Distance education at Harvard: I'm not convinced

This post was originally part of my epic last entry for the Harvard Extended blog, but I have decided to split it off and post it now.

It's a criticism of the Extension School's aggressive expansion into online/distance education. It's difficult for me to express, considering a good friend in the ALB program is completing his degree remotely. In addition, I have never taken an online class for credit at the Extension School -– all of my coursework was completed in person on Harvard's campus. Still, I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I want to discuss it here.

I feel the Extension School's distance education push has gone too far. It's one thing for the Extension School to offer online lectures to people who want to sample Harvard's incredible faculty and course offerings. But permitting students in some programs to get most of their degree credit sitting in front of a computer terminal, often with few opportunities for direct interaction with faculty and classmates, is a mistake. Two of the Extension School's most popular degree programs -- the undergraduate ALB and the graduate ALM in IT -- allow students to complete 88% and 90% of their coursework online, respectively. Students can earn certificates in environmental management or applied sciences without ever stepping foot inside a Harvard classroom.
I don't doubt the drive or abilities of these students (after all, some ALB candidates get better grades than their Harvard College counterparts in shared classes) but I am questioning the degree to which the Extension School has embraced for-credit online classes as an alternate means of educating students and awarding degrees. At the same time, I accept that the Internet offers benefits that are impossible to realize in the Extension School's real-world campus. Do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? I am not convinced that they do – at least not yet.

The Internet and its role in education have been discussed for many years at Harvard. In May of 1996, in an address to the First Harvard University Conference on the Internet and Society, President Neil Rudenstine recognized that the Internet was not just another mass media or communications technology, like the telegraph, radio, or television. In the educational sphere, the Internet represented a "real transformation." It was a technology that broadened access to data and course materials, reinforced methods of study, and enabled the sharing of knowledge in new and exciting ways:

"We know that the constant exchange of ideas and opinions among students -- as well as faculty -- is one of the oldest and most important forms of education. … The Internet allows this process of dialogue -- of conversational learning -- to be transferred easily and flexibly into electronic form. Communication can be carried on at all hours, across distances, with people who are on-campus or off-campus."

(Source: Neil L. Rudenstine, Pointing Our Thoughts. Harvard University Press, 2001, 123.)

For students at the Extension School, the Internet has certainly provided a special link. None of us live on campus. Many of us don't even live in Boston or Cambridge. Email, instant messaging, and the Web have provided connections to the school and to each other. These technologies have brought us closer, and they have also empowered us. My own thesis would have been impossible out without the Web. I used it to access HOLLIS and the LexisNexis Academic service, download text analysis software, and pass drafts back and forth with my thesis director while he traveled between Cambridge, Washington, and China. This blog is a product of the Web revolution, as is ExtensionStudent.com, where students and alumni gather to discuss classes, share advice, and debate issues relating to the Extension School.

But I am skeptical that distance education based on asynchronous Internet technologies (i.e., prerecorded video, online forums, and email) is a substitute for live classroom discussion and other on-campus interaction. Distance education students can't raise their hands to ask instructors questions or participate in discussions, and it's difficult or impossible for them to take advantage of faculty office hours. Teaching assistants don't always respond to email, and online class discussion boards can be neglected by students and faculty alike. In this sense, the "process of dialogue" is actually limited by technology. The main benefits of distance education become issues of convenience and access – being able to watch lectures at any time from any location, replay important sections, and see lectures by professors who otherwise don't teach live classes at the Extension School.

President Rudenstine saw some of these limitations. "No one should believe that electronic communication can be –- or should be -– a substitute for direct human contact," he said in his 1996 address. He stated that some technologies "permit an extension of the scope, continuity, and even the quality of certain forms of interaction," but added "communication over the network lacks other absolutely essential aspects of ‘real' conversations in the presence of ‘real' people."

Since then, the University has treaded very cautiously with online education. There have been a few isolated initiatives, and online video lectures and downloadable course materials are offered to Harvard alumni. But only the Extension School has made a serious attempt to develop an online curriculum and allow some students who live in other states or other countries to complete the majority of their classes remotely. Every year I see an increase in the number of online options, and the HES website currently boasts more than 100 online classes, out of more than 600 total.

This leads me to ask: If Harvard's other professional schools -– not to mention practically every other institute of higher education in America -- fail to regard online education as an acceptable substitute for in-class instruction, then why does the Extension School put them on the same plane? In the absence of any official explanation, I will offer my own speculation:

1. The school really believes the convenience of online education and the chance to expose students to special Harvard faculty outweigh the disadvantages outlined above. If this is the case, the Extension School has failed to communicate or explain its reasoning, other than offering feel-good marketing copy ("Harvard Caliber, Course Credit") on the HES website. Also, if the DCE feels that distance education is an acceptable substitute for in-person instruction, then why do certain degree programs (such as my own, the ALM/Liberal Arts) insist on a much higher level of in-class experience than the ALB and ALM in IT?
2. Opening up the course catalogue to out-of-state and international students has greatly expanded the Extension School's customer base, and increased revenues. The interest in these programs is huge -- every week, my Web traffic stats for Harvard Extended show visitors from all over the world searching for terms like "Harvard online MBA" and "Harvard online degree." The Extension School does not offer an online MBA, and the undergraduate ALB requires 16 out of 128 credits to be taken on campus, but no matter: The course offerings, the Harvard brand, and the possibility of completing between 50% and 90% of certain degrees' class requirements online are attractive enough for thousands of people take HES distance education classes casually or for credit. This has generated many millions of dollars in revenue for the Extension School over the last 10 years. However, it's not clear whether annual revenue is enough to offset costs -- distance education classes require a great deal of coordination to prepare and teach, not to mention significant hardware and software investments (hosting, editing, cameras, etc.)
3. Distance education dovetails with the Harvard Extension School's mission to offer Harvard's educational resources to members of the community. Dean Shinagel references this in his welcome message on the HES website, noting that "we stand ready to serve the community, be it local or global."
4. Harvard recognizes that the Internet is going to fundamentally transform education, and it wants to be prepared for the inevitable revolution. The Extension School has become Harvard's laboratory of sustained innovation and experimentation for distance education technologies and best practices.

The last theory is a stretch, but it intrigues me the most. The Internet has already transformed many aspects of society and human communication, and it's not unreasonable to imagine a future in which people participate in "conversational learning" and the "process of dialogue" even if they are not physically sitting at desks in the same room as their professors and classmates.

In fact, I agree with this vision. I just don't think it can be realized with streaming video, email, and online discussion forums alone.

Virtual worlds offer some hope for making highly interactive distance education a reality, and in fact the Extension School is a pioneer in this field, thanks to a partnership with the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. But, as of mid-2008, the virtual world platforms and applications used for distance education are only halfway there. The interfaces are difficult to use, the environments are hard to build and prone to unexpected problems in terms of behavior and connectivity, and in-world meetings can't scale. This technology definitely is not ready for large-scale adoption (Disclosure: I am a board member of the non-profit Immersive Education initiative, which is trying to develop and promote virtual world technologies and best practices for education).

Where does that leave the Extension School? Certainly, it's in a great position to capitalize on powerful technology and social trends, and potentially become a model for Harvard's other schools. But in the meantime, the technology is just not there. While I believe distance education is a worthy experiment, it is not a substitute for real-world instruction and discussion, and mostly online degrees should not be a part of a part of the Extension School's offerings.

Later this month, I'll be taking my first online class, Michael Sandel's Justice. It won't be for credit, but will give me some more insights into distance education. Maybe it will even change my mind. I also welcome other Extension School students to post their own thoughts on distance education below. What are some of the benefits and drawbacks that I missed? Can anyone describe what the academic research says about distance education? Am I being unfair to the Extension School and students working remotely? To what degree should distance education for credit be allowed using current technologies? What is the future of online education?

Update: Richard at ClueHQ has posted a lengthy response: Is Distance Education a Problem at Harvard?. He is a distance ed student in the ALB program, and his insights are definitely worth reading.

2nd Update: I have responded to Richard's essay in a comment on ClueHQ. Here's the preamble:

I think one of the biggest differences in our respective arguments is you are defending online distance education from the point of understanding course materials. I am approaching this issue from the point of what a “Harvard education” means.

It’s not just about having the campus experience, mastering course materials, or getting better grades than students who attend class in person. I firmly believe that a Harvard education — indeed, a university education — entails spending time in the same room with other human beings, listening to what instructors and classmates have to say, and asking questions. This is the process of dialogue that President Rudenstine referred to in 1996 — the discussions and sharing of knowledge that takes place when people are talking with each other in a direct manner, in person. It’s old school, but it works.

