Welcoming Teen Grid Organizations to the Main Grid

Posted by Terrence Linden on Sep 28, 2010 10:19:13 AM

It has been several weeks since we announced that Teen Second Life, our Second Life grid for 13- to 17-year-olds, will be closing at the end of this year, and that we would be admitting 16- and 17-year-olds to the main grid. Today, we are excited to tell you that we will be able to continue serving all of the educational and not-for-profit communities of the Teen Grid, including those that serve 13- to 15-year-olds, without an interruption in service.

Since our announcement, we’ve been speaking with many people from the educational and not-for-profit communities in Teen Second Life to better  understand their needs and determine what measures would be necessary to create a safe, secure, and collaborative environment for their students and faculty. I’m happy to say that we are able to meet these needs, and allow 13- to 15-year-olds access to limited locations on the main grid, with appropriate controls for administrators. We will implement these controls and transfer these rich and exciting projects from Teen Second Life before the end of this year.

The 13- to 15-year-old students affiliated with these organizations will be unable to visit any regions except those of their hosting organization, and those accounts will not have the ability to search the Grid or to purchase items from the Marketplace. Unlike on Teen Second Life, adults that work with these students will now be a part of the broader Second Life experience, allowing them to bring rich educational content to their students. The ability to invite organization-approved guest speakers and other approved members of the community to safely interact these students will further enhance their learning experience. For more details, see the Teen Second Life transition wiki page.

We are happy to provide this support for the educational community in Second Life, and we look forward to the community continuing to create  innovative and exciting projects!

It remains to be seen exactly how this will be implemented, and I will reserve judgment until I’ve been filled in on the details. This is a positive step in the right direction. IF they can secure these projects and insulate these students from the rest of the Main Grid, this will be the best option at this time considering the deficiencies in most of the other platforms, especially with voice (which is at the core of the PacRimX project). I will post my thoughts as soon as I see all the details for this new plan.

I had the opportunity earlier this week to attend the Back to School: Learning and Growing in a Digital Age event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This event was sponsored by the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Some of the speakers included Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology, U.S. Department of Education; Geoffrey Cowan, Dean Emeritus, USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism; James Steyer, CEO Common Sense Media; Julius Genachowski, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission; the Chief Security Officer at Facebook; the head of PBS Kids.org, and others.

At this meeting the FCC Chairman announced several new programs aimed at providing broadband to students after they leave campus. These are changes to the eRate program that may open broadband access to students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. There were two roundtables filling out the morning agenda. The discussions ranged from new technologies to how they will be used in the classroom and how they will be brought into the homes while involving parents in the process.

There’s no shortage of new gadgets that “could” be used with students. Many students already own some of these devices. Outside of price, I don’t see many barriers to student adoption of these new technologies. Where I see the most resistance is at the schools, and their practices and policies that already roadblock students from leveraging these technologies in their education.

The areas where I see issues are with both administrators and teachers at the schools, and their reluctance to allow these devices in the classroom (for very different reasons). I interact with a lot of teachers in the course of my job as Technology Director. While some teachers embrace new technologies with open arms, many others shun it (mostly out of fear). The general rule of thumb is the younger the teacher the more open they are to technology in the classroom. Older teachers sometimes don’t want to bother with it and don’t want to spend the time necessary to learn something new. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. It’s only very recently that we are reaching a tipping point with new teachers and the adoption of technology in the classroom (at least before the budget crunch and layoffs of young teachers).

On a larger scale, with online classes and online curriculum, I’ve seen the teacher’s union push back on the deployment of these technologies. Many teachers still prefer the model where the students come into their classroom for a class period, sit at their desks, and listen to the teacher lecture or moderate discussion. Integrating new technologies into the education model will change the role of the teacher to more of a moderator and guide for students working through their curriculum. Many of these technologies hold the promise of tailoring the curriculum to the student and letting them navigate through at their own pace. In my experiences thus far, if the technology or program changes the teacher student ratio, or makes any changes to the MOU, the unions will reject it straight up at the start of the discussion.

