Dear Linden Labs,

It is often a struggle to convince administrators, policy makers and educators that virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular are valuable resources for education.

Educators I know have worked in their own time, fought the battles with IT to unblock ports and find a reasonable space and afterward, even if they get results, they STILL have to keep on struggling to gain recognition for their work. In short, making a case for the educational benefits can be lonely work.

People like Joanna McKay or Jokay Wollongong in world who aggregate information and provide much needed advice, conferences and playspaces are a God-send to educators eager to learn. Her SLeducation Wiki has been a source of information and inspiration for years.

So your notice to her that she has to re-name her site because of her use of SL which you’ve apparently trademarked is not only counter-productive to educators wanting to use your site, is not only a killer of a site that markets your services for you by its very nature – it is a slap in the face to your community.

I’m assuming you’ll be gunning for SLoodle next?

Oh, and  please tell Phillip to stop with the tale-spinning that Second Life, founded on the concept of the Burning Man festival, is an environment about sharing creativity built by and for its “residents”. It’s clearly hypocritical. It’s an environment by and for Linden Lab.

But I do thank you for the wake-up call.

I hope that others – educators, businesses, entrepreneurs – hear that wake-up call too: you must diversify your explorations of new technologies so that you are not reliant on a particular platform or provider.  Because SLack marketers who are too SLow to consider the community of passionate users that grow up around today’s platforms and brands will SLash their own wrists in an effort to control what they feel is theirs.

Sincerely,

KerryJ

aka Pandora Kurrajong
Second Life user since 2007
ReactionGrid / Open Sim user since 2009

I’d like to get your input on what you feel constitutes spam and how much discloure you expect in your network.

Spam stunt in World of Warcraft

Some spam is easy to spot – like the spam stunt pictured here in World of Warcraft or the unwanted emails you get when you open your in-box.  Others are more subtle.

I’m a regular Twitter user – I treat it like a virtual coffee break where sometimes people can get silly, sometimes they’re profound but because I choose the participants (for the most part) they’re people I know or are friends of friends.

Twice now, I’ve had these friends of friends “recommend” books to me based on a topic I raise and I have found the link goes to a site that gives them money for people who buy from the sites.

I honestly have nothing against people trying to make a buck.  Or should that be I have nothing against people trying to honestly make a buck?   But when someone recommends a product they are in essence selling in a forum that is not retail in nature but trust-based — isn’t some sort of disclosure appropriate?

Something like “I onsell a book about X, DM me if you’d like the link. If not, NP” or “I onsell the sevices/products of this site – let me know what you think.”

A person whom I’ve met and who arranges get togethers for geeks recently suggested a site that helps you artificially boost the number of people who follow you on Twitter.  Big turn off here. Trying to rort the system in an attempt to create social status is dishonest.  And it cheapens it for everyone else.

So can social media and marketing mix? I think it can, but it is not about spam.  I think it’s more about developing trust relationships and listening. And I feel that when a marketer shares personal information and asks after my health and then doesn’t disclose that he or she will make a buck if I click on a link they suggest, my trust has been violated. And as for the lady who is going to try to artifically boost her crediblity — consider it lost.

Let’s talk, use this amazing vehicle called the internet and Twitter. BUT PRIVATELY. Telstra, a communications company proving it just doesn’t get Web 2.0. Or customer service. Or transparency. Brought to my attention by the fake Stephen Conroy twitter.com/stephenconroy

I’ve been researching virtual worlds for Education.au’s Immersive Learning Unit and had an aha moment this morning in between hitting the snooze button on my N95 that I wanted to commit to pixels before it faded away in the morning routine.

The issue of risk management in virtual worlds as with so many other virtual spaces stems from the fact that there are people there we don’t know.

Would closed-off virtual worlds created within a school or institution solve the issue of risk while allowing for many of the pedagogical affordances such as collaboration, role playing, simulation building and modeling? Is there value in creating a safe space?

But just as we don’t settle for a LAN or a closed off portal alone to solve the issue of viruses, scams and annoying people on the internet — settling for a localised virtual world cuts learners and educators off from their most valuable learning resources: other people and their ideas and information.

These closed off environments also create funnels — someone other than the individuals using them decides what is relevant and valuable. If we’re truly going to move towards learner-centred teaching — then allowing a centralised authority to limit access to tools and information and decide what goes on a narrow portal is a ball and chain that has to be severed.

Virtual worlds are 3D representations of  web sites.   Each personal plot is a blog or MySpace page in 3D.  Each island or simulation a web site or a series of smaller web sites.  Some of these destinations whether 2D or 3D are fluid, unique, wonderful, valuable and some are dangerous, scary, spammy and flawed.  Why are they this way? Because they are created by PEOPLE and that’s what people are.

