Grup de treball D-29: Metaverses and 3D environments

Education in Second Life - Experiences of a Mentor and an NCI Helper

Paraules clau

Ponent/s

Loris Talpo

Resum

This paper focuses on education in Second Life at the very initial stage of the life of a resident. Educators in that moments are the so called Mentors. This is the story in first person of one of them, the author is an SL resident since November 2006. The paper touches very particular points and deals with all the aspects of education in SL.

Contingut de la comunicació

In this paper I’m talking about my experiences of educator in the virtual world called Second Life (SL). Actually I had and still have experiences of being a Mentor, an NCI Helper and teacher of the SL programming language. Talking about my experiences I will be drawing a picture of some aspects of that wonderful world. I’m not pretending to be exhaustive, I’m just attacking only a small fraction of the whole story but it might be of some interest for people that are in SL or that want to approach it, it is a vision from inside, from a resident that is going to celebrate soon his third rezday, that is what the birthday in SL is named.

Rezday

For an individual, the moment of birth is a traumatic event. Birth in SL is as dramatic as it is in real life (RL). To make birth a joyful event it is necessary to adopt special expedients and techniques, because the virtual world is similar to the real world but enough different, for the lack of some senses that we, as humans, have. Residents were newbies in the first days then they grew, some of them were enough lucky to meet someone that helped them to move the first steps. Some of them met some wonderful persons called Mentors or Helpers, for some of them that event was like turning on the light in a dark room.

Birth in SL is coupled by a series of difficulties of technical order but not only, there are individual difficulties of psychological order, linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, gender and sex barriers and finally there are also some hostilities by other residents.

As you see there aren’t big differences respect to the real world, and it is obvious because behind the avatars of the virtual world there are users that are persons in the real world. Those users bring in the virtual world their personalities and they tend to reproduce behaviors and relationships they share in the real world. Some residents are better in SL than in RL, for others it is the opposite, and for many there is no noticeable difference, cases like Dr.Jekill e Mr Hide are not so frequent. All of them experience a shock when they come in.

How to make that shock less shocking is an interesting experiment, by the way it is not easy, and it requires patience, a great deal of patience. I will show how that happens.

Second Life Mentors and the first level of helping

Helping to new residents in SL is structured in at least two levels. In particular, because when we are born in SL we are created (rezzed) in one of many identical help islands, the only help we can receive comes from a particular category of individuals called Mentors. The group of mentors is, therefore, the first level of help. Mentors are organized in a group and they are an official organization supervised by Linden Labs, mentors are more exactly called Second Life Mentors, that can be seen in their group tags. To become a mentor there was a procedure to follow, a resident should have applied for mentorship through secondlife.com website, there was restriction and a period of apprentice. At the moment since, spring 2008, Lindens shut down the creations of new mentors and they are planning to reorganize the group probably.

Mentor at work in a help island

Mentors normally stand in the midst of a help island greetings new residents and offering them help. Of course people from any country might suddenly materialize so the first issue is to identify what language they speak. If it is relative easy to try English, French, Spanish, German, Italian very often all other languages are not easy to identify, in that case mentors ask for help to a Linguist Mentor, or to a regional mentor (SL Italian Mentor in my case). Sometimes it is possible to use an automatic translator, they are often based on Google translator, the translation is never good, for surprising reasons. People, when typing, do an impressive quantity of mistakes even in their native language, translators cannot cope yet with that, to not speak of abbreviations and SMS language. Once a contact is established they can answer to questions. Questions from a new born resident are, fortunately, very easy to answer. Of course if mentors help in places other than help islands they can receive more challenging questions, if mentors need help they open their group chat and ask for help, other mentors can reply via private IM. The chat channel is monitored by Lindens so it is free from spamming or not pertinent questions. It is interesting to notice that this mechanism works very well even if the number of mentors online in any moment probably is not enough to deal with a continuously growing flow of new joins to SL.

From the point of view of a new resident

Newborns see on their computer screen a 2D representation of a 3D world, they are represented in that world by avatars, that are not limited to human shapes, if they are humans they are women or men. Avatars or better their users need to learn some basic operational commands, how to walk using the keyboard, how to move the virtual camera, how to fly. In other words they need to familiarize with an user interface (UI) that like all user interfaces, is not user friendly in the very first moments. Beside the issues deriving by the lack of knowledge of the UI, there are issues deriving by Second Life itself, delay in graphics rendering is cause of infinite discussion, see the voice lag is SL dictionary (wiki). So a source of questions concerns dresses and why they are not worn.

Barriers

Analyzing the possible barriers that a new resident encounter in their first moment we can list that:

Chatting style barrier: it seems not important but it is not easy to understand who is speaking to whom. A simple expedient is to include the name of the listener in every message a Mentor types. Some for example use the @name convention, other use a more natural approach, but forgetting to include the name is enough to not get a reply.
Language barrier: I have already told about language barrier, I’m only adding that sometimes it is easier to send the new resident to a regional welcome area, so all mentors have a list of those areas. It happens very often in my case because I operate in an international region but I’m the only Italian, so it is simpler to take the new residents to an Italian welcome region.
Psychological barrier: often new residents cannot use the chat, it is understandable, and I understand it, it happened to me too, the first day. It is not a technical reason, it is merely a psychological matter, they type a sentence in the chat bar but they cannot press the send key. Or they are going to press it but the conversation progressed so fast that they feel their message obsolete, it is frustrating and embarrassing. Chat in second life is like to speak in public, everybody listen to you in a spherical area of 20 meters of radius, it is not easy to overcome the fear of speaking in public, as it isn’t in RL. In that case I, as a mentor, call them to a private conversation in an instant messaging (IM), I developed a sixth sense to identify people that would like to speak but don’t want to do it in the public chat. In an IM conversation they feel free, they are not flooded by messages coming from other people, the pace of the conversation is decided by them, and the knowledge transfer from Mentor to newbies is more profitable. This approach is more common when people already know that there is a private channel besides the public one, so it is more common when I operate in NCI helping at the second level. The content of this conversations is very various, from technical issues to relationship issues like stalking and becoming invisible to somebody.
Cultural Barrier: this aspect I suppose has been neglected by Lindens for long time, and in part it is still neglected. SL is in USA, Lindens are Americans, this is very evident in region classification, and it was a source of questions in my first days. Regions are classified on the base of their content, in particular there are PG, Mature and Adult regions. Probably it is intuitive what mature and adult regions are it is a measure of how much sex is in there. But PG is totally unknown to people that is not of American culture so asking for the meaning of PG is very common because not being PG in a PG land is a source of big troubles. Other cultural barriers are indeed normal they are the counterpart of a trip abroad in RL.