Many administrators are just as guilty. Far too many are paranoid about personal technologies and the abuses that can arise from their use on campus and in the classroom. The number one reason I am given relates to cheating. “What if the student uses a cell phone to take a picture of a test?”, “What if they take video or pictures of other students and post them to YouTube?” I’ve heard of several schools in the past year banning ALL cameras and cell phones from school events for fear of FERPA violations if parents post pictures of students (with names) from school events on the Internet. In schools today, students are required to power down to come on campus. We, as educators, need to crack this door open and find ways to let the students use their portable devices on campus to assist in their education.

I was practically cheering as some of the participants in this event talked about the potential uses of technologies in our schools. While many of the panel members saw infrastructure and costs as the primary barrier to adoption, several audience members asked questions that tell me I am not alone in my observations of the barriers that exist in our districts today with teachers and administrators. To get from here to there it’s going to take a lot of creative minds, open attitudes, and cooperation on everyone’s part to get past the fears of today to get to the potential of tomorrow for our students.

My perspective may be a bit different than most due to my family. My wife is a Microbiologist, and we were blessed with triplets boys eighteen years ago. The triplets just graduated from high school. Their little brother just entered junior high school. Some would say my kids are nerds. I would say that they are knowledgeable on acquiring knowledge and experimentation. One thing that plays in their favor is the fact that all of them have had ready access to technology since birth. And over the years, they have honed their skills at finding the information they are after, and acquiring it from reliable sources. And yes, they are typical kids who think cell phones are for texting (not calling) other people. They are also gamers who were there at the beginning of my PacRimX project and continue to be involved in virtual worlds and education.

So what is this blog post about? I currently work for a large K-12 district in California. I’ve watched as the old guard administrators have retired and new blood has come into the upper ranks of administrators. This latest round of promotions have brought in younger administrators that are more like me, they support technology in educaiton. One of them sent me an article Friday from ‘The Hill‘:

California testing iPads as algebra textbooks

The article details a pilot project in California in four school districts to use iPads as algebra textbooks. “Education firm Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has teamed up with California Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss for the pilot, which will take place at Long Beach Unified School District, Riverside Unified School District, Fresno Unified School District and San Francisco Unified School District.” No real surprise here, as this must be the direction textbooks take moving forward if they have any hope of surviving in the publishing industry. (See my earlier blog post: eTextbooks: The way it should be). So I was very happy to see movement in this direction detailed in this article. The email I received from this new administrator stated simply “And so it begins”. Let’s hope.

So it wasn’t until I finished the article and started reading the comments that I was brought back down to Earth. I was reminded of why the technology has been here for years, and yet we still see no significant use of this technology in our K-12 schools beyond web browsing, typing tutors, and PowerPoints. One example of a typical response I’ve heard (more times than I care to remember) is this:

“Wow, sounds like someone wanted an excuse to buy iPads for students and made one up. Nothing fosters learning more than a digital textbook hidden amongst chat, a browser, e-mail, iTunes etc etc.”

The only other obvious thing left out of that short dismissal was “games”. So many K-12 technology policies have roots in this type of knee jerk response to technology. The first one that comes to mind is the rule that phones have to be powered off while on campus. Any computing device outside of a calculator has to be powered down as a student crosses the threshold of their school campus. Reasons given are that they may be used to cheat on tests. The students may use them to chat all day and not learn anything. They may take a picture or video of another student (or staff) and post it online. The statements are always on the negative aspects of the technology, and never the positive uses.

I’ve fought, and continue to fight, the good fight for technology in education. I continue to advocate for the students, to try to make the “adults” understand that not all uses of technology are malicious, and that many can actually support the student’s education process. The really sad state of affairs is that many kids carrying around a device like an iPhone or Android have more power in their hand than their classroom computers (which are somewhere between five and ten years old, and getting older with the declining budgets). The one thing that many teachers overlook is that a student could carry a stack of textbooks, a bag full of specialized calculators, and a library full of reference books in one of these palm-sized devices.

I am a huge fan of TED. TED is a non-profit started in 1984 devoted to ideas worth spreading. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.

I was absolutely thrilled the other day when I discovered that there is a TED iPhone App to watch the videos on the go. It was with this new app on my iPhone 4 that I discovered my new favorite education related video: Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

I’m not even going to summarize what is in this video, it would lessen the impact of the message. I’ve read many articles on Mitra’s Hole in the Wall project. This was the first time I’ve seen him speak about it in this type of setting. Watch this video, and if you have ANY experience with children and technology you will know it’s true. You’ll also immediately understand why the current education establishment in K-12 education will push back and resist anything like this anytime in the near future. My fear is that real movement towards a child-driven education will not occur until the current batch of high school grads make their way through college and into jobs that can actually influence education policy in our schools. That’s likely a good ten years out, at a minimum.

