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

Presenting at the Boston Digital Media Summit

I am blogging from Boston College at the second day of the Boston Digital Media Summit, and have seen some great demos as well as interesting discussions about virtual worlds, games, and potential educational applications in 3D, computer-generated environments (the theme of this year's summit is Immersive Education).

One of the most amazing things to observe is how far the graphics have come in just a few years. Photorealism is coming. Less than two years ago, I presented at the "SIGGRAPH summit," which was the first installment of the Boston Digital Media Summit, held at Boston City Hall. The most impressive graphics on display were the demos by Jeff Kleiser, a professional visual effects artist who has worked on Tron, the X-Men movies, theme park installations, and television commercials. The games-based demos, including mine (I showed a machinima called The French Democracy), were far more limited -- textures were rough, character movements could be jerky, lighting was simplistic.

Not anymore. One of the BC students showed a demo of Crysis, an FPS that depicts a series of commando attacks in the year 2020. The graphics were stunning, albeit processor-intensive (it was set up on a custom PC running some major graphics hardware). Plants have always been tough to model in 3D, which I suppose is one of the reasons why even professional 3D CGI animation seems to prefer to environments that don't have plants -- witness Cars, Ice Age, and Pororo: The Little Penguin. Not with Crysis. A large part of it is set in a jungle, and the movements of the plants was very realistic -- the leaves were individually rendered, the physics of characters or other objects brushing against them was convincing, and even the little breezes that moved the leaves on individual branches of a bush looked like the real thing. It would be a stretch to call it photorealistic -- the mouths of the players still need work -- but photorealism is definitely on the horizon. I would embed a trailer in this blog, but the ones that are available are violent. You can see some Crysis trailers here; note that all are rated M.

I am joining one panel in the mid afternoon, and giving a presentation at the end of the day. The title of the presentation is "Grokking Generation G: Digital Media and the Video Game Generation," and gets into the demographic and technology trends that will impact the development and consumption of 3D media in the coming years. It's the third presentation I've given this week (I gave two earlier this week on online communities and video production at work) and the panel will be the second one I've participated in, after the discussions at the Social Media Club Boston event at Bentley College on Thursday night. After this is over, I can take a little breather -- I don't have any public speaking engagements scheduled for the next few months.

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!


View Larger Map

The Extension School and campus organizations: My experience with the HIMG

I first started taking classes at the Extension School in 2002, and formally matriculated into the ALM program in 2004. However, other than attending some seminars and symposia over the years, and joining a few Extension School gatherings, I haven't been involved with clubs or other extra-curricular activities at Harvard. Besides being far too busy with school, work, and family, I also haven't been able to find an on-campus group that really aligns with my personal, academic, or professional interests.

Until now. When I was in Singapore for State of Play V, someone distributed copies of the Harvard Interactive Media Review. It was an interesting read. The first issue contained an interview with Berkman Center founder and Law School Professor Charles Nesson (who helped bring Harvard's first virtual worlds-based course to the Extension School) as well as essays about business in the metaverse, new media literacy, and virtual learning. Some of the issues dovetailed with what I have written about in my personal blog, on Computerworld.com, in Terra Nova, and elsewhere.

I found out that the Review was published by an on-campus organization called the Harvard Interactive Media Group, which is an official student group of the College and has members from a few of Harvard's graduate/professional schools. According to the HIMG FAQ, the group aims to "bring together Harvard students and professors with members of academic and development communities beyond to explore the form and impact of interactive media, video games in particular." The FAQ also notes that Harvard has been lagging in this field:

While certainly our projects are valuable in and of themselves, we view them also as a means of establishing momentum, as facts on the ground, in our longer-term bid for an official interactive media program here at Harvard. Schools around the country—MIT, Carnegie Mellon, USC, Indiana, Madison, and others—are moving aggressively into the interactive media space. Harvard is being left behind.

In the past, be it with digital computing or Psychology, Harvard has been a leader in the exploration of burgeoning academic fields. We believe that Harvard should reprise this role, and ensure that its leadership carries over from the physical world into the virtual one as well. For now, we’re networking with various departments around the University. In the next five to ten years, we hope that the HIMG will be a launching point through which Harvard, as an institution, can leap into the field.

