.

Labels: second life, simulation, virtual worlds

Add to or view the (1) comments    external links to this post

On February 16, 2007 I hosted an Adobe eSeminar on Machinima as a tool for developing training videos. Tom Crawford explained how one can co-opt video games or re-purpose them for creating cheap, effective training videos.

Using something like The Movies you can short-circuit the painful process of shooting "real" video. You also skip the painful process of morphing your own SMEs or yourself into 3D artists/animators. Instead you can cast, script and "film" in the virtual sets. It is a great way to spend $20 USD and a few hours to develop mini vignettes to bolster the reality of your elearning and add life. It is a cool idea that text does not do justice to, so I'll link to the seminar recording as soon as I can.

Speaking of adding life to training, I just received a note from Kris Rockwell of Hybrid Learning Systems about using Second Life for learning, including a HUD (heads-up display) add-on that lets learners easily blog about their Second Life experiences with geo-stamps of where they were in Second Life at the time/place of the entry. A quick YouTube demo of the SL Blog HUD is online.

Check out the Sloodle site for more info on use of SecondLife for learning education and training. Sloodle is a sort of mash-up of the Moodle open-source learning environment and the Linden Research Second Life virtual world.

UPDATE: Catching up on my reading, I see that my friend Professor Kapp has posted an entry on taking ESL in SL. It usually takes an AICC meeting to get that many confusing acronyms in a sentence. Anyway, check out his post on the experience as a learner and observer.

Labels: second life

Add to or view the (3) comments    external links to this post