I describe specific advantages of in-class dialogue vs. their online components in the comment as well. You can read the entire comment here.

3rd Update: I have written about my own experience with distance education after sampling a class through the Harvard Alumni Association. See "Follow-up: My online education experience" on the I, Lamont blog.

4th update: Since writing this post, I have taken an online math class for credit, and have this to say about the online education experience:

• My online math class: Convenience gets an 'A,' but at what cost?

Some of my other writings about online education:

• SNL's "University of Westfield" ad: The reputation of online degrees takes another hit
• "The Gates Unbarred" review, part II: Shinagel's views of distance education
• MBA math review

In the digital age, Widener is "almost a museum"

Earlier this week, I was lamenting the state of research and the dissemination of knowledge in academia. Despite the incredible tools at the disposal of students, scholars, and professors, paper is still the medium of choice when it comes to publishing research and sharing knowledge.

I am not alone. This morning I was reading the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine, and spotted this quote from Venkatesh Narayanamurti, the outgoing dean of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences:

"I believe that the liberal-arts education of the twenty-first century has to be different," he says, noting that information is no longer centered in Widener Library. "The library made Harvard -- we have always had the rarest things, the best repository of knowledge, [but] information now is digital; it is on the Web. Widener Library is very valuable, but it is almost a museum."

When it comes to publishing, the Extension School is also very much oriented toward paper. Theses are bound in buckram and end up on shelves in Grossman Library. They may never be seen or read outside of the university community.

I really hope to see the Extension School and other academic units at Harvard embrace digital publishing and other Web-based ways of distributing knowledge in the next few years, so our collective efforts can be truly shared with the world, rather than being restricted to the museums of paper that dominate the campus.

Update: I just found out that in February of 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a plan that will "post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program." The source indicates that the policy applies to professors, but it's not clear whether student papers or research will be published online as well.

Thoughts on research, and saved by Scribd

When scholars from the year 2058 look back on the current state of academic research and the dissemination of knowledge, they surely will marvel at the fact that so much of it remained oriented toward printed words on paper.

It is a surprising situation. Never mind that nearly all educated members of early 21st century society are already familiar with the World Wide Web, the most extensive and accessible publishing and communications tool ever invented. Despite this, many facets of the academic world remain firmly planted in the ways of the early 20th century. Whether it's writing a term paper or conducting a major research project, the fruits of students' and scholars' efforts usually end up as printed sheets of paper destined for a professor's mailbox, a filing cabinet or a university library. Even a doctoral dissertation that takes years to complete is probably going to exist as a paper hard copy in just one or two locations. The insights contained in it may never be read by more than a handful of people.

This is not to suggest that academics are Luddites. Far from it -- most students and educators are very familiar with email, search engines, online databases, and Microsoft Word. But even if students use software programs to make and distribute a term paper or thesis proposal, electronic copies hardly ever venture beyond the hard drives of the students who created them, or the inboxes of the professors who received and graded them. On occasion, high-level research will be deemed good enough for a wider audience, but all too often these works remain restricted to books or journal articles that can only be seen in university libraries or expensive, password-protected databases. Fifty years from now, the scholars of the future will marvel at all of the ideas, hypotheses, evidence, analysis that were expressed but were only shared with a limited slice of humanity, despite the ubiquity of the Web and the many software tools at our disposal to share them with a much wider audience. This system will not only be viewed as inefficient, it will be regarded as isolating researchers from potential sources of knowledge and preventing them from making discoveries and improving our understanding of the world around us.

But there is hope. I have mentioned initiatives at MIT, Berkeley, and elsewhere that are attempting to leverage the power of the Web to spread knowledge more widely (see Online education, sharing knowledge, and a proposal for Harvard and UC Berkeley's free lectures on YouTube). Harvard Extended itself represents my own personal effort to share my experiences, observations, and research findings with a wider audience, and has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations -- Google Analytics tells me that more than 3,000 visits to Harvard Extended have taken place in the past 30 days, and nearly 85,000 visits have occurred since I first started using the tool in May of 2006.

Still, I want to do more. My blogging on Harvard Extended will come to an end in the next week, and it bothers me that the class papers I worked so hard on over the years do not have a permanent online home. Collectively, they took many hundreds of hours to research and write, and were shaped by my interactions with Extension School instructors, including members of Harvard's faculty. What a waste if they were to be resigned to a box of old papers in my basement, or a file directory on my hard drive. When I was still a student at the Extension School, I posted some of them to a fas.harvard.edu Web server. Unfortunately, I lost my FAS computing privileges when I graduated earlier this year, but I think I've found an alternate solution: Scribd.

Scribd is kind of like the YouTube of electronic documents. Registered users can upload their PDF or Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and random .txt scribblings. Anyone with a Flash-enabled Web browser can view them, or even embed them on their own websites, just like you can do with YouTube videos. The database is searchable and indexed by Google, meaning that people anywhere can readily find specific documents, if they use the right search terms.

So, I've taken a half-dozen papers and uploaded them to Scribd. The idea is to share them with my readers on Harvard Extended, and anyone else who finds them interesting. I've linked them below, and embedded one of them in this post -- my final research paper for HUMA E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext). You can read them in your Web browser, or download a PDF copy, but I've disabled text and Word exports to discourage plagiarism. Here are the papers, starting with the research proposal I prepared as part of my proseminar back in the winter of 2003:

Defining a Territorial Sea: China's South China Sea Policy in the 1950s and its 1958 Declaration on the Territorial Sea (research proposal)

• January 2004. Harvard DCE/SSCI E-100B (Graduate Research Methods and Scholarly Writing in Social Sciences), Joe and Doug Bond, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

Historical Nationalism: How Interpretation of China's Past is Used to Build Unity in the Present

• August 2004. Harvard DCE/Archaeology S-171 (Archaeology of the Silk Road), Irene Good, Peabody Museum, Harvard University

China's Emerging Overseas Chinese Policy in the Late 1970s and Implications for Ethnic Chinese Communities in Vietnam and Kampuchea

• May 2005. Hist E-1834 (Chinese Emigration in Modern Times), Professor Philip Kuhn, Harvard University

Evaluating Official Attitudes Toward Post-Mao Chinese Film Through a Quantitative Lens

• August 2006. History S-1855 (Film and History in Postwar Japan and Post-Mao China), Prof. Charles Hayford, Visiting Scholar, History, Northwestern University

Proposal for a Thesis in the Field of History in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Liberal Arts Degree

• February 2006. Prof. Donald Ostrowski and Prof. Alastair Iain Johnston, Harvard University

The Rise of the Press in Late Imperial China

• November 2007. HUMA E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext), Matthew Battles, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I am also embedding the last paper I ever completed for the Extension School in January of this year, which was also for Battles' excellent survey class. It's quite fitting that it should end up here, as the class discussed the history of the written language from the time of the Sumerians through Gutenberg's printing revolution and finally the beginning of the current publishing revolution taking place on the Web. I took things a step further, and looked at emerging Web-based software technologies and photorealistic 3D environments. It's entitled Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web:

Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web

One thing that's missing from this small collection of papers is the most important paper of my Extension School career: my thesis (title: Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993). There's are several reasons I have not included it here. While Scribd is a very easy way to host documents, one thing that Scribd does not have is a vetting process or a reputation for reliability. The contents of an academic journal will have been vetted by experts and editors, and quality will be high. On Scribd, anybody can publish anything without it being vetted by anyone, and quality is mixed. For academic papers published on Scribd, the good appears alongside the bad. You'll find astounding creative works and rigorously designed research projects, as well as limp efforts at scholarly writing and even deliberate misinformation. Users can flag offensive content and copyright violations, but the process is flawed and leaves a lot of bad content on Scribd's servers. Interesting or quality content can also be highlighted by readers and illuminated with comments, but this system is imprecise in that it does not differentiate the praise from a 15-year-old kid trying to finish his homework and a 60-year-old university professor who stumbles upon a great paper on Scribd through a search on Google.