This semester I have started to participate in the HIMG meetings and activities. Through the group, I was able to attend a panel discussion at the Business School a few weeks ago ("The Business of Video Games: From Virtual Worlds to Casual and Serious Games"), and next Saturday afternoon we are holding an on-campus event on Immersive Education. (preliminary information here, and I'll post the official description of the event in a separate entry).

Besides the HIMG, Harvard Extension School students participate in other on-campus groups. A friend of mine joined the Kendo club, the Harvard Graduate Council has included ALM students in its governance and activities over the past few years, and Extension School volunteers have joined Phillips Brooks House Association programs. Many clubs and organizations welcome students from across the University, and these are great opportunities for Extension School students to participate in campus life beyond taking classes and conducting research.

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 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.

Back from State of Play V: Conference recap

For the past two weeks, I've been meaning to write about the State of Play V conference in Singapore. I gave a brief report about the opening night's entertainment (a documentary about Second Life) but I also wanted to talk about what happened over the following two days of the conference. It was the first time I attended State of Play, and it really was an eye-opening experience for me.

I only become aware of the extensive academic interest in virtual worlds relatively recently, through my Terra Nova experience, and reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, R.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds, and Nick Yee's MMORPG research. Many virtual world researchers were on hand to discuss their work in Singapore. My panel included Henrik Bennetsen, a Stanford researcher who has spent the better part of six months inside Second Life; Aleks Krotoski, a Guardian columnist and University of Surrey PhD candidate who is studying social networks and online social influence; and anthropologist Thomas Malaby, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is in the midst of writing an ethnography of Linden Lab and its relationship to Second Life. I also met Ted Tschang, a Singapore Management University professor who has conducted some very interesting research into video game development.

The panel went well. It was entitled "Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants", and was described as follows:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

SoP V co-organizer Dan Hunter led the panel, which was in presentation format with a Q&A at the end. The others gave recaps of their respective research methodologies. I talked about the qualitative and quantitative approaches used by journalists, speaking from my perspective as a Computerworld editor and graduate student conducting media-related research at the Harvard Extension School. My main points: There is some stellar coverage relating to virtual worlds in the popular press and industry publications (I pointed to Wired and the New Yorker's Will Wright interview), but for the most part, journalists are quite limited in terms of the amount of time they can spend conducting research, restrictions relating to length and editorial focus, and problems finding and using quantitative research. Sensationalism, generalization, and poor use of statistical data are problems in many countries. I was able to give several examples from the American, Chinese, and Taiwanese media.

I concluded that the news media will play a major role in shaping the attitudes and understanding of the 90+ percent of the world's population that currently has no concept of social or gaming virtual worlds. I also revealed the results of some database searches I conducted, which support this conclusion: According to LexisNexis Academic, the number of references to "virtual world" or "virtual worlds" in "major US and world publications" (consisting of English-language newspapers and magazines from all parts of the world) has trended as follows, over the last three years:

July 2005: 45 results
July 2006: 81 results
July 2007: 199 results

I also searched Factiva for 虚拟世界 (xu1ni3shi4jie4), the simplified Chinese for "virtual world") in all languages, all companies, and all regions (which indexed results from publications in China, plus a few in Hong Kong and Singapore), and came up with the following numbers:

All of 2004: 271 results
All of 2005: 553 results
All of 2006: 624 results
2007 to June 30: 472 results

Assuming that the higher numbers reflect increased coverage, as opposed to the databases including more news sources, the data indicates that more people are indeed being exposed to virtual world-related concepts through the mass media. It will be interesting to see how their perspectives of virtual worlds and acceptable behavior in these worlds is shaped by what they see in the news in the years to come.

Besides the academics, State of Play V had large legal and industry contingents. The legal focus should come as no surprise, considering the history of the conference and its organizers, which include the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, Yale Law School, and New York Law School. The industry representation was dominated by people and companies working with social virtual worlds -- Second Life, There.com, HiPihi -- as well as several marketing and consulting firms. I've already talked about There.com on Computerworld, and hope to discuss HiPiHi on a later post here or on my Computerworld blog.

There are also supposed to be "video timecapsules" posted to the SoP V website at some future date. Henrik and I taped an interesting, half-hour discussion about Second Life, emerging software and hardware technologies, and issues relating to media coverage of virtual worlds. I'll post a link when it goes online.

