I'll reference another Trendspotting post here, this one from October citing a ComScore graph of unique visitors to "virtual world" sites. As you can see, Second Life is last on the graph, far below kids sites like Club Penguin and Neopets and the virtual porn site Redlight Center. Considering that Second Life has gotten so much media attention, its ranking here is surprising even for me. So what can Second Life to keep itself from falling into AOL chat room-type obsoleteness?
Well, it seems that the academic world is still quite hyped about Second Life and its potential. After the casual internet audience and major marketers have taken a pass on Second Life, it would make sense for the the land of Linden to concentrate on their relationship with academia. They should work on making Second Life a viable place for distance learning.
To do this, they should:
--Make it possible to password-protect class sites so that only registered students can attend and to avoid any embarrassing interuption by any graphically-endowed furries. (Unless this feature is already available?)
--Vastly simplify the interface so that learning the course content will be the focus for a user rather than having to figure out how to get your avatar to sit, or to keep it from listing to the side constantly and looking like Otis in the Mayberry jail.
--Provide a "lite" viewer with greatly reduced hardware requirements--one that works within a standard web browser would be best.
--Provide more "asynchronous" communication features--discussion boards, document storage, etc. (Many Second Life advocates point to the fact that the great advantage of Second Life is that it provides "synchronous " communication for people across the planet. That is true, but so does a telephone. The real power of the internet comes from the asynchronous communication it facilitates. With tools as basic as an email listserv, I can have an ongoing discussion about 1970s German Progrock with someone in Jakarta without either of us having to alter our sleep schedules. That is what is awesome about the internet.)
Second Life will never be everything for everyone. But with some effort it might become something for someone.
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2 comments:
I appreciate your opinions re: second life. I've never used it before but since I'm starting SJSU this coming fall, I guess I'll have my chance, but not looking forward to it. I just don't get the appeal as recreation, but like you said it could be useful as a full functioning virtual classroom.
Looking forward to future posts. --- Toni
You've made some EXCELLENT points here. I agree with you wholeheartedly. The 1st and 4th points may soon be solved by sloodle.com. Points 2 and 3 require a stronger open source community to fiddle with the viewer and create thinner clients based on web browser tech. But your 4th point about the lack of asynchronous affordances is ABSOLUTELY the biggest weakness of SL for distance learning. Most critics miss this point entirely and focus on porn, interface awkwardness and the "so what?" factor.
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