NCI – the second level of education

Besides being a Second Life Mentor, I’m a member of New Citizens Incorporated briefly NCI, my role there is Helper and Land Officer. NCI purpose is to offer an educational service at a superior level that the one offered by mentors. We operate in several ways, and briefly our educational program includes:

A Freebie wall

Real time help in our lands: offered by NCI helpers and Officers, not very different from what I described above.
Protected welcome regions: in our regions, new residents are protected by attacks or offensive and embarrassing content. For this purpose they are classified as PG. Land officers enforce that status and our rules, they have land powers and can neutralize attempts to distort the experience of SL that newbies are living. Land power are limited to removing undesired objects, obscene content for example. Land officers might also eject from our lands, temporary or permanently, people that are clearly on purpose don’t follow our rules. Our regions also include sandboxes where people can build simple and complex objects.
Huge collection of freebie stuff: available on easy to use vendors, in all our lands.
Free mall space: new residents not older than 90 days, can show and sell their products.
Educational material: contained in notecards organized in categories and language.
Space for socializing: this is very important because a comfortable place to chat is highly desirable. People can easily make new friends with people from all over the world.
Educational classes: the next section is dedicated to this topic.

Events: NCI organizes event for fun. Live music concerts, dancing, races. Those events are mostly. NCI organizes also nice challenges like Show&Tell, Blitz Build and weekly sessions of Questions& Answers.

That makes NCI the most important organization in SL for educational purposes. NCI is made by volunteers and it is completely self financed through donations and advertising. Financing is to pay teachers and land tiers.

Questions and answers

A survey of the most asked questions is interesting and fun, it is a qualitative one and it is not scientific.

At the first place the most asked question is how can I make money, and how can I find a job the two are strictly correlated. That question reveals a lot about who is asking, it reveals their age. Young people are the range 18-25 are asking that, they probably don’t have a work yet in RL and they want one in SL, they also need money because this is what they have learnt in RL that without money they can’t do anything. It is very rare that people that have a job in RL want one in SL too, they are here in SL for fun not for work.

The answer to this question is really a couple of answers I tell them how to find a job, giving them the advice that it is not easy. Or I tell them how to live in SL without money in a totally free way.

You can guess what is the answer that they like better, of course the first one, they want money, they want to spend money buying virtual things.

The next in line question is about sex, it is not asked directly, sometimes it is asked in IM. Questions about this topic are very various, from the simple how it works, to the very challenging teach me how to flirt.

Following a collection of technical questions, about second life aspects, or about computers and their operating systems.

Finally very difficult questions, requiring a very deep knowledge, legal questions about selling and buying lands, for example. Or questions about Intellectual Property and Policies in general.

Teaching

Teaching in SL is really original, partly because of the interactivity allowed in the virtual world, partly because of the geographical distance of students and teacher in RL but not in SL.

According to my experience teaching in SL is not very different than teaching in RL, factors that determine their effectiveness are practically identical in both world, the students, the teacher, the topic. As in RL the same class taught to two different group of students give different results.

A class with chairs and a screen

Rather it is interesting to describe how classes take place in SL. I’m a teacher of LSL that is a programming language for programs embedded in objects. There is a great interest for LSL, that makes people, without any knowledge of computers and computer programming, to approach this kind of classes.

Classes are taught in special places, very often in the sky (yes SL sky is populated by a lot of buildings). There are chairs for the students, and the teacher has screens microphones, amplifiers (virtual objects of course). It is better that students stay sitting on their chair so the teacher can control them better.

The teacher can teach in two ways practically:

Public chat, typed messages on public chat, so students can read them.
Public voice chat, students and teacher use their head sets to communicate via voice.

The first option has the great advantage that chat is written and it can be reread at home. Classes using written chat are more quiet and neat.

The second option has the advantage of a greater responsiveness and interactivity, but they have the disadvantage of no written transcript, and more confusion due to people talking over the teacher and ambient sounds from every student and teacher that increments noise. Also there is the problem that classes are taught normally in English, but not everybody knows spoken English so it is preferable the written option.

I chose to teach by typing. I’m not typing the class text of course, I use a notecard reader a script that read the class text line by line and copy it on the public chat, the effect is the same as a really typed text.

Text is coupled by a slide show, with diagrams, images, photos.

During the lesson there is space for questions, and to test immediately what students are learning, it is a great advantage we don’t have a RL counterpart that is cheap as well.

Conclusions

In this short paper I tried to give an idea of the complexity of Second Life, describing only one particular aspect, that is education. I hope I showed the difficulty of transferring knowledge to new residents.

I described methods and techniques Mentor and NCI use in their work.

All of this contributes to make less traumatic the first approach to SL it also contributes to enrich SL (and Linden Labs, we are volunteers).