Many thanks to Dan Hunter, Aaron Delwiche, and the staff of Harvard's Berkman Center for making my trip to Singapore possible!

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

Mandarin Chinese gaming vocabulary in Taiwan and China

I am a proficient Mandarin speaker. I lived in Taiwan for six years, studied for more than two years at the Taipei Language Institute, and traveled extensively throughout mainland China. I have family members from Taiwan and China, and we try to speak Mandarin with our kids as much as possible (a difficult proposition, considering both are more and more inclined to speak English -- I'll try to blog about this sometime in the next few months).

Anyway, even though I am proficient in Mandarin, I have not achieved fluency. I often have to learn specialized vocabulary lists prior to conducting interviews or preparing for visits to Asia. In advance of my trip to Singapore to participate in the State of Play V conference, I wanted to get a handle on the Mandarin terminology used to describe virtual worlds and popular gaming platforms. These are words that do not appear in my Oxford putonghua dictionary, so I asked a friend and former colleague of mine to help translate some of the Mandarin used to describe the videogame industry and related software concepts.

It was interesting to see her list. I recognized many of the characters right away, and many terms made perfect sense -- these phrases are often direct translations of the modern English expressions, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲, da4xing2duo1ren2xian4shang4jiao3se4ban4yan3you2xi4).

Others were readable, but were clearly not character-for-word equivalents. According to my wife, some of these terms may have been derived from classic Chinese literature, or older translations from foreign sources -- for instance, the term for "dungeon" is 地下城 (di4xia4cheng2), lit. "underground castle," or 魔洞 (mo2dong4), lit. "monster's cave." It's also interesting to see how -- in certain cases -- the terminology has split in Taiwan and China.

The list:

3d (3d image): (3D 影像）or 三度空間影像
video game engine: 電玩遊戲引擎
Software platform: 軟體平台 (Taiwan); 軟體平台 (China)
Hardware platform: 硬體平台 (Taiwan); 軟件平台 (China)
Tolkien: 托爾金 (Taiwan and China)
Lord of the Rings: 魔戒
Gaming experience: 遊戲體驗 or 遊戲經驗 (in different contexts)
Players: 玩遊戲者 （could also be 玩家）
Gamers: 玩家
Fans:（電玩）迷
Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, MMO game): 大型多人線上遊戲
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG): 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲
Subscription model: 訂購模式
Micro-transactions: 微交易
Virtual goods: 虛擬物品
Dungeons: 地下城 or 魔洞
player-vs-player: 玩家對玩家
Online account: 線上帳戶
Username: 使用者名稱
Online community: 線上社群
Beta: 測試版
Concurrent users: 同時上線使用者
Game industry: 電玩業
Internet cafe: 網咖 (Taiwan), 網吧 (China)
Prepaid cards: 預付卡 (Taiwan), 預付費卡 (China)
Prepaid playing time: 預付遊戲時間

Attending State of Play V in Singapore/HiPiHi

About two months ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at the State of Play V conference in Singapore, and I have just confirmed my participation after sorting out the travel-related details. This is the third public speaking engagement I've had in the past year that touches upon virtual worlds and 3D media. The title of the State of Play panel: Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants. From the program:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

This is a chance to discuss the role of the media in shaping public opinion about virtual worlds and their inhabitants, as well as the expectations of new residents. There is also a lot to say about quantitative research and data relating to virtual worlds and behaviors in virtual worlds. These are topics which I have discussed several times in the past year on this blog and elsewhere.

The rest of the program looks interesting, too -- the list of panelists and speakers includes a few people from the Chinese gaming industry, which has grown very rapidly in the past five years. I've heard that there will be a screening of a documentary about Chinese "Gold Farming" at the conference.

As part of my preparations for the conference, I've been reading up on the state of gaming and virtual worlds in China. There's been lots of news about the incredible popularity of World of Warcraft in China, and the virtual demonstration that I remarked upon last year, but there are some new products that are worth mentioning, too, most notably the emerging VW platform, HiPiHi.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to try out the beta version of HiPiHi -- like many software products designed for the Chinese market, it's PC only, and my Mac is too old to effectively use Boot Camp or Parallels.

Over the next few weeks I'll try to log some of the reading and other information that I am gathering as the conference approaches. The event takes place August 19-22, so I am going to combine it with a family trip to Taiwan, which will also give me a chance to do a little pre-conference research about the Taiwanese gaming scene. This is not a work-supported trip, but I was able to secure a small travel grant through my Harvard association, and the other out-of-pocket expenses are worth it -- this is an exciting field, and the conference seems like a fascinating opportunity.

