Exploiting the social - Secondfest and education

One of the reasons I attended Secondfest this weekend was to see if it told us anything about using SL in education.

Let's ignore the scalability thing for a moment. We know that SL doesn't work well for big events (i.e. for large numbers of avatars)... but we also know that this will change over time. In a sense, SL hints at what might be possible, but we are waiting for the technology to catch up before we can properly realise it.

So, what else...

Well, a couple of thoughts have struck me since attending... firstly, there's the art reflecting life issue. Tents looked like tents, stages looked like stages, mud looked like mud... it was very nicely done, but there's no reason why it had to look like that other than because it makes people feel comfortable in their new environment. We see the same happening as people build educational spaces in SL. (Hey, I do it myself - my virtual wellies look, as near as I can make 'em, like RL wellies).

Secondly, ignoring the technical issues, the streaming of live bands (I dunno if they were actually live of course) felt somewhat flat. A RL gig is interactive, in the sense that the band engages with the audience in some way - this didn't happen (for me) at Secondfest. Somehow, some level of engagement needs to be achieved for this kind of environment to work well. The set needs to be modified in some way based on feedback from the audience. Exactly the same is true when a RL educational talk (a lecture or presentation) is streamed in-world - there needs to be some engagement mechanism between audience and presenter for it to really work well.

A couple of times I heard attendees say things like, "Why are we doing this in SL... it has no advantages over X technology?". Exactly the same questions get asked in educational events. At the symposium follow-up meeting someone asked a question along the lines of "who is simply looking at the chat log, and if so, why are we bothering to chat in SL?". The answer, it seems to me, is hard to spell out - but there is a reason why SL works better than plain chat. For me at least.

Finally, Secondfest didn't really exploit the social aspects of the online environment - there wasn't much that Secondfest did that couldn't have been done at a RL festival. Imagine for a moment what a LastFM tent would be like at a virtual festival, somehow (I don't quite know how) exploiting the collective tastes of those inside the tent. Imagine a DJ who had immediate access to information about the likes of the audience (I mean, apart from the kind of "This is shite" comment in the chat log!)? I don't quite know how this would work - but I think that there are interesting possibilities in this area.

I suspect that the same is true of education. To work well, education in SL has to exploit the social networking aspects of our online environment - probably using tools both in-world and out-world.

Can you hear the music?

When you hear the music ringin' in my ear
Can you hear the music? Oh, yeah
Can you hear the drummer? Gets you in the groove
Can you hear the guitar? Make you wanna move? Yeah

a lyric written by the Rolling Stones, circa 1972 - but one that could have been taken pretty much verbatim from the chat logs at this weekend's SecondFest virtual festival in Second Life.

Don't get me wrong... I really enjoyed the time I spent at Secondfest this weekend and I salute the sponsors (the Guardian and Intel), builders and organisers for their achievement in putting together a well constructed, well organised and well attended event. It was fun.

But it pushed the technology to and beyond the limits of what is possible right now. 9 times out of 10 I couldn't see the video or hear the audio track when I went in... and I wasn't alone. "Can anyone hear anything?", "Press play on the video tab", "Tried that, still nothing :-(", "Try unchecking the streaming options, then check them again" was a typical kind of exchange between festival goers - or so it seemed to me.

I'm more used to shouts of "where's Wally"! :-)

Lagginess was also a bit of a problem, particularly late on Sunday night. I spent the start of the Pet Shop Boys headline set (at least I assume that's what it was - I wasn't close enough to hear) crawling at break-nothing speed towards the stage from about 500m out. In the end I gave up - PSB don't exactly do it for me anyway.

But, as I say, it was good fun. Does it matter that there were audio problems? For me, no it doesn't. I attended mainly to see what the experience was like... oh, and to give away virtual welly boots in a vain attempt to promote my failing shoe business! :-)

On the positive side, I thought the event was well organised, I loved the banal banter around the stages and tents, and the build and feel of the site was excellent.

Come back to an equivalent event next year and the year after. Watch how the technology evolves. Yes there were significant problems this year in terms of the streaming and lagginess. But that will undoubtedly get better.

We've seen a new way of doing things... but I don't think that Michael Evis has too much to worry about just yet!

Secondfest

Briefly... I note that Secondfest, organised by the Guardian and Intel, is happening this weekend.