Prior to finding this video, my favorite video on the state of education was this one from Sir Ken Robinson on how Schools kill creativity in children. I’ve gone out of my way over the past eighteen years to provide my children with opportunities to nourish their creativity.

I was just as surprised when I went to pull up this video to show another person I work with and found that Ken Robinson recently gave another TED talk four years after the above video, the title of this talk was ‘Bring on the learning revolution‘.

I wouldn’t still be in education if I did not feel that there was hope that we may actually get here one day. Universities are further down this road of adopting student technology, allowing students to use their own devices, and supporting that use with wireless and other resources necessary for them to operate on campus. What we need now are more “Adults” putting in the time to personally use these devices, and to fully understand their potential in education. Fear of technology and clinging to old teaching models should not prevent the upgrading of the education process with technology.

The roles of educators will change and evolve, but this is not a bad thing. We need a revolution in learning to catch up with the lives our students are already living off-campus. They should not have to power down to come to school.

It’s not that difficult to see how her talk relates to educational gaming. It was interesting to contrast this presentation with a recently posted video from the Second Life Community Convention 2010 in which Philip Rosedale (CEO Linden Lab) participated in a session and explained the reasons why the Teen Grid, as we know it, is being shut down. The Teen Grid stuff starts a little past half way through with an emotional plea from Peggy Sheehy to come up with a Linden run alternative for the under 16 year old students. Philip’s comments give little hope that any viable solution will be ready for the under 16′s prior to the end of the year shutdown of the Teen Grid.

The really frightening thing is that for the past four years, as evidenced by some comments in this session, most people doing work on the Teen Grid of SL refused to look at alternatives to SL. This was somehow to be interpreted as a violation of the relationship they all had with Linden Lab. I’ve seen this phenomenon within my own circles, so I know how strong it was, and apparently still is. Now, as the rug is about to be pulled out from under our projects, the rush is on to investigate these other platforms. My question is this: Over the past four years that I’ve been involved in virtual worlds and education, how many potential platforms have come and gone because everyone was so hyper focused on Second Life? How many platforms might have flourished and grown to be viable alternatives to the Second Life platform if only some educators would have started projects there? Yes, Second Life was the first, but will they be the last (for K-12 projects) because of this neglect of alternative platforms?

Where do we go from here? The most obvious choice that comes to mind is OpenSim. OpenSim is an open source SL platform that has had some support from some dedicated individuals at some pretty large corporations. If your educational institution is not lucky enough to have a full blown IT shop with techie gamer types willing to take on the administration and support of your own OpenSim grid, then there’s the Reaction Grid. This is a hosted OpenSim provider where for a monthly fee they will take care of all the techie bits for you, and you can develop your virtual world project much like you did with the Teen Grid. With the right tools, you might even be able to port over your assets from the Teen Grid and make a somewhat less bumpy transition off the Teen Grid. I’ve been told that you can use the Imprudence or Hippo browsers to export your assets for import into OpenSim. And then there’s Second Inventory, a commercial software program, to backup and move your SL inventory.

HyperGrid Business has a listing up of other providers of Open Sim grids. OpenSim Hosting Providers. I’ve been told by a few people that the majority of Reaction Grids customers are in education, and that they are becoming well versed in this market.

I am hopeful that educators working with virtual worlds will open up their attitudes towards other alternatives. Don’t put the blinders on and blindly pledge your allegiance to a single platform. Keep your eyes open, keep reading the blogs and company sites, talk with other virtual world educators, and keep looking forward for solutions that will engage your students, pass muster with your School Boards, and help to grow the virtual world education market beyond just a single platform or company.

What would have happened if Netscape, AOL, or Prodigy dominated the online market back in the early 90′s and the free and open Internet faded away in their shadow (or never even got started)? Let’s not let this happen with virtual worlds and education.

One of my favorite sites is TED. There are some amazing videos available there from the various TED conferences. I would love to attend the one in Pacific Grove someday out here in California.

One of my favorite game designers, Peter Molyneux (Populous, Black and White) recently showed an updated version of Project Milo. This is a virtual boy without a game controller. The update has been to adapt this to the Microsoft 360 and the new Kinect sensor. This allows you to use your hands and full body to control the action on the screen.

