video vidi visum : virtual : learning, teaching, and virtual technologies

The ‘Net in 10: Virtual Worlds in 2017

I’ve been asked to give a very short (5 minute) talk next Tuesday at the weekly Berkman luncheon forecasting the shape of the Internet in ten years and, in particular, the future of games/virtual worlds. At the risk of being held accountable to these predictions in 5 days, nevermind 10 years, here is a draft of what I plan to say. I welcome any and all feedback that would improve these thoughts or save me from humiliation!

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The Internet will become increasingly important in supporting and sustaining our civic communities. 3D virtual worlds illustrate how advances in technology will make that happen, and online games within those worlds are a harbinger of our potential future civic life.

I came to the Internet later than many of you, during the heyday of web-based forums. There, I found deep and rich communities and made friendships that my non-virtual friends found puzzling. Today we see that same dichotomy of acceptance and rejection of 3D worlds as “real” or “unreal.” But the trend, I think, is towards assimilating a larger and larger percentage of the population with each technological breakthrough – whether 3D visualization (as in Second Life) or kinetic motion (as in the Nintendo Wii).

Traditionalists worry that this assimilation will destroy our civic life. Net utopians look forward to that destruction. But I think Yochai Benkler is right in finding the middle ground: virtual networks often extend rather than replace our physical ones. Eric Gordon calls this embrace “net-locality.” You do it every time you pick up your cell phone and ask “Where are you?”

I don’t think it’s coincidence that the computer game industry is pushing many of these advances. Games are about engagement, and it turns out that what engages human beings most is other people. Game developers are figuring out how to get people to form teams and achieve goals together. Corporate managers are taking notes.

And those of us who care about civic and political engagement better take notes, too. Robert Putnam worried about bowling alone. Anyone who’s seen World of Warcraft would stop worrying about whether the Internet can build social capital and instead wonder – how is it going to help us to spend it?

I see two future worlds. In one, we have the Matrix. Virtual worlds become the new opiate of the disempowered masses. We emigrate, as Ted Castronova puts it, and never look back. In the other, we have what Beth Noveck calls, “Democracy, the video game.” Our institutions of work and governance learn from the technology of play. In that vision of the future, virtual worlds allow us to enhance and make more meaningful our relationships to our employers, to our governments, and most of all, to each other.

Facebook politics taste too del.icio.us

Networking is the lifeblood of all politics. So why are the Obama and other political applications for Facebook so terribly disappointing? At best, they function like bumper stickers for profile pages, and while my neighborhood’s lawn signs fill me with civic pride, I also know that sporting “I like Ike” buttons is a feeble way to participate in politics. Effective political engagement encompasses much more than the mere act of voting or supporting a candidate; it includes writing to officials, participating in hearings, and most of all, joining civic associations.

Given the critical role that associations play in our politics, why isn’t Facebook, the social networking tool par excellence, leading the way to Politics 2.0? For starters, the default profile field “political views” allows only 8 choices along the overbroad conservative/liberal spectrum, with “libertarian” and “apathetic” thrown in to mix it up a bit. By contrast, the “religious views” allows both selection from a picklist as well as custom text. (Personally, I would identity my politics as “contrarian”). Click on your choice and you’ll find “over 500 people” with the same label as well as options to narrow down by gender and relationship status. Clearly, this field was created to facilitate romantic rather than political get-togethers.

Tocqueville would suggest that Facebook groups hold a lot more promise for civic engagement than the “political views” label, but many of them turn out to be little more than vanity labels as well. The group Writing Papers Single Spaced First Makes My Double Spaced Result Climactic, which currently boasts 107,378 members, illustrates the fact that many Facebook groups’ reproductive strategy is to sport a colorful, ironic, evocative, or silly name that looks cool on your profile page. Thus, Facebook’s groups operate sort of like a self-directed del.icio.us — tags as temporary tattoos.

It’s not the banality of the groups that I’m critiquing here. Robert Putnam purposefully chose that most mundane of American pastimes – bowling – to illustrate that most any social activity can generate the social capital from which civic life emerges. Rather, it’s the fact that joining these groups usually requires no commitment and can be quite meaningless, not unlike belonging to the AARP (which at least requires $3.30 annual dues).