You'll have to take my word that all of the above papers were submitted to Harvard faculty or Extension School instructors for review, and all received excellent grades. However, the weaknesses in the Scribd system have convinced me to hold off on reposting my thesis on scribd.com. I want it to have the largest possible impact on my field, and I don't believe it will have that impact if posted to Scribd. Instead, I am holding out hope for a Harvard-sponsored solution. Nearly two years ago, I petitioned the Extension School to archive masters theses in the same electronic database used for doctoral dissertations at Harvard, ProQuest UMI (Update: My thesis is now available through UMI/ProQuest). While this is a closed database that can only be accessed through university library systems, it is restricted to vetted, accepted research from university masters and doctoral programs. It is widely used in academic circles -- in fact, the literature review in my thesis referenced several dissertations that I had located in the ProQuest UMI database. I hope that someday my own thesis might also be useful to future scholars of modern Chinese history, Cold War history, and Chinese media studies, if Harvard decides to extend this resource to ALM theses from the Extension School.

The coming Video 2.0 storm

This afternoon around lunchtime there was a severe hailstorm in my neck of the woods, about a quarter mile from the junction of I-90 and I-95 (about 10 miles west of Boston). Our family has a Flip video camera, so I grabbed it and took three quick clips, including this one:



Posting video on blogs is not a big deal nowadays, but as I went through the process, I was struck by how much things have changed in just a few short years. We really are entering the age of Video 2.0, and it's happening so fast.

Consider this: Five years ago, shooting and posting video was a very convoluted process. Most cameras did not record to disc, meaning that tape had to be played through cables to a PC and potentially converted to some Web-friendly format. Then you had to find server space, which basically limited homegrown video to techies who knew the ins and outs of FTP and had access to a server to host the file. At that point, you could send the link around or promote it via your blog, and maybe if you were lucky, someone bigger would also link to it or it would show up at the top of Google search results for people interested in the topic at hand.

A couple of developments have occurred since then which greatly change the way video is consumed and distributed online. First, there was a watershed event in world of news and user-generated video, the Indian Ocean Tsunami (I discuss this disaster at the bottom of this page). Second, the rise of free video-hosting sites such as YouTube not only took care of the hosting problem with easy-to-use interfaces, but also handled format conversion automatically and created search-enabled clearinghouses for millions of consumers. Third, cheap consumer gadgets such as the Flip (see my Flip review) and video-enabled phones made it easy for people to capture and send video to friends and hosting sites.

The hailstorm video above took 30 seconds to shoot, about a minute to get onto my computer (thanks to Flip's built-in USB connector) and about 10 minutes to upload to YouTube. Before I uploaded it, I used YouTube's interface to tag it, add a description, and even "geotag" it through the integrated Google Maps function. I then sent the link via IM to friends and even left it in a comment thread on a local newspaper blog. The editor at the blog then took the YouTube syndication code and published it under another blog entry, enabling more people to see the power of the storm ... and the power of Internet-enabled video.

This type of video will really change the way we understand the world in the coming years. For my final Extension School course (Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext, see a blog description here) I devoted my term paper to the discussion of video, 3D animation, and the Internet. The paper was called "Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Internet", and I'd like to share one of the sections here:

Members of the public not only happen to witness news, they often gain access to people and places that broadcast news professionals cannot or will not see. They are able to capture vivid, on-scene accounts of major and minor events. The Zapruder and Rodney King home movies were early examples of this movement. Then, the devices were relatively expensive and there was no way to distribute the video to a wide audience, except through traditional media outlets such as television news. Now, cheap webcams, video cameras and mobile phones with built in cameras make it possible for practically anyone to record news events. The Internet lets them distribute the footage to a huge audience, and lets them bypass traditional gatekeepers, their professional editing requirements, and ethical codes. The footage they shoot is raw and real. It can be brutally honest and compelling, but also provocative and biased. The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was a watershed moment in this respect. For the first time, global awareness of a major news event was shaped in large part by footage shot by amateurs and distributed via the Internet. The footage was disturbing, but captured the scope of the destruction far more effectively than broadcast news outlets, which had no reporters on scene when the waves first struck the beaches.

While my 38-second hailstorm clip is not as important as a riot video, it really is a sign of things to come. When hundreds of people are witnessing and videotaping storms, disasters, political meetings, crimes, and sporting events, and there are technologies to aggregate this content or highlight the best parts, local TV news created by a relatively small team of expensive anchors, reporters, videographers and editors will be unable to effectively compete using traditional newsgathering methods.

No More Questions about the Harvard Extension School?

Shortly after launching Harvard Extended in June 2005, I started getting emails from people interested in the Harvard Extension School. The messages generally came from out-of-state residents who were researching the quality of the school, and/or had specific questions about the ALB and ALM programs. Most had seen the Extension School's official website, but they wanted to hear from a real student. Through Google, they found me.

Although I couldn't answer all of the questions I received, I usually tried to the best of my ability to relate my experiences at the Extension School or point them to other resources. On several occasions, I turned some of the questions and answers into blog posts, for the benefit of others who had similar questions (see Questions from a prospective Harvard Extension School student and Acceptance rate for Harvard Extension School graduate programs?) but I stopped after the trickle of emails turned into a steady flow. I received dozens of messages -- in August of last year, I remarked that I was getting about two emails per month. In the same post, I noted that some of these contacts were actually relocating to the Boston area to attend the Harvard Extension School:

It's interesting to see how readers have turned to the Harvard Extended blog for information and even inspiration. I started the blog for research-related reasons, and to chronicle my experience in the Extension School's ALM program, but for a few readers it has helped them make major life decisions.

It's a good feeling knowing that I've helped people in this way, but it's also a little unsettling. Changing one's career or academic path is very common in our society, but moving across state lines -- or across the country -- to attend the Harvard Extension School takes things to a different level. We local students can drop out of a program, or take a break from studies without any major impact on our jobs or family lives, but the folks who move to Massachusetts have already quit their jobs and said goodbye to family and friends. They have made a huge commitment, and it's much harder for them to stop or take a break. I really do admire them -- I think the ALM program is fabulous and worth all of the time, effort, and tuition I have put into it since 2003, but I am not sure I would be willing or able to quit my job or relocate my family to take part.

Shortly after writing this post, the flow of emails stopped. Around November, I realized that it had been some time since someone had emailed me about the Harvard Extension School.

What happened? While some people coming to the Harvard Extended blog find what they need and no longer need to ask additional questions, I believe that the dropoff was mainly caused by the rise of other online information resources about the Extension School, and their prominence in Google searches. These resources include the Wikipedia entry for the Extension School. There are also new HES blogs popping up, such as ClueHQ (ALB student) and Mission Control (ALM/Government), which provide additional information and opinion about the school.

It's a positive trend, especially considering that my own studies have wrapped up and the information on Harvard Extended will start to get dated. After I participate in Commencement this June, I am thinking about retiring this blog. It's been fun writing about the Extension School and my research interests, but with the end of my coursework, the successful completion of my thesis, and my graduation from the ALM program, the main reasons for maintaining Harvard Extended are removed. It will be time for me to move on.

aka "Crazy Week"

I have a very difficult week coming up, loaded with public speaking, writing, and some kids-related activities, outside of my full work and family schedule.

This afternoon, I'll give a presentation on online communities.

Tonight, I'll burn the midnight oil, in order to finish the draft final paper for From Text to Hypertext. The topic touches upon Mitchell Stephens' book, The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the World. In a nutshell, he thinks "new video" will grow to dominate mass media. My argument: Formats based on computer-generated, 3D environments will overshadow most video content. The explosion of new 3D media formats in the entertainment and news fields is something I've discussed at length before, but the paper has allowed me to hone my thesis. (I'll post excerpts when it's done). The paper will probably be around 25 double-spaced pages. I hand in the draft tomorrow night, the last session for the course, and my last class ever at the Harvard Extension School -- after this, all I need to do is submit my final version of the paper by the 19th, get a passing grade, and my ALM requirements are completed.

Thursday, I am taking part in a panel at Bentley College in Waltham on social media -- blogs, online communities, video, podcasting, etc. It's a gathering for the Social Media Club (Boston). I've presented to this group before, when I introduced Shark Bait early last year. This time, I will be talking about video -- one of my responsibilities at Computerworld, and an area of growth in the online world.

Saturday, I am attending the first day of the Boston Digital Media Summit. I have volunteered to serve as the press contact. On the second day of the summit, I will be taking part in two panels and giving the closing presentations on demographic factors that are shaping the next generation of digital media. I have a title -- Grokking Generation G: Digital Media and the Video Game Generation -- but I still have to gather stats and video clips, and put the presentation together in PowerPoint. I'll probably work on that Friday evening.

And lastly, we will be celebrating my daughter's birthday that weekend, probably Saturday night. I still have to find the time to get her a present ... most likely during one of my lunch breaks this week.

