Anaheim, Calif.—Officials at one discussion session here at the Educause conference yesterday spent an hour debating whether or not they should relocate their campuses—taking all the buildings, quads, and people and carefully moving them elsewhere.
The focus of the session was virtual worlds, and the academics were discussing whether to take their virtual campuses out of Second Life in protest, after the company that runs the online environment announced the end of a generous education discount.
“We find ourselves in a critical point right now,” said AJ Kelton, director of emerging instructional technology at Montclair State University. “And that is what do we do? I’ve got this investment that I’m really invested in, how do we proceed forward? You either stay in Second Life or you get out. You stay in, or you find a way to transition and you get out.”
In addition to 20 or so professors sitting around tables here, several virtual participants joined the discussion via two different virtual worlds that were projected at the front of the room. One screen showed Montclair State’s campus in Second Life, and the other showed a campus in an open-source alternative, which looks almost identical to Second Life but gives administrators more control over the environment.
Scott Diener, associate director for information-technology services at the University of Auckland, said his institution was “very likely to move out of Second Life.” He said many longtime Second Life users are angry at the recent decisions by the company that runs the service, Linden Lab.
Moving a virtual campus isn’t easy, though. Mr. Kelton said that if he made the move, he would probably have to rebuild from scratch. Others said that it was possible to export their virtual properties, and that there were services that would do it for a fee.
Linden Lab has said it will allow current education customers to extend their discounted price if they pay their virtual rent in advance. One professor said that his university was likely to pay for a year now and use that time to research a likely move to a different environment.
Mario Guerra Jr., who works at the University of Texas at Austin’s Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment, said that a group there that set up a campus in Second Life was discussing a possible relocation as well. He suggested that professors using the virtual environment should team up and make a move together, rather than scatter to several different environments.
“Right now we’re just trying to figure out what we’re going to do as a group,” he said. “One benefit of using a virtual world is collaborating with other people and meeting other people. If we all go together, it might be a richer community.”
The discussion is continuing on e-mail lists, such as Second Life Educators.
Developing online and blended learning programs requires research and collaboration. Learn how top technology companies are partnering with campuses across the country to advance online learning as it becomes an increasingly important aspect of higher education.
21 Responses to Academics Discuss Mass Migration From Second Life
arrive2__net - October 14, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Is there life after Second Life? It might also make sense for the professors to try to put together a more formal interuniversity consortium that might be be able to negotiate a volume discount.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
manitoga - October 14, 2010 at 4:52 pm
“Right now we’re just trying to figure out what we’re going to do as a group,” he said. “One benefit of using a virtual world is collaborating with other people and meeting other people. If we all go together, it might be a richer community.”
The main question to ask is this: What does having an avatar bring to the table in term of collaboration? You can collaborate with products like Elluminate, various types of chat rooms, conferencing products like Telepresence and so on.
Personally what people have been doing with SL thus far has been sort of “m’eh”, so I can fly around. Big deal :-)
I say go back to the drawing board, look at your goals and determine what tech works best for the purpose. Experiments are great, but at the end of the day once you start paying the rent, it’s costing you real money and you’d better have a plan and some valid pedagogy to back it up!
One of the things that I never liked about SL is its closed nature. You can take your HTML and put it on another server and you’ve got the same content and presentation, your investment isn’t lost or held captive. You can’t do that with SL.
hoffpeter - October 14, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Is it any wonder the public is having trouble respecting higher education?
a_voice - October 14, 2010 at 10:45 pm
AJ Kelton, director of emerging instructional technology at Montclair State University was cited as saying, “… I’ve got this investment that I’m really invested in, how do we proceed forward?” I suppose that he means that his university has invested resources in Second Life. This illustrates a problem with IT investment management where risks are not considered and exit strategies are ignored. Whoever committed to this investment should have thought about the implications. This should serve as a lesson learned in IT investment management.
rgilmour - October 15, 2010 at 8:12 am
Okay, did anyone else, when they saw this headline, think “oh, yeah, I remember Second Life!” Is it possible that SL’s moment has passed?
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harrison_bergeron - October 15, 2010 at 8:23 am
Lets not pretend this is different from being held hostage by Blackboard.