Why are associations so essential to American-style democracy? Grassroots organizers would say that they are the foundation of power, the means by which isolated individuals find others who share their interests and join with them to achieve common goals. So, Facebook groups and other Web-based networking provide a critical first step of bringing people together. At the very least, the Obama app allows you to see which of your friends have also added that app, presumably so you can meetup with them. Whether Facebook can be part of the next step – helping groups take action together to achieve their goals – remains to be seen. (It helps that the Facebook founders studied with grassroots guru Marshall Ganz at Harvard).

Already Facebook groups can hold discussions and put on events. (The aforementioned WPSSFMMDSRC group also boasts 108 conversation threads and 4,784 wall posts). Maybe some enterprising developer will make group membership even more meaningful by developing the killer app for organizers. Such an app would allow group members to hold each other accountable for doing things, whether recruiting new members, meeting, or putting on an action.

Perhaps such an app would be incompatible with the Facebook vibe; after all, who wants to use a social space for task management? But I have hopes that something of the sort would work. If democracy rests on the ability of social networks to nurture the kinds of groups that keep citizens engaged in their polity, I should hope that Web 2.0 augments rather than diminishes the power of those networks.

2007 09 10 Miscellaneous Comments Off Permalink

Images from State of Play education workshop

Workshop panelist Grace Lim-Tan Keh Buoy has posted photos from our workshop at State of Play V in Singapore. Thanks Grace!

I’m still hoping to acquire some video from the event, which I’ll compress and post as soon as possible.

2007 09 06 pedagogy: MUVE
platform: Second Life Comments Off Permalink

BBC interview this morning

I had the fun of being interviewed by Madz Kohime (BBC reporter Madeleine Morris) this morning at 5:30 GMT (that’s 1:30am here) about CyberOne, together with CyberOne student Masala Dosei (Patrick Engelman). Here’s the full BBC coverage of Second Life; here’s just the interview.

I’m afraid I rather fluffed my part, as I committed the cardinal sin of focusing on the question rather than my prepared answers. I failed to convey the excitement of teaching and learning in Second Life as well as what it felt like in a way that listeners would understand. For whatever reason, when Ms. Morris asked what the class was about, I talked about the course topic rather than on the idea of CyberOne reaching out to a much wider audience than was ever possible before, in a deeper and more engaging way. Shucks!

There was a very interesting feeling of presence in the BBC virtual studio that I hadn’t quite felt before — perhaps because I knew this was being broadcast live in another channel. It’s too bad I didn’t find a way to work that feeling into what I was saying in the interview yourself — being radio, all of this has to be described, not just assumed.

Patrick was a real sport to join us at 1:30am (he’s also EDT) on Labor Day weekend, and I think he represented the student perspective quite well. Thanks, Patrick!

2007 09 03 project: CyberOne @ HLS Comments Off Permalink

Hub2 final details

This workshop demonstrates how communities can reimagine public and civic spaces using virtual environments and other new media. As a participant, you will research andvredesign your own local neighborhood within the virtualvenvironment of Second Life. In the process, you will develop your own understanding of how public spaces shape civic life and propose ways to enrich the spaces you inhabit in the city of Boston.

Course 1-page description (PDF)

Where does the class meet? Emerson College computer labs

On what days? Every Tuesday, starting September 18.

At what time? 6-9pm

How much does it cost? With assistance from the BRA, this class is now FREE for community residents.

How do I sign up? Submit this registration form with a 250 word (or less!) statement describing your goals in taking this class no later than September 7.

Whom do I contact with questions? Please email me!

2007 08 29 project: Hub2 Comments (1) Permalink

State of Play Workshop postmortem : integrating virtual and real participants

How we mixed virtual with real in our workshop:

1. Audio streaming. We couldn’t secure a real-time audio stream, which would have been ideal, but we did OK by routing our audio through voice chat. The problem with this is dropoff, which the listener can override. Or we could have created a group chat, though that can get logistically hairy in realtime. The bigger challenge, it turns out, was getting sound into the computer in the first place (see below).

In the absence of proper audio streaming, Catherine and Aaron engaged in a lot of furious text transcription. Wow.

2. Picture relay. We weren’t video streaming either (which probably wouldn’t have added that much anyway), but we did have someone take photos and quickly upload them into Second Life to display. This is a trick that Aaron’s done a number of times, and I think it helped give participants a feel for what was going on in the room without boring them with zero-action video.

3. Give virtual participants something active to do. As I discussed in my other postmortem post, we created small groups out of the audience and then assigned them all something to do. We treated the Second Life participants as their own group, and this turned out pretty well, I think.

