Thursday, May 10, 2007

Virtual Worlds in Context, Stephen Downes

Mostly an economic thing he offers.
He says there's a lot of hype. As usual he is doing a very good job at debunking some of this. He describes a desolate experience of wandering around a built environment where people are mostly absent unless you head for a casino.
SL is conceptually simple. The content is verything. The media is largely push driven.
Where are the crowds? Why was CopyBot killed?
Historically there were two sides to the web: the gamer side, and the text side.
He thinks SL is a game - making things and showing them off. You can cheat in SL.
We've seen this before in MUDs and MOOs (don't look as good though). SD and others set up the Multi-Academic User Domain (MAUD). set up in 95.
80% of online users will have second lives by 2011 (Gartner). He disagrees.
Who ons SL? The commercialisation of education (ref David Noble).
Is it scaleable? Not if there's only one provider (Linden Labs).
Interoperability? - there are issues of transportbility.
What's really happening? It taps into a latent conservatism. He shows a photo of us, next to a photo of the SL attendees and shows us that they look the same! YES! This is the same thing as recording your lectures said Andrew! Where's the imagination? Where's the next opportunity being exploited?
There are usually better ways of doing the things you can do in SL. Chatting to people in SL (especially a lot of people).
How much is the hype about following the crowd?
He is talking so much sense. OK, he knows it's easy to argue against anything, but I agree with everything he's saying. I'm waiting for him to tell us how 3D VWs is good.
He's just dismissed it as economically driven. He's right. There should be a diverse, democrartic, open source alternative. It should be like the web - a learning commons.
So what he hasn't acknowledged is some of the real potential for activity based learning in a 3DVW or the soc net potential.
Next the panel session.

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