Upcoming Event: The Boston Digital Media Summit

I wanted to let local readers know about a special event taking place at Boston College next weekend. It's the Boston Digital Media Summit. The focus of the summit is Immersive Education, related virtual reality and digital media technologies, and pedagogy.

You may recall that the Harvard Interactive Media Group hosted a discussion of Immersive Education less than a month ago at the Graduate School of Education. The Boston College event is more extensive. There are two full days of demonstrations, panels, and presentations on Saturday, January 12 and Sunday, January 13. On the second day, I'll be participating in two of the panels and giving a presentation relating to one of my research interests, the video game generation and their media habits (see MMORPGs training "Generation G" for corner-office suites and My new media manifesto: "Meeting the Second Wave"). It's being sponsored by The Grid Institute, the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, and the Federation of American Scientists with the Kauffman Foundation.

There is a tentative program for the Boston Digital Media Summit, and registration is now open. I have a few guest passes for the summit; please contact me if you're interested in using them.

Next week, I'll post more details about the event and generate a map for people who are unfamiliar with the BC campus.

The HLS Berkman Center explained

The Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society is an interesting organization. I subscribe to a few of their e-newsletters, sometimes read blog posts written by Berkman fellows, and also met a few of the Berkman staff when I was in Singapore for State of Play V. Readers may recall that the Berkman Center has teamed with the Extension School to create for-credit courses in virtual reality -- see Interview: Harvard's Rebecca Nesson discusses teaching in Second Life, and Harvard on the cutting edge: A virtual Law School/Extension School class.

A few days ago, the Compete blog published an interview with HLS Professor John Palfrey, the Berkman Center's executive director. He gives a good overview of what the Berkman Center does on a day-to-day basis, as well as its mission:

It’s crucial to us at the Berkman Center that we’re not just another ivory-tower think-tank. It’s important that we do some work that is theoretical and even abstract. We trust also that our work is intellectually rigorous and that our methodologies are sound. But at the same time, we try hard to be certain that we are speaking to an audience online that is bigger than our immediate circle of students and colleagues and other friends.

One way we do that is through our various modes of research, teaching, and activism. We believe in building out into cyberspace as we study it, so we have terrific developers on the team who put up the first blog server at a university, supported the first podcast series, built real-time teaching tools for the classroom, and a whole lot of code for specific research projects. Pretty much everything we do we publish to the web – whether on a blog, on our website, on a podcast, or by video. We are never as successful at this as we’d like to be, but it’s a constant area of focus. We think of our work as relevant to a broad audience and strive to avoid navel-gazing wherever possible.

The Berkman Center is now in its tenth year, and there are several anniversary events scheduled to take place next spring and summer. Check 'em out, they look pretty interesting -- especially the release of the book Born Digital, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. For an overview of what the book is about, read Palfrey's blog post, "Born Digital."

(Thanks to Planet 02138 for the link)

Immersive Education Day reminder

I wanted to remind local readers that Immersive Education Day takes place tomorrow afternoon (Dec. 8) from 2-5 at Askwith Lecture Hall in Longfellow Hall at 13 Appian Way, Cambridge (part of the Graduate School of Education). If you haven't been there before, it's very close to the Harvard Extension School HQ at 51 Brattle St. -- the map below will show you how to get to 13 Appian Way.

Immersive Education is a suite of virtual reality technologies and processes for education. This is an area in which the Harvard Extension School has a lot of experience, owing to the joint Law School/Extension School classes that have been held in Second Life (see my interview with instructor Rebecca Nesson.) The Harvard Interactive Media Group, a campus group which I recently joined, is putting on the event, and has lined up five experts and practitioners (more info here). Virtual reality has started to make an impact on distance education, and it will be interesting to see what the panel has to say about future development.

Hope to see some other Extension School students there!


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Quoted: Mitchell Stephens' The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word

More great reading from my final course, From Text To Hypertext: A Survey of Publishing. This week, I've been reading Mitchell Stephens' Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), which tracks the rise of television and other screen-oriented mass media, including the Web. His thesis: We are still at the early stages of the video revolution. Television largely copies what came before, such as drama, serials, discussions, music, and news, and real innovation has yet to come: "I will argue that once we move beyond simply aiming cameras at stage plays, conversations, or sporting events and perfect original uses of moving images, video can help us gain new slants on the world, new ways of seeing," Stephens says on page 18. "It can capture more of the tumult and confusions of contemporary life than tend to fit in lines of type."

A few other choice quotes, starting with a comment on the decline of reading, from page 9:

"In a society where professional success now rewquires acquaintance with masses of esoteric information, books now are often purchased to be consulted, not read."

From page 11:

"The video revolution is, by my reckoning, humankind's third major revolution, and the disruptions occasioned by the first two -- writing and print -- are surprisingly similar to what we are experiencing now. The stages in which the new technologies were adopted seem comparable, as does the profundity of the transformations they cause. Even the anxieties and anger sound familiar."

From page 22, after examining the transition from orality to literacy in ancient times:

"Now we are in the early stages of another great communications revolution, surrendering what Emerson called 'these traditional splendors of letters' in favor of the moving image, in favor of video. This seems at first glance quite a powerful new tool, especially when compared to the little scrawlings Thoth was promoting, Indeed, were visitors from Plato's time (or Emerson's) to find their way into one of homes, they might marvel at the machines we have invented for cooking, cleaning, calculating, and sending mail electronically; but would not their gaze be transfixed by that box in front of the couch, with its constantly changing array of images, its miniaturized people, intense dramas, and brilliantly colored scenes?"

From page 27, after noting repeated attacks on TV programming:

"Most educated people, eminent or not, find themselves asking why video can't more closely resemble more respected forms of communication, such as books, theater, concerts or conversation."

Related:

My final paper for the class, discussing the future of imagery on the Web (cites Stephens' book):

• Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web

A short essay I wrote for The Industry Standard, based on the above paper:

• The future of the Web is 3D, not video

Online education, sharing knowledge, and a proposal for Harvard

Spotted in a Boston Globe article entitled "An MIT education is now just a click away":

On Wednesday, the school celebrated the completion of a six-year initiative to put its entire curriculum online, with all 1,800 undergraduate and graduate courses - lectures, readings, labs, even problem sets and exams - available with just a few clicks and a spirit of scientific curiosity.

The initiative, the first of its kind, has been enormously successful, so far attracting some 31 million visitors from nearly every country who are drawn to such classes as Electricity and Magnetism, Classical Mechanics, and Introduction to Algorithms.

The misleading title aside (while the OpenCourseWare program places course materials online, including some video lectures, but does not provide textbooks, interaction with instructors, or credit), the article describes one of the most important Web-based educational projects in existence. Millions of students from around the world have taken advantage of the online materials in English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Thai. MIT deserves a great deal of credit for undertaking such a bold and expensive experiment.

Meanwhile, Harvard has been very cautious in its own experiments involving Internet-based education. The Harvard Extension School has the most experience with online education, and has developed some interesting Second Life-based courses with the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, but the University as a whole has lagged in terms of sharing lectures, course materials, and research with the rest of the world.

This is not the first time I've blogged about this problem. Here's an excerpt from last year's post, Yale to offer free course video over Internet. Why not Harvard?:

... Why isn't Harvard taking more of a lead in sharing its academic resources with the global community? We see some piecemeal efforts involving individual schools and departments placing some class materials on the Internet for public consumption. FAS and the Harvard Extension School have actually posted Computer Science podcasts online, but video of class sessions is closed off to the public -- if you want to see anything more than a few samples, you have to pony up thousands of dollars to register for the classes, even if you aren't taking them for credit.

Yes, I understand that video production is expensive, and FAS wants to turn online video into a sustainable endeavor. But it is possible to strike a balance between serving the global public (one of former President Summers' big interests) and creating a successful, self-funding academic program. Can't Harvard at least match Yale's efforts, and provide some complete courses online for free without credit? I mean, seriously -- how big is Harvard's endowment now -- $29 billion dollars? Can't Bok or Knowles sign off on a little seed money and staff time to get something off the ground, perhaps using Extension School Distance Ed programming from previous years?

I have another proposal for Harvard: How about organizing a free, indexed, online database of educational research from Harvard and other institutions? In the electronic age, it's remarkable that almost all of the research and analysis taking place in colleges and universities today ends up as droplets of ink arranged on thin white rectangles of processed wood pulp, intended for an audience of one -- a professor responsible for issuing grades. This knowledge is almost never shared with other researchers or the public, thereby stifling learning and the spread of human knowledge. In the age of print, universities had an excuse. Now that the Internet is here, there is no reason to keep this information stuffed in filing cabinets or locked up in individual hard drives.