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.

Guest Author on Terra Nova

For the month of May, I have been invited to be a guest author on Terra Nova. Terra Nova is an online community that discusses issues relating to virtual worlds -- a topic that I have frequently covered on Harvard Extended, I, Lamont, and my Computerworld blog. During my monthly tenure on Terra Nova, I intend to address infrastructure-related issues as well as the impact of 3D technologies on new media formats. There's already one active discussion, "Second Life's infrastructure issues prompt an open letter to Linden Lab."

Delayed posts

Sorry for the delay in updating Harvard Extended. Our family moved in the last week of March, and I only got Internet service earlier this week. In the next week I hope to have a thesis update, and maybe even another installment of the ALM interview series.

I also hope to post here or on my Computerworld blog a description of a very interesting lecture I attended at the Harvard CGIS on Friday. It was entitled "Kill all these Chinese Gold Farmers: Transnational Conflict and Cooperation in Virtual Worlds". The speaker was Dr. Aaron Delwiche of Trinity University in San Antonio, and he described some very interesting social trends taking place in virtual gaming environments. Stay tuned ...

The future of the Internet: Ray Kurzweil, Trey Perry, and the Pew report

A few weeks ago, I published my essay on the next 15 years of mass media evolution (see "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution," on my Harvard and I, Lamont blogs). Since then, I have been actively seeking out other futurist writings, and have found a few that need to be discussed here.

The first is Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, which I started to read on my way out to Intel HQ last week. Kurzweil puts forward an intriguing and convincing vision of a future dominated by massive computing resources, biomedical advances, nanotechnology, and virtual reality. In less than 40 years, he believes processing and storage power, growing at an exponential rate, will lead to artificial intelligence and the ability of human brains to interface directly with computers. Nanobots will be able to help solve some of our most pressing environmental crises, and will even be able to cruise the human bloodstream and, through networked connections, generate virtual representations of their hosts. Kurzweil's vision is fascinating, although I have to say his rigorous examination of the evolution of current biomedical and computing technologies is clouded by his own personal interest in living longer -- he says he takes something like 250 supplements per day to ensure that he lives to see the age in which he can take advantage of these marvelous technological advances. Is logic driving his views, or personal hope for an extended biological lifespan and digital immortality?

On a shorter timeline, Trey Perry and the Pew American Internet & Life project have published visions of the Internet in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Trey predicts the development of personal Internet technologies over the next ten years, while the Pew report ("The Future of the Internet II") has gathered the opinions of various experts regarding the big picture of the Internet's influence upon society at the start of the '20s. I will quote a few key findings of the Pew report here:

On the growth of the network:

A majority of respondents agreed with a scenario which posited that a global, low-cost network will be thriving in 2020 and will be available to most people around the world at low cost. And they agreed that a tech-abetted “flattening” of the world will open up opportunities for success for many people who will compete globally.

Still, a vocal and sizeable minority of respondents say they are unsure that the policy climate will be favorable for such internet expansion. The center of the resistance, they say, will be in the businesses anxious to preserve their current advantages and in policy circles where control over information and communication is a central value.

On autonomous technology:

Most respondents said they think humans will remain in charge of technology between now and 2020. However some fear that technological progress will eventually create machines and processes that move beyond human control. Others said they fear that the leaders who exercise control of the technology might use this power inappropriately.

On the new Luddites:

Future Most respondents agreed that there will people who will remain unconnected to the network because of their economic circumstances and others who think a class of technology refuseniks will emerge by 2020. They will form their own cultural group that lives apart from “modern” society and some will commit acts of violence in protest to technology.

On virtual reality:

Many respondents agreed with the notion that those who are connected online will devote more time to sophisticated, compelling, networked, synthetic worlds by 2020. While this will foster productivity and connectedness and be an advantage to many, it will lead to addiction problems for some.

There are many, many additional issues that are discussed in the Pew report, including the future of privacy, nation-states, legal issues, the Semantic Web, standards, interoperability, language and translation, computing costs, coding, and economic factors. I encourage everyone interested in the next 10-15 years of Internet development to read the Pew center's full report.