New World Notes

If You Want to Sandbox Build on Harvard's Second Life Sim, You Still Can

Click here to visit Berkman, sponsored by Harvard's law college of the same name, a mostly defunct educational sim once formerly used as a teaching resource for actual Harvard University classes from 2006-2008. I just visited its sandbox area to create and play with some prims, inspired to come there by a recent Twitter thread about defunct SL campuses for real colleges. Many of them still seem be in-world, albeit all but abandoned -- including the sim owned by the world's top university.

The mystery is why they haven't been taken offline. Either Linden Lab forgot they were there after they more or less ended the company's education outreach program -- or perhaps they're on an automatic payment system, and school accountants haven't noticed the bill? In either case, it's still there for impromptu sandbox building parties, or for creating new objets d'art you can show off to friends. "Oh this little thing? Just something I made while at Harvard."

In Experiment, VR Marginally Improves Learning in Minority of Volunteers

3D games and then virtual reality have long been touted as having the potential to be user-friendly "memory palaces" for educators, an ancient means of learning that today's students could easily use:

A variation of the "method of loci" involves creating imaginary locations (houses, palaces, roads, and cities) to which the same procedure is applied. It is accepted that there is a greater cost involved in the initial setup, but thereafter the performance is in line with the standard loci method. The purported advantage is to create towns and cities that each represent a topic or an area of study, thus offering an efficient filing of the information and an easy path for the regular review necessary for long term memory storage.

I've written about studies to see if this speculation is actually true, and now a University of Maryland study has some tentative results:

Both groups received printouts of well-known faces–including Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe–and familiarized themselves with the images. Next, the researchers showed the participants the faces using the memory palace format with two imaginary locations: an interior room of an ornate palace and an external view of a medieval town. Both of the study groups navigated each memory palace for five minutes. Desktop participants used a mouse to change their viewpoint, while VR users turned their heads from side to side and looked up and down.

VR did improve memory retention -- but only for a minority of volunteers, and only a little bit:

SL Mesh Avatar Brands Maitreya & CATWA Dominate, Survey Suggests

Really interesting survey results from the Mesh Body Addicts blog, which as the name suggests, is for fans of mesh-based avatars in Second Life. Asked to name their favorite brands, 1800 respondents (80% female) replied -- a huge sample. Overwhelmingly, two brands dominate:  Maitreya for mesh bodies, Catwa for mesh heads. And I do mean dominate:

What female mesh bodies are most popular?

• Maitreya Lara (68%)
• Belleza Freya (8%)
• Slink Hourglass (8%)
• eBody (7%)
• Slink Physique & Belleza Isis (tied) (4%)

What female mesh heads are most popular?

• Catwa (bento) (45%)
• Lelutka (bento) (16%)
• Catwa (non-bento) (16%)

Read all the results here. Based on survey results, we're talking about a near oligopoly on what's probably Second Life's most popular and lucrative virtual goods market outside of real estate. (Not necessarily a bad thing.) Notably, the only sub-category where no one brand dominates is male mesh avatars, but that could be because the market leaders aren't competing for that market.

Do SL Users "Play"? Online Course from Top University Explores Question

Exploring Play: The Importance of Play in Everyday Life is an online course from the top-ranked University of Sheffield in the UK (there's a paid and free version of the course) which discusses Second Life for one of the courses, specifically citing this New World Notes classic in which early SL users recreated the 9/11 terrorism attack partly for cathartic reasons:

University of Western Australia's Second Life Presence Saved at Last Moment by Community, University of San Jose

Good news from Jay Jay Zifanwe, who's managed the University of Western Australia's five simulator-wide presence in Second Life for over seven years, which looked likely to disappear last month:

"An 11th hour reprieve," he says. "All of the five sims are alive through mid-2017 (in part thanks to a lot going on behind the scenes including SL residents making direct offers to UWA senior management to help keep the sims alive). While all five sims are still there, one of those has transferred ownership to the University of San Jose, although in operation will remain as it has been in the location it has been."

Wonderful (if temporary) reversal of fortune for Second Life's art scene, as UWA is one of its last prominent sponsors. Go here for more on this change on the official UWA in SL blog.

Harvard Still Has a Sim in Second Life, But I'm Not Sure Even Harvard Remembers That

When I noted the decline of "the most prominent and active presence of a major university in Second Life" on Monday, I added "active" as a qualifier because there's still some other prominent universities in SL, up to and including the most prominent in the entire world: Harvard University. Click here to visit Berkman, sponsored by Harvard's law college of the same name.