Would such a project be difficult to carry out? Sure. But MIT has proved that massive online educational initiatives can work and can yield tangible benefits for the public.

Strange database queries at the Harvard Business School, and a new model for downloading online music

My Computerworld blog was recently updated with some new functionality and a new name -- The Digital Media Machine. The focus is mostly new media technologies, ranging from the Internet to virtual reality, but I also touch on some subjects that might be interesting to my Harvard Extended audience. For instance, yesterday I blogged about a strange incident at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library:

The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, has a report of an unusual incident in a campus library. Administrators at the Harvard Business School library were forced to block a user's IP address from accessing Factiva, an online database of news articles and other text documents, after determining that the user had downloaded millions of articles in the span of a few months.

It turns out that the user in question was (probably) building a very large census of news articles and other text documents for a computer content analysis, using a script that scraped the articles from the password-protected Factiva database. I can totally sympathize: As some of you may remember, I also carried out a very extensive content analysis of news articles from China's Xinhua News Agency for my thesis, and was frustrated by the manual processes involved in getting samples and query results from LexisNexis Academic.

There's another new post on my Computerworld blog that might interest anyone who pays for online music: A proposal to revamp the per-song and per-album pricing model from a flat fee (e.g., iTune's 99 cents/song scheme) to a scaled pricing model that actually evaluates whether or not you value the song.

Bible Study: Comparing Gutenberg's invention with the rise of the World Wide Web

The course I am taking this semester -- Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext -- is getting quite interesting. In the past few classes we've gone over the transition from manuscripts to printing, and it's quite remarkable how the developments in Mainz in the 1450s parallel the Internet publishing revolution of the 1990s. Consider the page from this Latin bible (from the Library of Congress website):Compare it with this one, from a different bible now housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia:The top example is a Gutenberg bible, while the bottom image is from a "Paris" bible made two hundred years earlier. Gutenberg basically tried to mimic the illuminated manuscripts that had been made by scribes, in terms of the lettering and the use of hand-painted letters at the beginnings of new sections. He did not immediately see the potential of his application for new styles of books and new uses of printing.

When our instructor, Matthew Battles, showed us similar slides in class, I was immediately reminded of the Web publishing models used by many media companies in their initial approaches to the Internet. Web designs and content-production strategies were often based on the same strategies used for paper products.

It's not just a 1990s thing, either. Even though the WWW has been around for about 13 years, we still see print media models dictating website content. I heard from a Chinese magazine editor last year that their news cycle is based on the deadlines and submission processes used for their weekly print edition. A friend who works for a recently launched U.S. monthly said the Web design was carried out by the print graphics team, and was basically a copy of the print edition.

While I am comparing the rise of the printing press and the World Wide Web, it is important to note a few other historical developments. First, manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe. Additionally, while the printers of this era quickly discovered new applications for printing presses (e.g., the use of scientific charts, the creation of mass-produced handbills, and illustrated children's books), they could have never conceived of the magazine, book, and newspaper innovations developed in the 20th century. We are seeing something similar happening right now -- paper-based printing is still widespread, while the Web world is gleefully experimenting with new applications and media models. And while we have vague ideas that virtual reality and virtual worlds are the future of the Web, we have no idea of what these technologies will turn into 100 or 200 years from now.

Quick Taipei

Last April, during a family trip to Taipei, I took some video of life on the street and in the temples and night markets, and made a short documentary/travelogue about it, using iMovie. My intention was to immediately post it on Google Video, but the submission requirements for video were too stringent -- the Quicktime Pro export formats weren't acceptable.

How quickly the technology changes! Google has since bought YouTube, and now accepts many Quicktime export formats, including AVI and mp4. I had to mess around with the settings to get the file small enough (YouTube limits file sizes to 100 MB, and the only way I could get it that small was by using mpeg4), but you can still get the gist of the program, despite the resulting loss of quality:



You can see more images from my April, 2006 trip on my posts about Bishan Temple and Taipei street photos: Life under the overpass.

UC Berkeley's free lectures on YouTube

Last year, I pointed to the University of California, Berkeley, and its efforts to spread knowledge using audio podcasts and video. Now, UC Berkeley has expanded the video offerings to YouTube and its huge audience. CNet reports that 300 hours of lectures will be posted on the school's YouTube channel. Most are "hard science" topics. Here's a sample, a 2005 lecture, "User Experience Issues in Web Search":



There's a very lively discussion thread about this effort on Slashdot. Here's what some people have to say:

Anonymous coward:

I'm surprised the internet hasn't made us reexamine the entire nature of our higher education system. Is congregating people in one spot for four years to learn something really the best way to do it? Of course there are physical things that you need access to for a lot of classes, but we could be looking at a future where education is a lot more accessible, transparent, and open. If you could sit in on lectures and classes just because they interest you, there may be a lot more people learning things and getting exposed to knowledge they otherwise wouldn't have. You're right that there would need to be some way to certify and verify things, and that's really the main strength of the current system. I can't help but thinking there's got to be a better way.

GnarlyDoug:

This is the start of education for the masses. Books are nice, but they don't convey enough information of certain types. The lectures will help go beyond that. Even barely literate people will be able to use these to learn. It will also be a huge boon to people with dyslexia and other issues. Even more important is the time-shifting aspect. Learn when you have time. Thanks to this trend a lot of people who might not have otherwise been able to get access to this type of education will now be able to do so. In time they'll probably be able to take tests as well and for very little money get a degree at their own pace and within the needs of their own life.

The exciting thing about this is that it will actually allow the internet to do something really great. Provide effective, free, and high quality education to ANYONE who can get a computer and an internet connection. Which is rapidly becoming almost everybody in the world.

GnarlyDoug again, responding to a comparison with broadcast television (e.g., Open University, early PBS programming, etc.):

The fact that a handful of people said that about TV has what to say about this argument? The technologies aren't even remotely similar. Also, unlike with TV, we are already seeing that the educational possibilities are beginning to emerge on their own. It's not ivory tower speak. It's happening.

Posting content to the internet is basically free and mostly unregulated. The content is available on demand. The internet also provides a means for feedback, chatting, and community discussions about the content to instantly spring up.

Broadcasting on the airwaves is regulated by governmental monopolies and is a scarce commodity. It is regulated, censored, and horribly expensive. No ability for feedback loops or interaction.

The internet reduces the cost of transmitting, storing, and replicating all forms of information to almost zero. Education is mainly a form of information. That is why it will become a tool of education. Even if only 0.1% are interested in using it that way, it will provide that function.

GnarlyDoug again, responding to a comment about the role of books in education:

... This is just the start. Soon these educational videos will include dynamic information. You can't show a heart pumping in a book. You can't show a sterling engine in operation in a book. It's static. With video you can show, well, video. These lectures won't stay just being a video of some professor. Eventually someone will start putting out educational video that is much richer in content and leverages what you can do with video. There are tons of things you can do with video that you can't do with a printed page.

... Thanks to the feedback loops of the internet and network effects, the best videos will be found, rated highly, and rise to the top. So the best sources of information will soon be easy to find.

The current crop of videos aren't all that important. It's what they probably portend for the future that is important. Fully dynamic, multiple approach (written, visual, auditory), interactive, free, at will education.

You can read some more 'Net reaction/regurgitation via the blogs highlighted on Techmeme.

Quick Yoshikoder/General Inquirer update

In August, I described how I was constructing a modified General Inquirer negative dictionary to use with Yoshikoder, in order to perform a computer content analysis of press coverage of Second Life. I actually published the results on one of my other blogs, I, Lamont:

So, what does the data mean? The BW articles that were published in the latter part of 2006 generally had a lower percentage of negative terms than those published in the first four months of 2007. This agrees with the anecdotal observations by myself and a few other sources that BW hyped Second Life in late 2006.

However, the negative rates from the early part of 2006 were surprisingly high. In May 2006, the rate approached 5%, and that was the same month BusinessWeek made the famous pronouncement that "Virtual worlds abound in useful business applications." The analysis suggests that there was actually a stronger negative thread running through the BW coverage during this time, although that apparently dropped away during the summer, when the negative rate dipped to about 2.5% in August.

There are more data points, an Excel chart, and some notes about why I think the quality of the Yoshikoder-derived data quality is suspect over on my other blog.

