This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Second Life Community Convention – IRL!
The convention was different than many of the professional workshops I attend. SLCC is now just three years old and entirely run by volunteer members of the community and included educators, residents, developers, artists, and businesses all mixing and mingling together. I spent almost all of my time attending the Education track of the conference.
The New Media Consortium posted audio of some presentations and the full set of papers from the education track available on their NMC Campus Observer blog. I wont’ cover in detail here what you can read and see for yourself.
Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation opened the education track by calling for a conceptual shift in education away from the model that prepares us for the 1950s. Education needs to move beyond learning about to learning to be, it needs to be participatory and passion based. Those of us in the museum community will of course find these words encouraging. It’s what many of us already do and have been doing for quite some time – providing spaces for informal learning, inquiry and constructive learning and learning that is often inter-generational and/or peer based.
This year MacArthur has begun a significant investment in virtual worlds such as Second Life and other innovative approaches to learning. (See the Spotlight blog for more information). While they see SL as a public place where learning and philanthropy can grow, Yowell also cautions that we need to be prepared to ask hard questions. What are virtual worlds really good for? What about them is effective?
We’re already seeing discussion in the museum community about where we should be…MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, etc., etc. Yowell reminds us that kids don’t necessarily think this way – they seamlessly flow between the platforms that give them what they need at the moment. We’ll need to address the interoperability of virtual worlds within the larger framework of Web 2.0 applications and ways of working. I’d argue that it’s not just kids – it’s anyone who has decided to engage this way – as she notes, we need to rethink age because confidence often trumps age.
During a late night surfing session I finally accepted an invitation to the Museum and Educational Social Network on Ning. Pilar pointed me towards a recent conversation about SL that asked about how we measure “success” in SL. The papers in the SLCC proceedings would be a good place to start to learn about the successes that people have had so far with museums in SL.
Of note is Hillary Mason (slmetrics.com) and Eric Hackathorn’s work (Maya Realities/NOAA Metroea) to bring some basic metrics into SL spaces. While both of these give us a better sense of what happens in SL spaces, there is still lots of room for improvement. We can see where people go, how long they stay, and other things that we’ve grown used to with web metrics. It can tell us that students spend more time in a SL classroom, work longer on an SL project. But the work needs to be done to connect that to students learn more, and students learn better.I would still argue that there is a great opportunity here to see how what we’ve learned from vistor studies translates into virtual spaces in way that it doesn’t translate onto the web. For one thing web metrics tell us the who’s and what’s, but doesn’t tell us with who we did it or why we did it. In SL I may be co-visiting or I may have motivations that aren’t clear from simple observation. Do avatars have virtual tethers that keep a couple in the same gallery together, just as you often see IRL?
And if you haven’t seen it yet, the Second Life build of the Old Masters Gallery at the Staatlische Kunstsammlungen Dresden hit Wired. Like the Sistine Chapel, another breathtaking example of the possibilities here – at least for replicating the architecture and artifacts we have. This is success on one level – but is it the success we want?