How we could have improved:

1. Ensure and test appropriate hardware. Our microphone sucked, and it severely affected participants’ ability to hear what was going on in the room. Ideally, we needed some kind of multi-mic setup, though such an option wasn’t in our budget. On the flip side, we also had trouble getting sound out of the computer into the room. We had a room mic and amp, but it took just a few seconds too long for us to put it right in front of the laptop’s speaker. Direct output to the speaker system would have been better, if that had been an option (as it would be in most classrooms).

We also failed to test the hardware setup with enough lead time to troubleshoot problems — as Aaron points out, “When a single component was crippled, it had enormous effects on the experience for the participants in Second Life. Also, small and seemingly insignificant issues, such as physical location of the computers can have a huge effect on how things play out.” In our feeble defense, I would point out that this especially hard to do in a hotel setting where not everything is going to be available far in advance for testing. Having a mobile broadcasting suitcase (containing microphones, mixer, mini speakers) would be the ideal solution for those who can afford it.

2. Upgrade our Second Life learning objects. We just didn’t have enough appropriate objects in the space such as discussion logging, whiteboards, etc. That was simply a lack of preparation!

3. Get to the action sooner. We lost a lot of participants early on because there just wasn’t enough for them to do. I’ve sat through enough SL lectures to know that listening to people talk about something somewhere else is just not that exciting. Compounded with technical difficulties, it’s deadly. By the time we got to the group activities we were down to 4 hard-core participants. Next time, we have to move to group activities almost immediately.

2007 08 28 platform: Second Life Comments (2) Permalink

State of Play Workshop postmortem : building a learning environment

Our workshop on creating learning environments in virtual worlds — trying to learn tricks from game developers — ended up providing, in itself, a spot lesson about user-centered design. Rather than tread the usual path of presentation / questions, we went for a participatory workshop. With that framework in place, we put ourselves at the mercy of our participants — the perils of practicing what you preach! Which is not to pat ourselves on the back — weak points of the workshop highlighted potential pitfalls of user-led experiences such as accommodating wide ranges of learning styles, knowledge, experience, and cultures (more on these later). Nonetheless, I think we were happy with the way the workshop ran despite several rough spots. I’m also satisfied with our real life / Second Life interface, though that wasn’t hitch-less either.

As described earlier, our method was (1) to deconstruct successful games, running on the assumption that good games provide strong learning opportunities; (2) develop a set of principles of successful learning environments; (3) apply that framework to real-life examples, including a proposed project. Our starting hypothesis is that for teachers who are good at creating teacher-centered educational experiences, developing learner-centered experiences might be quite challenging.

Some lessons learned that are applicable both to future conference workshops and, I hope, to learning experiences in general:

1. Exploit small-group dynamics, but model them first. We started by playing the classic sequencing game (get yourselves in order of…) which assisted us into breaking into mixed-experience groups. But we squandered this effort by following up with a large-group activity that dissipated some of the early energy. We asked the entire group to identify factors in a game that they were familiar with that made them compelling experiences. While these questions were good, participants hewed to highly theoretical, general answers — most refused to give specific examples. Perhaps we should have modeled some of the answers ourselves. Then we might have had the small groups, rather than the whole group, answer a set of the posed questions, with narrow parameters for acceptable answers.

2. Focus on practical, not theoretical, activities. We should have played more games as object lessons for the session. Scot started us out with tic-tac-toe, which he used as an illustration of how games get us into a different zone even when the game is so simplistic. We probably could have teased that out more, and perhaps pulled some activities out of Rules of Play, especially since we couldn’t require participants to read Jim Gee and Raph Koster in advance. In any event, it was unrealistic to expect that we could develop a framework from scratch in the span of 1 hour. Better to do 3 spot lessons and then move on to the next phase.

3. Problem-solving is fun: Any game designer can tell you that! I think our case study was really the best part of the morning — each group went at it with some level of seriousness, though maybe not as much gusto as I might have hoped (see next lesson). We ended up with some really good responses. I think it was also at this phase that the Second Life participants got really into it (see lesson 5).

4. Culture matters. I could detect some pretty serious variance in individual participation even at the small-group level, and I attribute it to a combination of language, culture, and knowledge differences. There’s not much we could have done about the knowledge differentials, but I suspect we could have done more to have eased the group dynamics around language and culture. I noticed that most of the groups — about 10 people each — had only about half actively participating.