Preparing the General Inquirer negative dictionary for Yoshikoder

I've been spending my free moments this weekend creating a Yoshikoder-friendly version of the General Inquirer negative dictionary used for computer content analysis of political texts. It entails adding wildcards, which Yoshikoder recognizes. This means that the dictionary will be far more sensitive to variations of common negative terms. The creators of the GI dictionary got some variants -- for instance, "exasperate" and "exasperation" -- but missed many other obvious ones, such as "exasperates" and "exasperating". Using "exasper*" will catch these terms.

Of course, wildcards don't work for every word. For instance, "envy" and "envious" could be replaced by "env*", which would get variants such as "envies," but would also catch unrelated words with neutral or even positive meanings -- "envelope," "envision", etc. In this case, I simply added "envies" to the list, rather than using a wildcard.

Converting the General Inquirer dictionary is no easy task. There are 2000 words in the original dictionary that my thesis director gave me (although I see another version contains 2291 words), and each one requires manual review to ensure that wildcards are effectively used and don't introduce unwanted terms into the content analysis that I am planning -- a review of press coverage of Second Life in the past 18 months. Although the GI dictionaries were originally created to examine political texts, I believe they can be used to evaluate other types of text content as well. The GI negative dictionary doesn't contain some of the terms that one typically sees in American or British media articles about new technologies, but it does have a very solid baseline list of negative terms that one might see anywhere.

To see how I used Yoshikoder for my thesis research, check out the following posts:


Thesis update: One small step completed, but still a long way to go

Thesis update: Revising proposal, going granular with Yoshikoder

Thesis update: A eureka moment

Thesis update: Chapter 3 (draft) completed

Terra Nova recap

I've been meaning to put together a short list of the topics that I discussed on Terra Nova during my stint last month as guest author. I mentioned a few of them here -- most notably, the interview with Rebecca Nesson on her Harvard Law School/Extension School teaching experience in Second Life -- but there were a few other excerpts from posts and comments that I submitted to Terra Nova which I also want to record here, along with links back to the full versions.

In addition, I am including links to a few interesting responses that others made, but unfortunately cannot include every one -- a few threads received several dozen responses apiece!

---

Comment: Virtual worlds, MMOs, Taiwan and China:

Issues that potentially limit virtual/electronic interaction are China's constantly evolving regulations and restrictions on Internet use in the country, and the ability of authorities to close down local websites, block individual sites or domains overseas, and even monitor traffic and messages for certain characters and phrases that the government doesn't like (e.g., names of dissidents, "Taiwan independence", etc.). These controls -- part of the so-called "Great Firewall of China" -- are only partially effective, but potentially limit the ability of local Internet users to see information that goes against the official line. Local media outlets that publish alternate interpretations of Dynastic or Republican history can be shut down, while Taiwanese and foreign sources can be blocked. ...

The other issue which limits exchange between Taiwan and China are the different character sets in use in the two countries. Standard spoken Mandarin in China (putonghua, or "common tongue") is very similar to Mandarin spoken in Taiwan (Guoyu, or "national language") but Chinese use simplified characters (jiantizi) which impacts typing, search, software installation, Web design, and game design.

What this all means for game and VW developers is that they cannot simply sell and support the same product in Taiwan and China. Localization is required, and in China, special sensitivities have to be taken into account.

---

Post: Second Life's infrastructure issues prompt an open letter to Linden Lab

My follow-up comment: "I don't believe Linden has to worry about residents abandoning ship. Where would they go?"

• (Tripp's response)
• (thoreau 's response)

My second follow-up comment: Proprietary virtual worlds/"Is giving up SL for another virtual world an option?"

---

Post: Evaluating virtual population projections:

... Can we expect the number of users/residents for individual virtual worlds to double every few months, or every year? Will hundreds of millions of people also have a virtual presence in just four-and-a-half years, as Gartner suggests? If not, when will a majority of "active Internet users" also be active virtual users?

In my opinion, growth in virtual platforms will continue, but at more restrained levels, owing to demographic usage patterns and technical limitations. For instance, in the United States, converting 78 million baby boomers to active MMO gamers or SL participants will be difficult. Most boomers are well below retirement age, and finding the time to join virtual worlds in between existing family and work responsibilities is difficult. Moreover, the boomers, and for that matter, people of all ages already have ample leisure time distractions, including television and traditional Internet use. And even if millions of boomers suddenly wanted to plunge into virtual worlds, perhaps attracted by some killer virtual app or community, would they be able to do so? ...

My follow-up comment: Gartner virtual world projections:

"I am very interested in seeing what types of SL competitors emerge, and how the features and functionality will differ. Ease-of-use will be critical to building support for new VWs, not just in terms of the client UI, but also for the 3D building tools. The company that develops a tool that makes avatar or 3D object creation as easy as Blogger makes creating a website will usher in a massive wave of adoption and interest. I am also interested in seeing how standards affect competition."

• (response from Mike Sellers)
• (my response to Mike and others)
• (Mike's second response)

---

Post: 3D media in 3D worlds:

... I mention these examples to illustrate the shift in popular views of 3D animation. This technology was once remarkable. It is now so common that it is taken for granted. Hollywood movies, kids' programming on television, and even advertisements are the most conspicuous examples, but these may soon be joined by a crop of next-generation 3D media formats that are being developed by academic labs, hobbyists, and a few adventurous media companies.  Examples include Video Mods, NewsAtSeven, and Machinima. I recently wrote an essay about these and other emerging media technologies, "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution," but what I am interested in discussing with the Terra Nova community is how these formats, programs, and characters might be integrated with virtual world experiences.

We know that people make friends, form teams, and respond to pitches for products and services within virtual worlds, paralleling experiences in the real world. Is it reasonable to assume that other real-world communications habits -- such as listening to, watching, or interacting with mass media -- will be transferred to virtual spaces in the years to come? If so, what 3D formats will be able to gain traction, and how will the personalization options and creative freedoms available in virtual worlds lead to new formats and usage patterns? In Second Life, there have been some very creative marketing experiments using interactive 3D buildings and objects. But why don't we see Pororo, Buzz Lightyear, the cast of Red vs. Blue, and other 3D "stars" in Second Life or other virtual worlds?

• (response by Ren Reynolds)
• (my response to Ren)

---

Post: Virtual reality and higher education: Another perspective:

... There are other virtual world/virtual reality technologies [besides Second Life] that can support instruction and classroom activities, and this week we will get a perspective from someone who is using these alternate technologies to teach. The interview is with Aaron Walsh, a programmer and instructor who has used modding software and other tools to create VR classrooms for courses at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College (the inset photo is from one of his experiments, and depicts "students gathering in the virtual Egyptian environment"). His VR classes are part of a larger effort that he is leading to develop a standards-based educational platform called Immersive Education. ...

My follow-up comment:

One interesting aspect of using WoW or Unreal Engine as the basis for classroom sessions, is that both platforms are optimized for fighting/killing/combat. That's not a bad thing -- it certainly serves as a hook for younger students, potentially flattens out the learning curve, and helps with customization-related tasks, thanks to the large developer/support base. Nonetheless, it seems to me that using these tools for instruction is a square peg/round hole type of situation. Of course, instructors can neuter the fighting nature of these platforms, while emphasizing the engines' communication, teamwork, and design capabilities.

Second Life, on the other hand, is a platform optimized for creativity. That can be a disruptive force, but it also appeals to many institutions. It allows customization of environments and objects, and lets students be themselves in a way that might not be possible with many gaming-based worlds.

At some point there may be virtual worlds or VR platforms that are optimized for education. My question for the group: What does "optimized for education" mean to you? What capabilities, characteristics, tools, cost considerations, etc., are most important to teaching students in a virtual world or space?

• (response from illovich on what "optimized for education" means)
• (Aaron Walsh's response to illovich and others)

---

Overall, the Terra Nova blogging experience was a good one. I've blogged about 3D technology, MMOs, and virtual worlds on my I, Lamont blog for three years, and have sometimes talked about virtual worlds on Harvard Extended and my Computerworld blog, but my month on Terra Nova was a great opportunity to discuss and debate these issues with a formidable audience of academics, experts, and enthusiasts.

Many thanks to Aaron Delwiche, Dan Hunter, and Greg Lastowka for extending the invitation -- and I hope to keep on contributing to the newer threads in the future!

