Learning in Second Life 2: My SL Hell

John Helmer gets bags under his eyes and samples at first hand some experiential learning in SL.

In Second Life, the virtual online world with upwards of 7m ‘residents’, educational institutions and e-learning stalwarts like Brandon Hall are buying up real estate (perhaps that should be unreal estate) at dizzying speed. But is there any real potential for learning here? We’ve been finding answers to that question this week on your behalf, tirelessly buffing up our avatars (you want to see my bling trainers) and teleporting like beasts.

I was initially sceptical. Like many of you with busy working lives, I suspect, the thought of throwing a load of spare time I don’t have down the toilet learning an online game seemed a liddle hard to justify... I’m too busy trying to get a first life, I quipped. But about three hours into my second life all that changed.

Hanging out at Puerto Banus by the open-air catwalk, watching the avatars strutting their stuff, I got talking to a French person. I go to France perhaps once a year, and for the rest of the time my conversational French lies fallow. Now here I was having to get it to be very unfallow. The conversation very quickly went way beyond my rather limited and conventional vocabulary (moules frites s’il vous plait). I found myself learning a lot about what has happened to the French language under the onslaught of widened internet access and textspeak... Oh, see what happened there? I used the ‘L’ word...

I quickly realised that here was a learning experience far richer than only you would get from interacting with a guidebook – or even from doing one-to-one French conversation lessons in the UK (a friend of mine had to cancel his recently because the tutor wouldn’t let him get a word in edgeways). You don’t have to have an MBA to recognise the potential for language learning businesses in Second Life, and this little epiphany of mine reinforced what I had heard elsewhere – notably from Ron Edwards and Donald Clark - that the real potential of sl and other MMOG environments is in experiential learning. The doing, applying, practising part of learning – an area in which e-learning has, up until now, been felt to be relatively weak.

Surprised at having stumbled over such positive reinforcement just accidentally, I began looking around in a more directed way. Below are just a couple of relevant examples I found on my travels in sl.

1. Health & Safety. People have been talking for a while now about the potential of games-based e-learning for training in dangerous environments. The showstopper here has been development costs, however sl reduces these massively as the online environment is already in existence and doesn’t have to be developed from scratch. You just buy some land and start developing with ready-made tools – you don’t need programmers, necessarily, and neither do you need to engage with the quirks of a supplier’s proprietary technology platform.

Interesting in this regard is one of the stops on PA Consulting’s disneyesque tour of their island (see snapshot above) - a service centre simulation for H&S training. Visit http://slurl.com/secondlife/PAconsulting/117/134/27 and IM ‘German Guru’ inworld for a demo.

2. Team building/leadership. One of the great strengths of sl (also a drawback, but more of that later) is that it comes complete with a world. On Education UK Island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20UK/229/38/21) I came across a concept called Virtual Quests, originated in RL but seemingly ideally suited to SL, described as ‘a focused activity where most or all of the information gathered by learners is gained within the Second Life environment’. Given the nature of the world, there’s no reason why such quests need be limited to information-gathering. One could forsee groups of learners being despatched on Apprentice-style tasks in SL, interacting with the virtual ‘public at large’.

More than the H&S example - which involves a very contained use of the sl environment – this approach seems to leverage the full value of having a community of 7m to interact with. This is one distinct advantage of sl over closed learning environments for any sort of training that involves interpersonal skills – and also, incidentally, over most classroom training situations: while offering a relatively safe environment for experimentation, the world offers the chance to interact with real human beings, one-to-one, in groups and even crowds.

An Australian HR expert I met in Second Life developed this theme in conversation: ‘When people think about online learning they think of a static interaction with course content, however in Second Life the interaction happens in "real-time". Second Life "feels" real, largely because behind every avatar is a real person. In its ability to build a sense of community and support, that’s where Second Life's real learning potential lies. It allows the avatars (virtual residents) who live in different parts of the world to collaborate and share different perspectives on many topics, providing the potential of very rich learning experiences.’

Take the example of retail training. Where better to learn the skills of interacting with the public than in a virtual shop? Serving real customers from all over the world is a significant step up from a role play. And shopping, of course, is the second favourite activity of people in sl (what’s the first? – er, we’ll cover that later on).

Oh, and while you’re visiting Education UK Island don’t forget to take a ride on the mini-steam train. I’ve pictured it here because the rest of this island is so visually dull (sorry folks); a little bit of Milton Keynes in the throbbing heart of Cyberspace.

Speaking more generally, sl has two other major advantages as a learning medium.

