SLCC: Day Two, "We need to stop being a lab!"

[Donavan Vicha]

That's a quote from "El President" Philip Rosedale aka Philip Linden. In his keynote, he was brutally frank about being in our way as a company from doing what Second Life is supposed to do. He even wore a t-shirt that read "MISSING IMAGE" to underscore his public apology for the breakdowns that have plagued SL for the past four months. He also expressed pride that the community of SL is its most important asset. LL has only spent $20 million to get to this point in its history and if it disappeared, he was confident that "the Grid" would be rebuilt by that community. Finally, he reiterated that the virtual metaverse will be bigger than the Web, that the web of hyperlinks that still stand between one user and another will give way to the way avatars stand face to face.

But as he said, "the Web doesn't go down for maintenance on Wednesdays," but also said they are very close to having the kind of server stability that allows different versions to run together. Once that is achieved, those Wednesday mornings will be receding in the rear-view mirror.

Following on the heels of that keynote address was a keynote for the Education track by Connie Yowell, of the MacArthur Foundation, who have put up $50 million (USD) for funding Digital Media, Learning & Education projects over the next five years. She affirmed the idea that new paradigms in education are emerging that substantiate the significance of virtual worlds like SL. I hope to be able to point to her powerpoints, but here are the four sets of paradigm shifts see sees taking place:

Education --> Learning
Education is tied to place and time, learning is ubiquitous, occurring everywhere and always

Consumption --> Participation
Rather than being pushed at students, they actually pull information from whatever available source because it's tied to a specific and often "messy" problem

Individual --> Social
Obviously, with the Web 2.0 tools, the individual is no longer on his or her own and questions as well as answer coalesce in that social framework.

Direct transfer --> Imagination
Rather than sychronously receiving information, the student backs out of a virtual enviroment and must put it back together in the perspective of real life, which involves the imagination assisting in assimilating and understanding.

These last two shifts are helped tremendously by the ability to make public the student's "learning project" and get collaborative help.

What we see emerging from digital media and virtual worlds, then is networked imagination. Yonnell credits a lot of this way of thinking to Henry Jenkins and his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Caught the King Drive #3 to get to HQ to type this up. (Too bad I had to surrender my laptop last week -- lease was up -- or I could have stayed to blog "live." Yeah, right!)

Unless I find some folks to "commune" with, I'll be back again to this PC later tonight with more!
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I'm not sure of the quality, anyway, but using my son's camera, I've taken some photos and videos. However, my work PC doesn't accept SD cards, so I'll have to wait to post them from home . . . if electric has been restored!

[Donavan Vicha]

By speaking in terms of a lab, Philip was admitting that SL has treated residents like "rats" or at least without the usual customer service one would expect of a gaming environment. But his rationale has been that they have expedited the process for reaching the goal of server independence. By stating that they have to stop being a lab, he is announcing that soon that distribution among servers will be possible. (Whether those servers will still be LL property remains to be seen, but he admitted if a meteor hit the labs, SL would be toast.)