Counterfactual reasoning, gaming, and Niall Ferguson

In 2003, during my ALM proseminar at the Harvard Extension School, the instructors (Doug and Joe Bond, of Harvard's Weatherhead Center) introduced the class to a fascinating research technique: Counterfactual reasoning.

How does it work? Simply put, using "counterfactuals" to study history or government policy entails applying an alternate reality scenario to a real-world situation. Then, using logic or knowledge of other issues, researchers can evaluate what factors were most important to the real-world situation.

For instance, counterfactual reasoning based on the following scenario allows scholars to evaluate President Kennedy's role in determining U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1960s:

"Had Kennedy not been assassinated, would the United States have escalated its military involvement in Vietnam in the mid-1960s?"

Authors and scriptwriters have had a field day with counterfactuals, often in the form of "alternate world" fiction, such as Robert Harris' Fatherland (what if Germany had defeated Britain, and Hitler had lived?).

Some strategy-based videogames also incorporate counterfactual scenarios. And it turns out there is academic interest in such games. Wired's Clive Thompson that Harvard historian and counterfactual researcher Niall Ferguson was so fascinated by Making History, "a game where players run World War II scenarios based on exhaustively researched economic realities of the period" that he is helping advise its creator, game studio Muzzy Lane, on a new game series that will let players "model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran."

Counterfactual games also tie in with the "Serious Games" movement, as reported by Serious Games Source.

Interview: Harvard's Rebecca Nesson discusses teaching in Second Life

Last Friday, as part of my guest author activities for Terra Nova, I interviewed Harvard Extension School instructor Rebecca Nesson. Last year, Nesson was one of the instructors for CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, a joint Harvard Law School/Harvard Extension School course that was mostly held (for Extension School students, at least) in an Internet-connected 3D world called Second Life. This Fall, she will be leading a new Extension School course, Virtual Worlds. In the interview, she talked about her experiences using Second Life as a platform for distance education, and also described how students used the virtual world to interact with the CyberOne instructors and each other.

Following is the complete, unedited transcript of the May 11, 2007 telephone interview with Nesson (excerpts will be published on Terra Nova). The full transcript is quite long -- more than 3,500 words -- but it will hopefully provide some useful insights to educators and students who are considering classwork in virtual reality environments. Such activities should not be seen as fringe educational experiments -- other users on Terra Nova (a blog network devoted to the discussion of virtual worlds) have pointed me to a long list of colleges and universities that use Second Life for instruction. As we shall see in the transcript, there are some advantages to using virtual worlds as educational platforms, and virtual world-based instruction may soon begin to outpace traditional distance education offerings using Internet video streams, static websites, and text-based discussion forums.

Without further ado, here is the full transcript of the interview with Nesson.

Ian Lamont: At the beginning of the [CyberOne] class, there were 40 people registered. Does that include everybody, including [students from] the Harvard Law School, or just the Harvard Extension School students who were taking it online?

Rebecca Nesson: That's just the Extension School students. We had a little bit of attrition, mostly right at the beginning — for people who didn't really realize how demanding the program was going to be on their computers, so we probably ended up with about 30 people.

Lamont: When you say the program was demanding on their computers, were they using systems that weren't up for it in terms of processing power, or were there network constraints?

Nesson: I don't know. For some of them, there may have been firewalls and they were trying to do it from work, or Internet connection issues. It was a little unclear what was the problem people were having. It was not very widespread, actually. As is sort of typical wit h the Extension School classes, there were a few people who signed up, but weren't able to make the time commitment that the course [required] so for them I wasn't sure whether it was a technical issue or not.

Lamont: Aside from these issues, what was the feedback [you heard] from people about the Second Life interface?

Nesson: Overall it was very positive. I would say that there was a definite arc to it. At the beginning, there was a certain amount of Second Life culture shock, where people try to get acclimated about how to use the interface. The first impression that a lot of people had about it was that it was a very chaotic environment in which to have a class discussion because everyone talks at once and there's no threading in the discussions. When you read the transcripts of the discussions, they can seem fairly disjointed and that felt a little disorienting to people right at the beginning.

We all got used to it over the course of the semester, and also got much better at it. One of the things that we brought to the class with us are years of built-up experience of how one is supposed to act in a class as a student and an instructor. And a lot of those norms — like, raising your hand and waiting for someone to stop speaking before you begin speaking — they just dont make sense in the Second Life environment because it would just take way too long to have a discussion.

And as a result we were basically faced with the challenge of having to develop a whole new set of classroom norms that worked in this environment. Once we got that going, everyone got much more comfortable with the environment. By the end of the semester, people were really enjoying it.

There were some people who had a much easier time expressing themselves in the Second Life environment, than in the more formal writing [assignments] and turning it in on our courseware website. So for those people, it really opened up the distance education experience to have this other method of being able to express themselves and interact with the instructor and other students.

And there were some students on the other side of things who were very comfortable writing traditional response papers and had a harder time in the spontaneous, more interactive discussions that we were having in the classroom environment in Second Life. So all in all, that's a major improvement. I would prefer for my classes to be available to a wider range of learning and styles of expression.

Lamont: You just said that some people found it easier to interact in Second Life. Why do you suppose that is? Does it relate to their personalities, or the fact that they're used to typing IMs?

Nesson: Let me be clear. I don't necessarily mean it would be easier for them than acting in real life. This is just opposed to them acting in their normal way in a distance education class, interacting mainly through a website and through email with their instructors.

I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.

And having a physical representation of their "selves" through their avatars, whether it looked like them or looked like something completely different, was quite important in having them establish relationships with each other. Because it gave people a way to express something of their personality that wasn't necessarily directly related to what we were doing in the class. And it just was the icebreaker for people beginning to relate to each other and make comments about somebody's cool dress or something like that and get a little conversation going.

So having the class have a sense of a community, and being a little bit social for most students really adds to the experience. It certainly added to the experience for me. I think that probably helped to draw in some students.

Also, we tend to think of Second Life as a less expressive environment than face-to-face environments because at the moment we don't have the ability to easily do gestures and facial expressions or even to really direct our gaze really well.

It does in other senses offer people a wider range of ways that they can express themselves, and that was something I was excited about. Early on, when I was writing on the blog, just finding that some students just really seemed to take to the creative aspects of the environment and really try to use the unrestrained environment and really try to violate the laws of physics as part of their way of existing in the world, and it just gave them a range of expression that doesn't really exist when you are typing out a response paper and turning it in.

Lamont: What surprised you in terms of the creative aspects and the things that they did in the classroom sessions?

Nesson: I guess what surprised me was that I had sort of a typical narrow view of what Second Life was going to be like. I was thinking of it as a big improvement over a chatroom but I hadn't really considered as something that had potentials that really went beyond what I had experienced with other technologies. I think that it's not until you spend some time in there that you start to get a sense of the way in which it's different, because it's kind of hard to pinpoint, to put into words, what exactly is making the difference.

So I would say the biggest surprise for me wasn't the way that some people were expressing themselves, but the experience of all of us running our classes in a text-based environment. I expected that to be only a hindrance, and at the beginning it did seem like a hindrance, it seemed a little chaotic, and it was something that we had to get used to. But as we progressed in the class, it became clear that running the class in a text-based environment has a whole lot of advantages over the face-to-face environment that I just hadn't anticipated.

The first one that was really striking, was that in all my years of teaching classes, there are always some students in the class who are very hard to get to speak up. You can ask them a direct question, but basically, unless they are put on the spot, these students will not volunteer their own opinions in class, and I think that there are various reasons why people are reticent and don't want to do that. Sometimes I think people are shy and don't want to be put on the spot — all the conversation stops, and everyone turns to look at them. In some cases, students for whom English is not their first language, it really can be an intimidating thing to have to extemporaneously put together English sentences like that in a classroom environment.

In Second Life, that problem of students not participating in class discussions just totally disappeared. And when I thought about it, these reasons, these challenges of speaking up in a regular class went away in this environment. In Second Life, when you want to contribute something to the class discussion, you just go ahead and start typing it in your chat box, and nobody turns to look at you, even if they do notice that your avatar is doing the typing motions, they are not actually looking at you, it's just your avatar, and your avatar is not doing anything embarrassing. When you are ready to enter your comment into the conversation, you just hit enter. And it doesn't have that moment where everybody stops and looks at you. Your comment just goes right into the conversation, along with everybody else's. So i think a lot of the anxiety that goes along with the public-speaking aspect of participating in class discussions, is just removed in this environment.