I’m not going to spoil anything here, as the demo covers it pretty well. We’ve come a long way since Tamagachi and Pong.

From an email posted to NWN by Terence Linden:

 “There are a number of great projects and organizations on the Teen Grid, and we are working to understand what would be necessary, especially from a safety and security standpoint, to continue serving as many as we can on the Main Grid in the future. We cannot commit to serving the under 16 market for now, but we will work with educators and others to determine if and how we could allow younger users access in the future.”

 Students turn 16 during their second year in High School, so all third year students are 16.  So basically what this message says is that they will continue to serve as many as they can on the Main Grid (16+), but that they cannot serve the under 16 market.  So what was once a platform for 7^th – 12^th grades for education, is now an 11^th and 12^th grade option.  That’s roughly 2/3 of the age range from the Teen Grid that will stop being served as of the end of the calendar year.  Anyone working with middle school students are shut down as of the closing of the Teen Grid.  Those working with high school students will lose the ability to work with half of them.    

Thankfully, due to all the rumors about this coming back in June, I told my teachers to hold back on any planning for Second Life this year until further notice.  My main project with Japan should be able to complete our in-world activities prior to the turning off day. However, most of the Japanese students are second year, so this will seriously impact this project moving forward. 

There are other options, the most immediate being something like Reaction Grid and OpenSim.  I can’t imagine that it’s easy to move assets between the Teen Grid and OpenSim, but I’ve not researched it.  The key point I was trying to make is that this was on the radar back when the education group was cut loose in the reorganization. That was back in June.  It would have really benefited schools with projects to have found out in June that this was coming.  And even if they had been notified, it’s highly unlikely that they could have made the shift and got back to fully functional over a few months of summer break. 

Announcing a shutdown of the Teen Grid in mid August after many schools have gone back in session, with a turn off date of the end of the calendar year (not the end of the school year), will do significant damage to a great number of projects that exist on the Teen Grid.  It’s clumsy, disruptive, and shows that they don’t understand this segment of their market.

Speaking for myself, I would have been open to paying more for our islands to keep them up than to see the Teen Grid shut down.  No matter where we go now, it will cost more in service fees, hardware, people, and other costs that were not budgeted for this school year.  It’s bad news for sure. 

Philip’s SLCC Keynote

There’s been a lot of buzz on the SLED listserv since the laying off of 30% of Linden Lab’s staff, including the entire education group. There were rumors that the axe would next fall on the Teen Grid of SL. This past weekend that rumor became fact with the announcement of the shutting down of the Teen Grid by Philip during his speech.

I just posted a message to the SLED Listserv with my reaction to this announcement. I am reposting it here so it can get picked up by the search engines:

Peggy Sheehy from Ramapo Islands makes a statement at 1:04:15. She talks about what it took to get education projects off the ground. And also about the middle school kids getting abandoned by this closure of the Teen Grid. And she is dead on the money that these educators won’t come back if there’s a gap in service. Philip makes is clear that everything is moving to the Main Grid in his response. There’s a “there” there? Jeez.

“Consumers” are important to Linden Lab, not students. Consumers and the SL economy are what drive business and the bottom line at Linden Lab. The reason the ages are being lowered on the Main Grid to 16 likely has something to do with some study or poll on how much money this group spends online on virtual goods in other online services. It’s always been about selling stuff and the economy, and if we ever thought different we were fools. How else do you explain the need to purchase L$ to upload textures to a private island?

All of the positive press four years ago about education projects helped to offset the horrible press SL was receiving on all of the adult issues of the main grid. For the past four years the vast majority of the positive press about SL has come out of the education community. The Teen Grid and education has always been functional, but without the resources to make it exceptional. Even with these restrictions, the things that Global Kids, Peggy, and others have done with 13 – 17 year old students (including the project I’ve been involved with) have sought to change student’s views of the world, to engage them in their education, and to promote social change and cultural exchanges. Unfortunately, the Teen Grid is not connected to the shopping malls of the Main Grid. We didn’t buy enough stuff (outside of our land fees, and even those did not pull in the $’s of main grid).