Does anyone think “oh yeah, I remember Blackboard.” The corporate model works because we let them do it. Open access alternatives are available and learning institutions should be playing a greater role in their development, if only to mitigate risk.
nanzing - October 15, 2010 at 8:25 am
For Manitoga: The quality of “presence” among participants in a collaboration and the ability to use collaborative tools as if we were in the same room (because we are) are both much deeper and much more effective in Virtual Worlds than trying to do that through Eluminate or any of the other webinar tools, or Google docs or any other collaboration tool for that matter. You are sitting alone in your own home everywhere else no matter what tool you use but the feeling of “being there” is much more alive, and in the mix in virtual worlds than elsewhere. The only impediment is getting team members over the strangeness of meeting in a virtual world — especially if they are not strategy gamers — shoot ‘em up gamers are at a loss too, I think — and getting team members up to speed in terms of the basic tools of self-presentation, movement and so on in Virtual Worlds.
The old adage in Ed Tech is still the best one: use the technology because it does the job best, not because the technology exsits. For close to real life collaboration experiences, virtual worlds are the best, IMO.
As for a_voice, I think everybody who walked into Second Life — with maybe the glaring examples of Adobe (believe it or not) and Princeton University — they had a purpose and they were aware of the risks. On the other hand, given the level of communication between Linden employees — such as John Lester who was the Edu-guru Pathfinder Linden before he got the boot — and the universities and educators in SL, there was a reasonable expectation of being involved in or at least informed about in a timely manner any pending draconian changes that now seemed precisely designed to boot all educators and not-for-profits out of SL. It also now seems that LL is negotiating individually and privately with bigger education customers which suggests to me that they want to have a morass of special deals rather than a policy. That’s a nightmare, I think and it’s hard to understand why that would be a better business practice than a clear cut policy that takes clients’ needs into account.
I find it hard to believe that this move isn’t a strategy towards some greater and more obscure goal on the part of LL. Surely they knew that by rolling back discounts mid-fiscal year for the majority of universities and not-for-profits they were guaranteeing a mass exodus sufficiently large enough to obliterate any financial gains they might make by rescinding discounts? One draw of other virtual worlds like the Open Sim-based worlds is that the folks who run them don’t believe in secrecy, and that affords a level of at least perceived protection to new and prospective clients.
Me I have a tiny build financed at the retail cost and I’m staying for now, but I have been actively investigating Reaction Grid and Inworldz and anything else I can find so I have a strategy for the future. And in that, I agree with a_voice: there also has to be an exit strategy as well.
manitoga - October 15, 2010 at 9:33 am
Nanzing, I disagree.
I am a gamer, I do play online coop games of various sorts and while a virtual world is best for that game, it’s best NOT because I can see someone’s virtual body, but because I have some sort of mission to accomplish, some knob to turn, some turnstyle to activate, some enemy base to blow up or hack to pieces, or some enemy-boss to take out, and that’s done collaboratively. My avatar is an integral part of doing that. When I go onto a virtual world only to sit down in a chair around a roundtable to have a meeting, that’s just pointless.
We are left again to the initial questions: (1) what is your goal? (2) how does this technology achieve it?
~Dr. Pepper (forgot to sign last one)
stevefoerster - October 15, 2010 at 10:01 am
Only in academia would so many people be horrified at the prospect of actually paying the same amount as everyone else….
a_voice - October 15, 2010 at 10:07 am
@nazing: It is very naive to base decisions on the words of vendor personnel. That is why we have contracts. It is ok to experiment, which is probably what Adobe and Princeton were doing, but one should not put production type things in these environments without knowing how to sustain them. That is just bad practice.
urspider - October 15, 2010 at 10:47 am
Please….those bashing us here as whining because we don’t pay as much any anyone else forget:
1) Other software and hardware vendors offer educational discounts
2) Educators using SL did not tend to occupy their campuses as heavily or continually as do social users
3) Linden Lab announced this pricing change in the middle of an academic and fiscal year
4) Those on grants must now go back and try to realign funding in the middle of projects.