Firstly, as shown in more detail in Mark Aberdour’s walkthrough of the various media types available in sl, the environment handles disparate content types with ease, and combines them in a way that seems to make sense psychologically. Where your average VLE might present a collection of learning content assets as a dry list of file names in a table, in sl learners can walk through the library, taking books down off the shelf – or touch on wall screens to start a video. The central metaphor behind sl – that of a world similar to our own in many of its physical properties - gives a context to these different assets that somehow makes them easier to understand and apprehend than when they are accessed through a two-dimensional web page.

Secondly, the environment itself is engaging and stimulating in a way that a classroom or a website can seldom match. In Second Life you can fly. You can see round corners. You can construct the perfect self that time, genetics and lack of money have forbidden you in your first life. You are uplifted by an unusual sense of freedom and potency. Simply being in the world is pleasurable, and learning within that world therefore has the chance to be a more pleasurable, and therefore more engaging activity.

But, as they say in showbiz, everything is bullshit before the ‘but’. There has to be a catch right? Right.

The world itself – the teeming, polyglot community of 7m+ users – is sl’s biggest asset, but also its biggest potential downside as a learning environment. Just a cursory glance around sl will tell you at once that the distribution of traffic is unequal. Go to Education Island and hear a pin drop: go to Sexy Beach and get yourself mown down by the crowd. Take a look at the places and activities around which traffic clusters inworld and you’ll the Pleasure Principle in action with a vengeance. As the internet stats site Hitwise (http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-hopkins/2007/01/search_engines_larger_than_adu.html) points out, Porn and gambling were the first business sectors to thrive online, and can even be seen as a bellwether of commercial viability. Small surprise then that much of the activity in Second Life is (reportedly) ‘adult’ in character. SL comes with a sleaze factor which may make it off-putting for many organisations as a learning environment.

With the trend in HR being towards the creation of work environments in which nobody need feel oppressed or discriminated against – or even mildly shocked - is the organisation going to want to throw its vunerable employees into the Wild West (or perhaps that should read Westworld) atmosphere of SL? Nobody dies in hyperspace, but you can certainly get shoved around a lot, psychologically speaking. Noobs (or newbies) attract ritualised contempt, and the community has its own heavily ostracised minority group in ‘furries’ – those who elect to fit their avatars out with non-human heads and bodies. PC it ain’t.

Then there is the time it takes to get acclimatised inworld. Linden Research Inc. the makers of Second Life, estimate that it takes only four hours to learn how to function there – however in practice it can take a lot longer until you really feel confident moving around and interacting. As I mentioned above, there’s a clear hierarchy obvious to everyone who enters the world, based around how long you’ve been in it. You’re going to want to shed that noob, generic look as soon as possible, and that involves a certain amount of shopping, not to mention hanging out and getting tips from more experienced residents (if you can persuade them to give you the time of day).

Now if I’m going to spend even four hours learning something, I’m going to want to know that the time I put in will be worth it. What would be the point of learning to hang in Second Life if you suspected that the whole thing might turn out to be a flash in the pan? Last year’s papers were all full of MySpace – this year it is, apparently, ‘so over’.

Neither is Second Life the only MMORG on the block. According to Wikipedia: ‘Second Life has notable competitors, including There, Active Worlds, and Red Light Center (albeit more "mature" themed)’. What if the organisation were to spend a fortune building its training centre in SL, only to find that the traffic was going elsewhere? No traffic, no world. Even IBM’s fabled $100m investment in SL gives little reassurance. They’ve been wrong before. Let’s face it, they’ve been spectacularly wrong on numerous occasions.

So there you are: two good reasons why Second Life might not be the Next Big Thing. To be honest, though, they are there largely for balance. While the sleaze factor might hold back certain sections of the market, and deter the more wary for a season or two, sleaze has certainly not proved to be a showstopper for the general internet becoming the default mode of business communication. SL seems already to have achieved a critical mass which will be hard to emulate for any competitor. As a platform for development, it’s easy, flexible and cheap. And surely not too many people are going to baulk at the difficulty of learning the interface when by and large the rewards are so instant and so huge. It’s a lot of fun. Granted, the fun has the potential to distract from getting on with the serious business of learning – but then, that’s a problem we face equally in RL (real life, to you).

After two weeks of investigating SL (by night, while working by day) I’m now so badly in sleep debt that it is entirely possible my judgement has been compromised. However, If I were only to go by the hairs on the back of my neck, I’d say you have to take Second Life seriously as an environment for learning. It may not itself be the future of learning - but the future of learning is almost certainly going to look something like this.

Note: some of the links in this article are ‘slurls’, or links to locations within Second Life. You need to be registered with Second Life to use them.