When the entire education group was let go in the recent restructuring it was obvious that this was coming next
(I even posted about this back then). A post from a Linden staffer earlier this weekend about “finding another solution” for education sounds a lot like “I have a bridge to sale you”. If they were committed to education and the 13 – 17 crowd they would have invested in the resources to run the teen grid better, to continue staffing their education group, and to at least keep the Teen Grid online until the end of the school year and not the fiscal year.

What exactly would an alternate setup involve for the under 16 students? If it is anything that is housed on the Main Grid it’s DOA. School boards were spooked enough knowing that the Teen Grid was under the management of the same company that ran the infamous Main Grid of Second Life. Even given that the Teen Grid was separate, and our project’s islands were “private”, I had to go through extreme hoops to get the project off the ground, and then again to merge with another project in Australia. All students and parents had to sign releases and permission forms to participate. This simply will not fly if there is any linkage to the Main Grid of SL.

While some are cheering the move, and welcoming the > 16 year old crowd onto the Main Grid, others are in shock. Entire projects will collapse due to this closure, unless they can quickly find an alternative platform. I’ve been a resident of SL since BETA. One of the administrators in Japan affiliated with our project purchased a plot of land on the Main Grid to practice his SL skills. It would not have been appropriate to practice in the same space as his students. He built a really nice little Japanese tea house and garden on his land. He went away for a short exchange trip. When he returned the neighborhood had gone bad, a porn video store had taken up residence next to his land, and there were billboard in the sky above his land advertising this store. He quickly closed his account on the Main Grid.

I can’t imagine that there is any drive or initiative at Linden now, or anytime in the future, to come up with a solution for K-12 students under 16. It simply does not fill the consumerism based business model they focused on. And the offer to move our assets and projects to the Main Grid only demonstrates their disconnect with these projects and our students. They’ve never fully understood our demographic, and they are now abandoning it.

I am going to comment in this post on this speech, since it contains some of the first public comments made post reorganization by someone who is actually in the know at Linden Lab. And I will preface my comments by saying that these are my own observations and do not in any way reflect those of my school district or any organizations I am involved with that makes use of SL.

First on tap was a list of “stuff” (or systems) that Linden Lab has created over the years to make up the Second Life experience. The second item on the list was “the systems we use to transfer assets from the Teen Grid”. Hmmmmm. When we created our project on the Teen Grid, we were moving assets to the Teen Grid, not from it. Maybe this is in reference to some tools that have recently been developed to help migrate the Teen Grid onto the Main Grid?

The piece that everyone was waiting for were comments about the recent reorganization:

“I wanted to speak for a couple of minutes and touch a little bit — obviously — on the layoffs we just did. We sadly reduced the size of the company by about a third — by about 100 people a week ago, and that’s a big deal and a huge change. But I wanted to say that standing here today in the midst of such a rich world and such continued creative — and for some people, financial — success that’s here makes me realize that, that choice is the right choice and one that though it is hard to make, is definitely correct and obvious. We’re never going to — as a company — risk the world and the businesses and the livelihoods of the thousands of people who make money working here by growing too quickly ahead of profits. By doing the difficult process of restructuring the company and making layoffs, we’ll return ourselves to solid, very solid levels of profitability.”

So at the end of that statement, the goal of the recent reorganization was to “return ourselves to solid, very solid levels of profitability.” This is slightly different from Mark Kingdon’s statement in the press release about the reorganization that stated “Today’s announcement about our reorganization will help us make Second Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for consumers starting with their first experience. It will also enable us to invest in bringing 3D to the web and will strengthen our profitability.” Philip’s comments about ” risking the world and businesses and the livelihoods of the thousands of people who make money working here by growing too quickly ahead of profits” almost sounds as if Linden Lab overextended these past few years in staffing up for growth that never occurred. This is reinforced in the next statements with “And so, to be safe, we have stepped back — reduced the size of the company — and kept everything safe.”

When addressing what comes next, Philip made a very confusing statement:

“I mean, I think a high-level way to describe it is that we may have sort of two-thirds of the people that we did a couple of weeks ago, but we need to actually do less than two-thirds of the things that we were doing. So the process of restructuring and replanning that the teams are engaged in right now is fundamentally to figure out how to do a lot less a lot better.“

When I stated in my earlier post that there was a lot of doublespeak out there about this reorganization, I couldn’t have even come up with that one.