5. Let virtual participants actually do something. I think this is where we fell down in the first half — a large-group discussion just didn’t lend itself to Second Life participation. It’s also where the workshop shone — giving the SL participants a task was a great way to get them involved, and so we should have done the same for group discussion.

I will try to post pictures and video of this event as they become available.

2007 08 28 pedagogy: MUVE Comments Off Permalink

CyberOne, Hub2 in Weekly Toyo Keizai

Weekly Toyo Keizai, 4 Aug 2007

Journalist Misa Kurasawa from the Weekly Toyo Keizai met with a number of us a few weeks ago for a cover article about Second Life. The issue is finally out, and I think it covers the CyberOne and Hub2 courses. I can’t know, because the Toyo Keizai doesn’t publish the full article online, but the Babelfish translation of the issue’s topic is Second life Temporarythoughtrevolution: The worldwide oven it is it got on the move!! Our section of the article has the heading, “Joint ownership” of place; Production efficiency improves with how new to work by it is. (I suppose automated translation still has a way to go).

It was a fun interview, and with a little bit of effort I hope to have a translation of the relevant part of the article soon.

2007 08 13 project: CyberOne @ HLS
project: Hub2 Comments Off Permalink

Globe picks up Hub2 story

Hub2 grabbed front page coverage today (slow day for the Globe, apparently). The article necessarily, but unfortunately, takes off with the gee-whiz breathlessness typical of most mainstream coverage of virtual worlds. Unfortunate, in part, because it seems to premise the value of virtual worlds on their novelty — which inevitably fades — rather than their unique capabilities. Unfortunate, more importantly, because the exotic spin makes our project seem alien rather than intended to weave into Boston’s grassroots civic life.

Still, readers who make it through the setup do get an accurate description of the project:

Oates and other city officials, working with Emerson College, are hoping to have a prototype within the next six months that would be designed with the help of students taking an Emerson course called Hub2. A version of the course will be also offered to nonstudents. The students are to meet with community organizers, school teachers, and residents to develop a design proposal that they will build in Second Life. Students will be encouraged to reimagine parts of the city, for instance adding more parks or finding ways to make Downtown Crossing more lively.

Certainly any publicity is good publicity, and I’m happy that the Globe and Matt Viser have helped us get the word out about our project.

Edit: I should correct some of the inaccuracies of the article’s photo captions. Rodica Buzescu created the Weeks Memorial Footbridge on Berkman Island, not I. Also, I don’t teach internet law at Harvard nor have any immediate plans to do so.

2007 07 21 project: Hub2 Comments Off Permalink

Announcing Hub2: a workshop on real/virtual civic places

And now, to follow up my earlier teaser: I’m excited to announce that my colleague Eric Gordon and I will be teaching a new, experimental class at Emerson College on exploring, imagining, and building civic places in real and virtual spaces. The class was born of an idea hatched by the City of Boston to develop vibrant, virtual civic spaces. And what better way to foster civic life than to invite members of the community to build it for themselves?

Eric and Gene emerge into Boston Commons

We have several goals in offering this class:

Examine the intersection among group identity, creation of meaning-space, and civic engagement
Test Second Life as a tool to stretch participants’ imagination about spaces and groups
Establish the foundation for an ongoing program working with different civic groups across Boston, including youth

Much like CyberOne, there will be a “traditional” class, taught by Eric, and an “open” class, taught by myself. The two classes will run in tandem, with the two groups collaborating on a continuous basis. Here is the description of my class. The flyer explains what the class is about; here is what it is not:

It is not a class about technology and Second Life, although participants will learn how to use Second Life and other tools.
It is not a theoretical class about urban design or political sociology, although sound theory underlies much of the work of the class; participants are expected to engage actively with residents of Boston neighborhoods.
It is not a “check-in/check-out’ class; we want participants to stretch themselves intellectually and socially, and we expect them to make practical use of what they learn in the class with their own constituents.

To make the class accessible to as many Boston organizations and individuals as possible, Emerson has cut the tuition of my class to only $431 for the 12-week course, which includes access to Emerson’s computer labs. It is my hope that we will be able to engage many of the communities and neighborhoods in Boston who are wrestling with issues about civic engagement and public space. Update: This class is now FREE thanks to the financial support of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Hooray!

Enroll here.

2007 07 18 platform: Second Life
project: Hub2 Comments (3) Permalink

video vidi visum : virtual