NMC Campus Observer

Why It Makes Sense that Wired Magazine Left Second Life

Larry Pixel (aka Larry Johnson) : Aug 16, 2007 06:19pm

Jeff Young made a provocative post today in the the Wired Campus blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. He asked, Colleges Are Building in Second Life, but Is Anyone Visiting?

Jeff’s article makes some accurate points about Second Life — and some inaccurate ones. The New Media Consortium has been exploring all of the various virtual worlds platforms that are available, including Second Life, for a couple of years now, and I could not resist weighing in with another perspective.

My observation is that while I agree that Second Life is probably not going to be “the platform that launches the revolution,” it is in clear point of fact a very credible first entrant in the race to the 3-D web. I find many similarities between its approach and that of AOL, the first place many of us encountered the Internet. AOL is hardly a player today, and but a shadow of the powerhouse it was in 1994, but it was important in its time. The technology moved on, becoming both more open and offering greater facility that was possible in a walled garden, and that will happen to Second Life as well eventually. No technology or company owns the future.

The essential point I feel needs to be made is this: The fact that Wired decided to leave, and the fact that their expectations were not met does not mean that ipso facto no one’s expectations will, and that we should all now leave. Despite my high regard for that publication, I don’t plan to follow them to the door. Other companies have also left Second Life, and in each case, I think that is has been the right decision, because they were either trying to make Second Life into something it is not, or because they spent little or no time trying to understand what does work there.

There are in fact many highly successful educational projects in Second Life — and the Case example, which is carefully proceeding on a well-conceived community-based plan, is one of them. Those that are successful recognize that the essential factors of success are much more related to establishing a community than a “presence” as is the so-often stated goal. Socially-based virtual worlds like Second Life provide a natural platform for building community, as they incorporate a very useful and intuitive set of tools for interaction. The success in the Case example is not to be found in the number of visitors to SL, but in the way the Second Life presence has cemented a real-life collaboration that spans Cleveland. The project has real-life outcomes that will never be measurable if one sees only the space they have built in Second Life. In the Case example, those 40 visitors were not Second Life Residents, but invited visitors, prospective students, who were being invited to a private tour. The island was not open to the public at that time, but if one wants to talk ROI, the conversion rate for those visitors was an easy match for admissions office activities that cost far more.

The NMC’s own project in Second Life has a very vibrant community of nearly 5,000 educators, and there are events and activities taking place there almost every day. Nearly all of these activities are organized by community members to meet community needs. And the community is global — with both students and educators interacting with colleagues from around the world.

That they find value in their work is the sort of ROI that matters in this case.

I would argue that monetary-based ROI measures are inappropriate for many academic pursuits, a great many of which are designed to achieve very different goals.

The sorts of things that work in these highly social spaces are absolutely worthy of study and understanding. Sadly, too many of the high-profile companies —and admittedly some of the university presences — make little use of the things that really make a platform like Second Life interesting. From the perspective of the people we work with, it makes considerable sense that Wired left. They came in with hugely unrealistic expectations and built a presence that had almost no connection to or acknowledgment of the culture. They made no attempt to build a community and they, not the platform, failed.

Their failure is a good thing if it helps to highlight what is valuable here and to distinguish it from what is not. We need to know those things.

Story filed under: Editorial

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