The next part of the speech focuses on how great Second Life is, and other people would participate if they could only just get over the castle walls:

“Second Life is this wonderful, beautiful city — once you’re in it and you’re having this amazing immersive experience, you’re just totally blown away by it. But the city itself is surrounded by huge walls and a moat. It’s like a medieval city. To actually get into it you have to invest an enormous amount of time and energy getting across that moat, and over the walls, and into this amazing new world of people inside that are waiting inside. And I think that in our excitement about the success of Second Life — in its amazing initial growth and the amazing things that you guys have done and that we’ve done together — we were getting ahead of ourselves a bit as a company and this is what we really talked about in this restructuring. We were building these sort of rickety — we were in many cases building these bridges and scaffoldings that sought to get different types of people across that moat and over those walls, whether we’re talking about international Residents, or the community welcome areas, or enterprise or education users — we’ve been sort of building these little, thin bridges that try and quickly get everybody kind of over that wall and into Second Life. And of course, you can understand why we’d do that, because it’s just so fantastic an experience once we can get people there.”

Well, at least education finally got mentioned post reorganization announcement. But please, as I stated in my previous post today, not much that is wrong in Second Life has been fixed over the past seven years (even the past two). I can go back four years in my blog posts over on PacRimX and shake my head in agreement as I read what was wrong then and what is still wrong today with the Second Life platform. Very little has changed. And I think some of the Linden alumni and most of the larger education projects would strongly disagree with the statement that rickety thin bridges were built to bring people in. We build multilane freeways into Second Life and brought bus loads of students in to experience what the platform has to offer. And I think that it stoked imaginations, fired creativity, and brought together large groups of evangelists for the platform’s use in education. In fact, I would argue that most of the positive press about Second Life a few years ago was about the explosion in education projects (as opposed to virtual adult entertainment and goods on the main grid). But while the platform showed promise, it’s been too slow to deliver on those promises. Many people have developed a virtual world fatigue, and some have lost that initial enthusiasm (at least as it relates to this specific platform) for education in Second Life.

Here’s a post from 2008 about Philip’s comparing Second Life to London. Second Life is as empty now as it was back then when talking population density.He completely hits the nail on the head with his next statements:

“Whether we’re talking about how many people can stand together in a meeting like this, or how to put clothes on, or manage your inventory, or build basic objects inworld, or how voice works, how parcel media works, live music — all of these basic features are things that are amazing experiences when you can have them, but they’re not easy enough yet. They’re not — they just in many cases don’t completely work, and we — it’s so easy to get ahead of ourselves as a company and forget that. So going back to those basics and just trying to make this thing work for all of us is what you can expect to see from us next.”

The only problem I have with this is if you couldn’t get some of these things to completely work over the past seven years, and you just let go of 30% of your workforce, how is it going to get fixed now? According to one post at another blog, some of the people who were let go of in this reorganization were “those involved in infrastructure development – whether it be projects such as Mono or script limits, or simply Fixing The Grid. (This is not at all to say that those remaining are incompetent by the way, just that I can see that resource has been greatly diminished.)” And focusing on doing a lot less a lot better . . . well, it remains to be seen.

Time will tell if these adjustments in staffing were a brilliant reorganization and optimization, the early moves towards the sale of Linden Lab, or the beginning of the end of a ground breaking virtual world platform. I still hold out some hope that there are still bright shiny days ahead for Second Life, that they will somehow figure out how to fix even some of the things that have not worked over the years, and I am even more hopeful of the future of education, specifically in Second Life (or one of the open source off-shoots). There is most definitely a future for virtual worlds in education, I’m just not sure yet where that future might land.

Linden Lab Restructures to Generate Efficiencies and Support Investment in New Platforms

This post has caused a lot of doubt and questioning in the Second Life (SL) Education Community. This major announcement included the laying off of the entire Education group at Linden Lab (LL). Claudia, who has always been a strong supporter and proponent of the use of SL in Education, was a casualty. Pathfinder was another casualty of this reorganization. The worst part of this press release, and subsequent comments by the current CEO at LL, is the noticeable absence of any information about education in SL and the fate of the Teen Grid where so many educators have their current projects.