To me stevefoerster sounds like a Tea Party goon who just managed to slip into our company. Great. I always said that they would come for us. It just started here, first.
vandoesborgh - October 15, 2010 at 11:55 am
@stevefoerster, do you forget the myriad of colleges and universities that receive tax-dollar funding (CCs, state schools)? We need to be cautious with our money and how we spend it. Are you saying that tax dollars should be spent on full-cost versions of software? Is it so wrong for a company to give a school a break?
lkvamme - October 15, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I really dislike seeing advertisements placed by companies in the comments section.
barbaramikolajczak - October 15, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Hello everyone, The Chronicle has written several articles about the Immersive Education Initiative (including one that Jeff Young wrote as well, and another that came out last week about the SL price changes that they interviewed the Initiative director, Aaron E. Walsh, for). Since the Immersive Education is a non-profit consortium for open immersive learning technologies, it looks like they are about to provide free land and services for Second Life educators to “get off” SL at no cost. Here is the draft press release, which has been tweeted all over (it’s where I found out about it). Some of the text version is below as well (but the HTML version has all the details). Barbara
FREE SECOND LIFE MIGRATION LAND AND SERVICES ANNOUNCED BY IMMERSIVE EDUCATION INITIATIVE
HTML: http://mediagrid.org/news/2010-10_Teen_Second_Life_Migration.html
TEXT:
BOSTON, MA – October XX, 2010 – The Immersive Education Initiative [http://ImmersiveEducation.org] today announced that it will provide free virtual world land and migration services for Teen Second Life account holders. The announcement was made by the Initiative in direct response to the decision by Linden Lab, the company responsible for Teen Second Life, to permanently shut down the youth-only virtual world.
In December Teen Second Life will be added to The Education Grid registry of abandoned virtual worlds (see http://TheEducationGrid.org/About_The_Education_Grid.html).
The Initiative will make these services available free of charge to all Second Life educators in November.
The Initiative will provide these services free of charge and on an ongoing basis, citing 1) escalating Second Life prices, 2) the continued failure of Linden Lab to follow-through on its stated commitments to the Open Source community, and 3) potential legal liability and ethical issues for educators working in Second Life (see http://mediagrid.org/news/2010-04_Call_For_Legal_Opinions_On_Second_Life.html).
DETAILS: http://mediagrid.org/news/2010-10_Teen_Second_Life_Migration.html
prokofy - October 15, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Oh, here we go again with the technocommunists, claiming that their sect represent all educators, and that they can stampede people out of a virtual world setting with proprietary software which they, as opensource fanatics, loathe, and a setting with copyright protections, which they, as copyleftists, also hate.
AJ Kelton/AJ Brooks in SL has been stumping with this same sectarian shtick for years. It’s just one perspective. The Chronicle of Higher Education really needs to get out more and get a broader perspective about virtual worlds in general and education specifically.
The Educators are the Losers of Second Life
http://bit.ly/93E9f4
prokofy - October 15, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Um, “urspider,” do you always tell people who criticize in an open debate that they are “Teapartiers”? What a closed mind you have! Oh, you sound like a lot of the Marxist “educators” in universities dumbing down our children’s education!
Look, *discounts* are one thing. Sure, educators get discounts, i.e. like tax exemption. But *half price*?! That’s what universities got out of Linden Lab all this time. And all many of them did was continuously bite the hand that fed them, constantly whining about the lack of the ability to copy other people’s content (!) or about not being able to shut off commerce (!) or about not being able to shield their 18-plus students from politically-incorrect or adult content (sigh). A more narrow-minded and sectarian bunch of people you will not find. It’s really been a disgrace. Let them go to sterile and clunky Open Sim with no IP protection and no economy and see if they can create anything appealing. Do they ever wonder why their students find them a bore?!
barbaramikolajczak - October 15, 2010 at 11:01 pm
The Immersive Education Initiative that was mentioned in the story associated with this one (see the “end of a generous education discount” link in Mr. Young’s article) is providing free land and services for Second Life educators so that they can safely “get out”. I posted a comment about that earlier today, but it may have been too long (I included most of the announcement then) so here’s the link instead. Apparently hundreds, maybe approaching thousands, of educators are now leaving Second Life because of the price increase and change in terms of service. It’s sad, really. For almost 5 years I taught all of my virtual courses in Second Life, but haven’t been using it much at all this past year because there are other options that don’t cost and are better for my students to work in. Hopefully Second Life will “get it” and return to their focus on educators.