Thing is, you may be one of the few visitors in quite some time.

That wasn't always the case, because a decade ago, it was quite active, hosting events like "Avatar-based Marketing: What's the future of Real Life Companies Marketing to Second Life Avatars?", which spun out of an article from the Harvard Business Review. I was a panelist at that event, and another time, distinctly remember first meeting Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on the sim, as he was exploring SL as an avatar named Jimbo Berkman (yes).

The place is more or less empty now, except for a public sandbox, and to judge by the surroundings, hasn't been updated in many years. For instance, clicking a nearby bulletin board produces this notecard, dated 2011:

Educators Discuss Minecraft for Education in Second Life

Somehow this feels like an endpoint of a years-old evolution, but here's a group of educators who once advocated Second Life as a great education tool now gathering in Second Life to discuss best practices of Minecraft as a great education tool. SL is pretty excellent for group voice chats in 3D where Minecraft isn't, so maybe this is the best marriage of the two virtual worlds as education tools. (And there's lots useful advice and case studies discussed throughout).

Fusion & Biased Second Life Fans Fail to Explain Why Education in SL Mostly Failed, So Guess I Have To

Top tech/popculture site Fusion recently published a profoundly weak piece, "We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life" (just picked up by Boing Boing) in which the author wanders about in the few remaining, empty SL sims that various colleges and universities are still paying for -- or as sometimes happens, Linden Lab simply forgot to remove from the grid. (Yes, that does occur from time to time.) Fusion's Patrick Hogan thinks the problem is that "it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island" in Second Life, which is entirely wrong, because since 2013, Linden Lab has restored its 50% discount to non-profit/educational sims. So the article is pretty incomplete on its face.

As usually happens with warped media coverage of Second Life, a number of enthusiastic SL fans have posted angry replies on the article, and on SL fan blogs, and are critical of the coverage in not very productive ways. For instance, here's Bernhard Drax's comment on the Fusion piece:

Drax is a very talented videographer of Second Life, and just as key, is paid by Linden Lab to promote Second Life as a contractor. (Which any reporter exercising "journalistic research" would quickly discover.) His points are echoed by a Fusion comment from Jo Kay, a talented educator who has long used SL as a teaching tool. I am not questioning the motivations of either, but the plain fact is an outside observer is apt to see them as biased about the topic and be duly skeptical.

In actuality, the Fusion article, while inaccurate, is not wrong about the big picture: Second Life-based campuses, which once existed in the hundreds or more, have almost entirely gone dormant or been abandoned, and we are far from the days when even Princeton and for that matter Harvard were in Second Life. (Yes, they were.) 

Why are the universities and colleges all but gone from Second Life, and why has Second Life almost entirely (with a few marginal exceptions) failed as an education platform? A combination of factors, none of which Fusion is aware of, and many of which invested/biased SL advocates might be willing/unable to acknowledge.

As it happens, sim costs were (and still) are only part of the problem, eclipsed by these issues (among others):

Former Linden Educator's Advice to Linden's Current CEO

John Lester, formerly Linden Lab's virtual education evangelist, has some good advice for Ebbe Altberg, currently Linden Lab's CEO, who's reaching out to educators still interested in Second Life:

[I]t’s not just about collecting technical requirements and reading submitted feedback when you have the time. It’s about taking the time to actively investigate and participate in a community so you can cultivate its success and identify completely new market opportunities in the future.

Good advice. (And a good argument for Linden Lab hiring a virtual education evangelist.) On the other hand, I think Linden Lab should also spend more time reaching beyond educators already into SL/OpenSim -- such as all the folks using Minecraft as a teaching tool:

Sandbox Summit: Don't Miss The Latest and Greatest Ideas in Educational Gaming (Even if You're Not There in Person)

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

If you're into that sweet spot where gaming and education intersect, the hashtag to watch right now is #sandboxsummit14. There you'll be able to see live reactions to talks and workshops being conducted at MIT's Sandbox Summit, an annual get together for educators and scholastically-minded developers alike. The event runs today and tomorrow, and  just because you're not there in person doesn't mean you can't pick up a thing or two from afar (thanks to social networking and streaming video.)

In this case "gaming" isn't limited to video games, either. One of the most interesting topics so far (if Twitter is any indication) has been The World Peace Game, a massive tabletop game in which an entire class can wage war and peace, and gain a better grasp of the effects of both. 

You'll eventually be able to view videos of this year's talks on the Sandbox Summit website, but until then keep your eyes on Twitter, and check out recorded talks from the 2013 summit here.