There’s lots of doublespeak about why this move was taken. But as with all good press releases, and writing of any type, you always want the core of your message in the intro. Here’s the first paragraph of the press release from LL about this restructuring:

SAN FRANCISCO — June 9, 2010 — Linden Lab®, creator of 3D virtual world Second Life®, announced today a strategic restructuring to increase focus on the company’s consumer business including investments intended to enhance ease of use and participation in its virtual goods marketplace through browser-based and mobile applications.

The focus on the company’s consumer business and participation in its virtual goods marketplace through browser-based and mobile applications is not unexpected. I’ve personally seen the focus in sessions and meetings I’ve attended at Linden Lab and in other venues where LL staff were present. At one meeting attended by Phillip Rosedale, he spent most of his time quizzing the attendees on their first login to SL, how long it was until they bought L$ and went shopping, and how often they went shopping once they settled into the world of SL. The focus has always been on the economy of SL and how much real money is flowing in the form of L$ between residents. This should be painfully evident to any educator who has to purchase L$ for their private island just so their students can upload textures. And when the students leave the project, so do any unspent L$ they have in their pockets. This has lead to the metering out of L$ on a project by project basis in education settings, which is an administrative nightmare.

What statement in this press release rubs most people the wrong way? What is it that we, especially those in education, have been asking for years to be a priority? Ease of use . . . this is the holy grail of the SL platform. Here we are seven years down the road from the official launch of the platform and ease of use is still an issue. The controls for avatar navigation, chat, and content creation have changed very little over the years. As a matter of fact, with the numbers of students I’ve run through SL over the past four years, the most frequent comments are usually on how “clumsy” the controls are, how “dated” the look is, how “difficult” everything is to do, and how “slow” everything is in SL. And one of the biggest complaints out of the teachers has been how “unreliable” the platform is when they’ve planned a lesson in SL (maintenance and downtime). It seems that the teachers are more enamored with SL than their own students are.

One June 15^th the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable met in-world for their regular meeting. Here is the transcript from that meeting. If you can wade through the conversations, you will see that nobody knows what’s going on at LL. There is no “official” information flowing out of LL. When there is no official word, speculation and rumor move in. There have been hints from a few that the Teen Grid is going away, but what will replace it? Will it be moved to the Main Grid and walled off from the adult content? This would certainly prove a challenge for many K-12 educators who already have to deal with all the parent questions about SL and its adult dark side.

Over the past few years the SL platform has hit a plateau. Concurrent user counts have not changed much (for the grid as a whole, and individual servers). It’s still very hard to get a full class onto one sever without it crashing or lagging to such a slow frame rate as to be inoperable. The user community of SL is pretty stable (and loyal), it’s not really gaining or losing in any great numbers. The people who are there continue to spend money and attend events in-world. It’s just not changing much. So what’s next for SL and LL?

I’ve made the argument that LL is going to shift focus to be more like other currently successful virtual goods dealers like Zynga (creator of Farmville, Frontierville, and all else that is ‘ville). The sheer number of subscribers and daily logins to Zynga games makes everyone else in the industry envious. The problem with moving something like SL or World of Warcraft to a mobile platform is that for now it needs to be done in a terminal server type environment which means a whole lot of hardware on the backend to support all those mobile clients. Most people are not going to pay more for this ability to go mobile, and if it doesn’t get you more customers then what’s the point? I suspect a more likely mobile app would be a way to shop for SL goods using your phone. I personally don’t think this is going to pump up sales or draw any more subscribers, as it really only appeals to the existing user base. I just don’t see them coming up with anything that would bring the bright lights of the media back on LL and SL.

What really needs to happen? People, and especially students, spend many hours a week playing games on consoles and PC’s. They are now playing many more games on their phones as well. They are accustomed to smooth graphics with flashy special effects and sound. They demand simple controls. And they demand multiplayer environments where they can compete with others (either directly or in the collection of virtual awards). If the SL platform has not changed significantly since their launch in 2003, what are the odds that it will change much in the next few years? Outside of Windlight and sculpted prims, what major advancements have been made in the past few years to the platform of SL?

The educational community has been asking for years for a web client. The current stand alone client has a limited range of video cards supported. The client is network hostile, in that updates cannot be made in a network that is “locked down” (as most classroom and lab environments are). And when you want to teach a class, a streamlined client that just has navigation and communication options would be much preferred. A dedicated content creation client with more advanced tools would be welcomed by content creators. Even better, the ability to use other programs and “easily” import the creations into SL would be even better. More hooks to other services on the Internet would also be good. And how about richer estate administration tools? Administration tools for land owners are lacking in almost every way. RegAPI is a joke and should be an embarrassment to LL that is has been unchanged as long as it has (and that it falls to the landowner to write the front end code for it to be used).