So, opting for a virtual world that is limited just to one institution is creating a LAN or a closed portal – not a virtual world experience.

If educators and learners are limited to password protected virtual portals or LANs — on the net or in the virtual worlds space — they are shut off from a universe of original thinking, unique experiences andopportunities to broaden their worlds.  Plus, it prevents both groups from learning the digital literacy skills they need to have to be fully realised as citizens of the 21st century.

Virtual worlds like the 2 D internet offer a wealth of experiences – one institution or jurisdiction cannot possibly create them all. And if they did, what a homogenous world it would be.

PS: You may be asking yourself – what’s up with that photo? It is of a group of valued friends/colleagues  (and our waiter) that are an important part of my life and constantly enrich it with their insights, knowledge, friendship and laughter.  I got to know them all in Second Life. So glad I didn’t get limited to a LAN or portal or single closed off island.

Had a really frustrating experience at a conference in Second Life today but am grateful for it due to the thinking it has stirred.

"no, but you are MY STUPID HUSBAND" CC (by) nayrb7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nayrb7/3044673793/

The session was about social networks and viral systems (no, not going to name the conference or the session or presenter, this isn’t about dissing).  Because viral content spreads across channels, my first question was – what’s the tag for this session?  The presenter told me to ask a conference organiser.  The organiser said there was no tag.  Okay, some people don’t think of this stuff – but in a session on viral marketing, gotta say I expected it.

The lecture progressed on interactivity and social networking and the instructor failed to engage with the text chat in a constructive way.

Some people in the audience complained that the text chat was distracting them and was blocking the powerpoint on effective interaction.

If you’re not laughing yet — let me explain why this is sadly funny:

• A session on interaction where interaction is discouraged and/or dismissed
• A session dealing with social networking that did not allow for cross-channel seeding via tags
• A session on social networking that compared Facebook and Second Life — two completely different tools – and made judgement calls because one was not like the other.
• People attending a session on social networking who don’t like it happening and find it distracting
• A session on social networks and viral marketing where avatars sat in chairs, faced front and the presenter did not build in any time for interaction and social networking

What if we’d gone to this session on social networking and he’d removed all the chairs and replaced them with rings or platforms with different keywords or interests and asked us to pick one, meet three people, move to two others?

What if he’d canvassed a wider variety of social networking tools, explained there are horses for courses, asked how we used them?

What if he threw out his opinion or findings or whatever they were that Second Life is NOT a valid social network because 1 million people can’t be on at once and we can’t use our real names and asked us to challenge it?

Finally, what if he’d been using a social networking tool during his lecture and invited us to interact with him there as well as in SL?

The thought process this irritation set in motion sort of hooks into a blog post I wrote a while back about people at a tech conference complaining about others who were Tweeting.

There are multiple tools available to us all – for group learning, collaboration, communication.  Viral communication works best when it’s organic.  And as different people are drawn to different tools or communications channels — communications jumps channels. I find out about great YouTube videos via Twitter.  I find out about great web sites via me.edu.au, or Second Life, or Twitter, or Flickr or Diigo. I can start a conversation in Twitter and it will end up in Second Life or Skype.

And it’s easy to find conversations when they are tagged with keywords that would stir my interest or that are unique and shared across networks.

In creating learning modules and sessions on interaction, communication, collaboration, engaging learners — in short, all the faboo ways teaching and learning is being transformed — shouldn’t we ensure that we model those teaching and learning practices in our modules and sessions???

At two other sessions today, presenters standing in front of rows of avatars while standing on stages said we have to get rid of the sage on the stage mentality. *sigh*

Anyone – care to design a conference where PowerPoint, whiteboards, chalkboards, flip boards, butcher’s paper, videos, stages and seating that faces in one direction are outlawed?  Where there are NO presenters or presentations – but facilitators in the truest sense of the word? We could do it in Second Life — I can get us some free space.  We could do simultaneous sessions in Skype.  Maybe Elluminate.

It CAN be done.  It doesn’t mean anarchy.  I worked with Jo Kay and the Jokaydians last year to lead educators through tours of Second Life that taught them a helluva lot more than any PowerPoint could have. Jo shows, tells and offers opportunities to get hands one.  A role model.

Frankie Forsyth of Pelion Consulting, a consutlant from Tasmania, facilitated sessions for educators that drew information out of the participants in a structured way to achieve a common goal using an online classroom. She introduces research summaries, has questions where participants write out free form replies and then presents all the answers given and leads discussion.  She’s another of my role models. Because she takes it out of theory and puts it into practice.

I attended an Elluminate session on Friday sponsored by Edublogs on how to engage audiences using interactive tools and guess what? The presenter used interactive tools and we interacted and fed back what we thought and how we could use those techniques in our own sessions! Wow! Another role model!

So — are you a role model?

Image license is CC (by) – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en