Free Second Life Migration Land And Services Announced By Immersive Education Initiative
http://mediagrid.org/news/2010-10_Teen_Second_Life_Migration.html
prokofy - October 16, 2010 at 7:01 am
There’s nothing sad at all about these selfish freeloaders leaving. I’ve just come from visiting AJ Brooks’ campus in Second Life. *I am appalled and outraged*. After getting a half price on islands and tier, instead of giving back to the community in any way, he’s done nothing but suck down just about every freebie on the grid. He has one of the largest freebie bazaars I’ve ever seen. These are products that merchants made as loss leaders, inteading to stimulate commerce and purchases from them of their creations that they work hard to produce — some of them making their living in SL. By grabbing all these freebies and redistributing them outside the economy, AJ Brooks has not put a dime in any of these hard working people’s pockets. It’s the classic town/gown problem, quite frankly.
Worse, for all his spouting about how he can’t take out his build, he hasn’t created anything himself. He has a few basically textured boxes that he could easily spit out and texture on another grid from the same textures he copied off the Internet in the first place.
AJ Brooks entire set of three islands consists of other people’s work — their freebies ensuring that he had a free ride on builds for all these years. There’s a large building by Lordfly which is part of the free all-perms set from Clever Zebra, a consulting firm that expects that when they give away all these freebies, they get some sort of business. They didn’t. Other prefabs include those of Myles Cooper, one of the prominent black entrepreneurs in SL. What, AJ Brooks can’t help this guy make a living with *a few dollars* it might cost to license a transfer? Other freebies he’s grabbed to make up his builds include the work of Eric Linden and Bill Sterling. These are all all-perms freebies he’s just plunked down randomly without any aesthetic sense. We are *not* talking about the Princeton build of Scope Cleaver, a work of art and complexity that rightfully cost money and would be literally a crime to copy. But then, Montclair isn’t Princeton…
It’s really *appalling* what these freeloaders have done to our society. They have never given back. They don’t supply free lectures from interesting speakers (like a real-life university would do) or any kind of free knowledge (i.e. free scripts they’ve invented, the way RL universities make inventions useful to people). They are just crass, greedy, and narrow-minded freeloaders, insanely harping on their technocommunist theory of opensource and just grabbing, grabbing, grabbing like Bolsheviks. I don’t at all fear using these historic terms because they are exactly appropriate for this expropriation that has gone on with people like AJ Brooks. I voted for Obama; I’m a Democrat; I’m not a Teapartier merely because I criticize the horrid selfish shakedown of these neo-Marxists on the campuses.
There isn’t anything of beauty they’ve created; there isn’t anything of joy. There is no interesting material, no lectures or papers or *anything* that anyone can get from most of these campuses. They are insular cul-de-sacs with sectarians who have spent most of their sojourn in SL whining that it didn’t enable them to grab *more*. One can only celebrate their passing to the sterile Leninist Open Sim without commerce or intellectual property rights where at least they won’t further denude the merchants and craftsmen of SL of their rightful due.
And no actual journalist is doing any due diligence here to get past these sectarians and see if in fact “hundreds” of educators are leaving. There are other more mainstream colleges that ignore all this blather and simply took out the year-long discount offered and remain, mindful that sure, costs go up after an initial hugely deep discount of *fifty percent*. It’s impossible for the company or the community of Linden Lab to justify the largesse — the educators of this virtual world do not give back, do not create, do not add value. That’s not a requirement (I’m not a creator fascist like some of them) but it’s a comment. For all their talk of open this and open that, they haven’t been able — any of them — to provide low-cost or free education for the general public — “the masses” that they claim to serve with their Soviet-style stadiums. I can’t go to any of these places, pay a prim as I could in RL with continuing ed, and get a lecture or a set of classes or a certificate of a skill. It’s really an outrage that they’ve been able to get away with this for so long.
Those providing free server space (land) and services (maintenance) are of course fooling the public, too. The Internet is not free. Servers cost money; people who run them cost money, and *that’s ok*. Luring people in with the claim of free of low-cost servers will eventually cause them to collapse. The Lindens charge money not because they are greedy, but because they know the value of a service that isn’t just server space, but interactive on-demand dynamically updated user-generated content and the ability to easily teleport among presences.