In the transcript from the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, and elsewhere on the Internet, I continue to hear that SL is the “bleeding edge” of virtual world technologies. I keep hearing calls to be patient, that all will be good again soon. Nobody wants anyone to hypothesize as to where all this is going. There are those who think there is some grand plan to put this back on top and back on track to being the standard for a global network of grids that will replace the Internet and online ecommerce. I just don’t see it. I BETA tested SL. I have been around the platform for over seven years now. There has been so little change in those seven years that it would take a complete rewrite of the underlying system to move this platform in any significant way in a short period of time (and I’m being generous and quantifying “short period of time” as a few years).

There are simply too many things that are wrong in the underlying infrastructure of SL to be fixed. There are those who say that the layoff of 30% of LL staff is a sure sign that they are either on the market, or already in talks to be acquired by some other company. Some see this as the coming of a savior to bring order to the chaos that is SL. I don’t see this happening either. What would attract another company to buy SL? The way SL is currently set up, it’s simply too hardware heavy (read $$$$ to maintain) for the user base it serves. Why would a Google (who already flopped in Virtual Worlds with Lively), or any other company want or need SL? Last I checked, most of the big companies that have dabbled in virtual worlds are already involved with OpenSim for internal enterprise use.

I personally spent and afternoon playing with the SL Enterprise product. It was the answer to everything I had ever wanted. Images of islands could be loaded on a whim (can you imagine the utility of swapping out the island for every different class?). Everything I had ever asked for as an estate owner was there, and it was easy to navigate the tools and manage the system. The only kicker was the price. The price was so prohibitively expensive that there is no possible scenario where anyone in education could ever afford to run the Enterprise server. But alas, the entire Enterprise division was also a casualty of this reorganization. So that’s somewhat of a moot point now.

The one hope I had was that an open source server would be released. That someone would control the central economy of the LL/SL universe (something akin to what IBM did years ago for ecommerce), and the users would then build the universe one private grid at a time. This is the federated or Internet model. This model goes against everything that Philip Rosedale and others at LL have always said about how SL needs to be one land mass, one world. This model seems to have worked well in building the current Internet structure, why would it not translate to virtual worlds? My other dream was that a person could go to one place and register an avatar with their real name, and that avatar was then free to roam the virtual universe carrying their virtual assets with them (especially their virtual currency). But LL recently announced that they have pulled out of funding projects to this end.

My guess is that those who have education projects in SL will continue to run them while keeping an eye our for other options. The longer the education community is left without meaningful information about what’s in store for them moving forward, the more people will start to look elsewhere or simply leave the SL platform. The more doubt and uncertainty that is spread about LL and SL, the harder it will be for educators to get budget to continue (or even start) projects in SL. Linden Lab has always had a problem communicating with their user communities. They’ve never been willing to give a full disclosure on anything effectively. This is again where we find ourselves with the current events, very little information and nobody to call to ask the important questions.

I personally want to thank all those at LL who are now out looking for new careers who have spent roughly the past five years supporting the growth of the education community in SL (both Main Grid and Teen Grid). Your enthusiasm and assistance have been invaluable. I truly hope that you all land in your dream jobs, and are able to continue with your goals of promoting education and virtual world technologies. In the end, I think this will all be good for the Education community as a whole. We should never have put all of our eggs in one basket. No company stays on top forever, and there’s always another one waiting in the wings to step in and take it to the next level. Having SL coast along for another few years would have stifled the innovation and adoption of these technologies into our schools and universities. Innovation usually follows disruption in an industry. I can’t wait to see what’s next. . . .  just got a link to audio of a speech Philip Rosedale gave at SL7b (audio link)

The only reason I can find is that the Slate was sluggish running the stripped down and modified Windows 7 OS. With the recent purchase of Palm by HP, don’t count this one down and out just yet. I suspect that WebOS might work back into this hardware platform and bring a much more snappy performance in line with the iPad.

Come on hardware companies, the iPad has only been out less than a month. Don’t throw in the towel just yet. A little competition is a good thing. Check out the article over at TechCrunch for more details.