On the flip side, we didn't have any trouble with students who dominate the discussion. There's always been the phenomenon of the student who ends every sentence with a conjunction in order to not stop their comment, and you can do that as much as you like in Second Life, and it doesn't stop anybody else from participating in the discussions. What's nice about that is very frequently people who usually speak a lot in class have a lot of very good things to contribute, and it's hard as a teacher to shut somebody down in order to make space for other students, especially if you do feel that you want to be encouraging of their interest and enthusiasm. And this just takes away that problem as well.

So for me the idea that I would actually end up almost preferring to run a class in a text-based environment to a voice-based environment, that was a huge surprise.

Lamont: In Second Life, or a virtual world, or any chat environment, don't you have students who are really stepping over each other, and it's impossible to sort out all the questions that really need to be answered?

Nesson: Well, it turns out that that was not a problem, and I think there are a few reasons for this. First of all, over the course of the semester, I developed some skill at moderating this type of group discussion in this type of environment. Basically, what happens is you have a few different threads of discussion that start, and the job of a teacher or discussion moderator becomes continually trying to weave the threads together, so that you don't end up with a discussion that's too fragmented. Because if it's too fragmented, it's as you described — it's just a bunch of disconnected things going on.

But you also have some help as a moderator, from just the natural effect of trying to participate in one of these discussions. If there's a lot going on, you have to put a fair amount of energy into reading the discussions and sorting out what's happening. So even if there are a lot of people, it's not that easy for everyone to be adding some totally different thing all at once. People sort of tend to stay on one topic or another, especially if the moderator is doing her job well.

But that said, we definitely did break the class up into smaller groups for discussions fairly frequently for exactly this reason — just like with any discussion, it's just much more effective if you have it with smaller groups.

Now that Linden Lab has open sourced the viewer for Second Life, there are quite a few possibilities open to make this management task easier. Right now when you chat in Second Life, everything just goes into an undifferentiated chat history. But it would be possible to add some simple threading technology to help identify different threads in the discussion and make it easier to follow. Perhaps even some moderation tools that would let the moderator modify what was going on in the discussion in some reasonable way. I am not exactly sure what that would look like.

Lamont: What's going to happen when voice chat is added to virtual worlds like Second Life? Will that kind of lead to the problems that you've had in the real world educating and getting people to speak up?

Nesson: I am not sure I am able to predict what's going to happen. I do think that there are some potential serious problems because it's going to be harder for people to access it and participate and get good sound quality at first. It will be difficult, because there are some people who don't have the ability to listen to sound when they come into a discussion that's mostly happening in voice. That could be problematic.

But assuming that everything works just fine technically, then I think the biggest challenge will be seeing if everyone can integrate text and voice. If everyone can speak and type at the same time, will anybody bother typing anymore? And I'm not sure. I just don't know whether people will do that. What I imagine is that Linden Lab is going to make it possible to have areas in which voice is not permitted and areas in which voice is permitted.

We're at the moment considering building a campus for the Extension School in Second Life, and one part of our design is to have some classrooms that are text based classrooms, and some that are voice-based classrooms.

I do think the voice is going to be very, very tempting for people, and it's also going to be very useful in some situations and for some purposes. And I certainly wouldn't want to say, “no it shouldn't be used.” I do think that as soon as you have voice, you get back to these regular problems of having to wait, and speak one at a time, and people can monopolize the mike and that kind of thing.

Lamont: In virtual reality classroom environments, what's your perspective on grading and evaluating students?

Nesson: It's really no different than in a regular face-to-face class. For CyberOne, we obviously had to know the real-life identities of the students who were in our class, in order to grade them. For some people, who wanted to keep their other avatars anoymous, they created a new avatar to take our class. From my perspective, I expect that it is the actual student who is operating their own avatar, and I grade them just as I would in another environment.

Lamont: What types of tools would help you be a better educator? If you could magically create or program some tools or objects or something in Second Life that would help you teach, what would they be?

Nesson: I'll tell you what we used that were really great. We had a video screen which was wonderful and also streaming audio, which was great. If you want to use any lecture-type material in Second Life, those are total must-haves.

Then we aslso used a basic slide projector, which is similar to having PowerPoint, and that obviously can be useful. I didn't use it all that much.

One thing were using right now in the Internet and Society course which I am not teaching, but other people at the Berkman Center are teaching, is something called the Question Tool, which is a great tool that the Berkman Center has developed. How their class works is that it's webcast live into our classroom in Second Life. So students who are taking the class from a distance can attend the class in real time and watch it and they can sit with the other students in Second Life.

And the way that they can participate in the class is through the Question Tool. How it works is that anybody who wants to can post a question on the Question Tool, or they can vote on somebody else's question. And the Question Tool organizes the questions from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, in order of popularity [depending on] how many votes they've gotten, so the professor then has access to this list of questions or comments coming from the student audience that's sorted in a way that's actually meaningful in terms of their level of relevance and interest to the students in the class.

One of the things that's really cool about it for the Internet and Society class is that students who are physically in the classroom at Harvard Law School and the students who are in Second Life are using the same instances of the Question Tool so that they're interacting directly with each other through that. So that is one great tool, and it's not actually in Second Life, in the sense that you do everyithing in Second Life. Right now, we just have it set up so that there's an object you click in Second Life and it takes you to the Web page, which is the interface for the Question Tool.

The main thing that doesn't exist in Second Life and I can't for the life of me figure out how one could program, is something that's more like a blackboard. A free-form writing tool is something that I would really love to have. As a person who studies Computer Science, I am frequently wanting to draw all kinds of diagrams on a board if I am teaching students about Computer Science, and there's really no way to do that in Second Life. So you have to simulate doing everything you want to do like that, using slides, and the problem with that is when a question comes up, and you need to give an example that isn't already on your slides, there's not really any good way to do that in Second Life right now.

Lamont: Based on your experience with CyberOne, and your observation with the ongoing Internet and Society class, and the upcoming Virtual Worlds class, do you think that virtual world activities and classes are here to stay at Harvard, or it's still in the experimental stage, and you don't really know how it's going to end up?

Nesson: I think it's still in the experimental stage definitely, but I also think that it's here to stay. I am not sure that Second Life is the thing that's going to stay, but virtual worlds technology in general is just a giant leap forward ahead of any of the previous education technologies that we were using for distance education. And at least in distance education, I can't see moving backwards from that, especially once we get better abilities to represent people using gestures, facial expressions, voice maybe, various different things that actually make the experience even richer than it is now.

It's a real challenge to figure out how to best use technology like this in conjunction with face-to-face classes. What we did in the fall that was I think pretty exciting and definitely an innovating thing to do was to incorporate Second Life as a way to invite people that were part of the public at large to participate in the class, and actually provide something of use to the students who were enrolled in the class in exchange for having free access to the materials. So for them, we held some office hours in Second Life where they could come and they could discuss the lectures and issues that were going on in class. They had full access to all the lecture videos and the materials for the class.

And as the semester progressed we started to realize that it was important for that group of people to contribute something back to the students in the class, so the students in the class wouldn't feel that they were having the experience that they had paid for diluted by sharing it for free with other people.

I think that there are just so many ways that this could be done. This is just one tiny example and only really the tip of the iceberg, as far as this is concerned. We came up with the idea of having a "trial" in which the [Harvard Law School] students could practice their lawyering skills and actually go through the whole experience of a trial, and we were able to recruit people from our at-large participant group to participate as jurors in the trial. So they sat and listened to all the arguments and deliberated, and returned a verdict.

This was a pretty good use of Second Life because it was a great way for us to bring together a group of volunteers. it would have been extremely difficult to recruit and get them together at the Law School for a real mock trial. And also because for Law School students, who are trying to learn how to actually raise the appropriate objection at the appropriate time in a trial, in a real-life mock trial, often those moments go by too fast, and it's just extremely difficult to practice it. So in Second Life, in the text-based environment, things go a little bit more slowly, and additionally you can have a whole team of Law students operating a single avatar. So you can have a bunch of minds working together and discussing together — without actually talking out loud in the courtroom — and helping to direct their avatars to do the right thing. So that turned out to be a great experiment.

We've now done two trials in Second Life, and they haven't been perfect, but they've certainly been big successes and very interesting.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Nesson is the instructor for Virtual Worlds, scheduled for the Fall 2007 semester at the Harvard Extension School. She is currently a candidate for a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she studies computational linguistics and conducts research in the area of synchronous grammar formalisms and applications to computational semantics and machine translation. Nesson is also a 2001 graduate of the Harvard Law School and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.