In all the years I’ve been listening to these sectarians rant on with their virtual theories, I’ve never seen a student’s blog, or an enthusiastic student on Twitter or any place — they don’t seem to exist. They didn’t grow their presences because they didn’t attract young people. And small wonder, when on most of these Soviet compounds, there were no open rights to the group to build, and no incentive to commerce to sell creations.
tessa_spoton3d_com - October 21, 2010 at 9:31 am
I am a 15+ year veteran of the 3D Web, as I have always seen this, and as such, saw the demise of SL coming many moons ago. There are classic signs early on, if one has the experience to see them and that’s why almost two years ago, we began the process of our ‘Noah’s Art’ project, SpotON3D to ensure that 3D Web’s advancement didn’t go into hibernation again as it had before in tough times. This time around there are loads of choices, but a lot of pot holes as well. As a means to assist educators, business people, their solution providers and the wonderful skills of the creators, SpotON3D has created and well recognized and appreciated document titled, ‘Questions to Ask About OpenSim Grids’, which I’d be happy to provide anyone with a copy of. My email is tessa@spoton3d.com.
There are many choices in the Metaverse, but like any social media mecca it is a mish-mash of all types of groups and people. I’ll cover a few of them here:
* TECHONO HIPPIES – free love, free sex, free content, free build.
These folks are usually pretty militant on their stand against IP rights, to the point of ripping content openly and flooding the market with free replications, openly stating their purpose is to dilute its IP value and what a fool the creators are for thinking they should be able to carve a career out of a game. In my mind that just adds up to a lot of chaotic drama that can’t help business or education and could very well sully someone’s good reputation just by guilt of association.
“ROLEPLAYING Business People”: These folks can be easily ferreted out by simply looking for the real world identities of the company heads, a real address or a real working phone number. If they refuse to offer you anything but a character name from a game then you’ve probably got someone ROLEPLAYING BEING A BUSINESS PERSON. Fine for a purely recreational grid, but if you hope to do any real business, either as a V-Retiler, Educator, of Business concern tread carefully.
* HYPERGRID GRIDS: Generally bandied around by some as the nirvana of the Virtual Worlds, Hypergrid is in fact a very vulnerable system for traveling with your inventory content from one grid to another, relying on that good nature of many to stay secure. Why? because your inventory kinda follows you, and if you rez something inworld that is not full perm or at least copyable and forget to pick it up you can kiss that puppy goodbye. Its also said anyone around you can copy your prim once its rezzed, of a rogue sim owner can see in and even grab art you inventories’ content while you are there. It about like making your hard drive open to anyone if they should call you via VOIP.
And that’s just covering the top three.
If you’d like us to meet with you and your team to discuss some of yoru back up options please feel free go drop us a note at support@spoton3d.com
Tessa :P
enerhax - October 24, 2010 at 11:48 am
moving to OpenSim is a task indeed. especially if you use many tools that you did not create. OpenSim allows for SLOODLE and also for direct MOODLE work
the good news is that once moved, your content is yours
a troubling thing about Second Life is the violation of FERPA that many institutions are guilty of as well as the exposure of their intellectual property
Linden Lab’s terms of service make it very clear that they may stake claim in anything you do in Second Life. for FERPA issues, all chats, texting, and voice are recorded and kept on their servers
why any university would persist in Second Life is questionable
OpenSim has evolved to a platform with the same stability as Second Life (this was not true a year ago)
OpenSim is also very easy to install yourself and hosting your virtual world on a university server seems the most prudent thing
i come from having 19 sims in Second Life to now having a private grid on a dedicated server that i fully control. i would never recommend anyone with a serious endeavor to setup a presence on anything but their own grid where they retain 100% the copyright and ability to back up all of the data
i work with one person in this who comes from 7 years of teaching at Miami-Dade College and i have taught at college and secondary (only for a short time)
OpenSim can run for “free” on our own servers or be very affordable to run on a dedicated server for $10 per sim
many institutions will disappear after the January price increase and it is such a shame that Linden Lab will not allow the export of entire region files (OARs) and i understand that very well from a copyright perspective
once in OpenSim, it takes seconds to fully back up entire sims and import them to another grids. i write about this extensively – how to migrate from SL with the least pain and how to set up your own OpenSim even on a USB drive!
good luck and for those looking to make the move – it is worth it but can be exhaustive!
ps – lol on Prok’s rant on freeloaders! hardly any educational foray into virtual worlds could be termed freeloading! VWs are simply another channel we have available for teaching and reaching out =)