Finding the Right Skin (Part 1): The Problem of “Uptime”

If you pull up my Second Life profile you’ll see that I was born on October 15, 2007.   In SL terms that’s an eon; it's such a long time ago, in fact, that any reasonable person would want to know either why it took me this long to finally start blog posting or why I’m even bothering to start a blog right now after not having one for so long.  The answer is that, as everyone knows, you can’t blog well if you don’t have the right skin.  Frankly folks, it took me this long to find that skin.

Now anyone who’s reading this probably already has some experience in SL and knows that it requires a significant investment of time and brain power just to be able to use the interface to move around without running into things, to figure out how to listen and use voice chat, and to get streaming audio and video to work.  That doesn’t even to begin to scratch the surface of the time it takes to learn to create content and get oneself looking like anything other than a total noob.  It’s what I call “uptime” – the time it takes to get up and running sufficiently skillfully on a platform that one can begin to use it unselfconsciously and creatively.  I can pretty much trace the course of my uptime just by looking at the skin I was wearing at various times during the past 3+ years.

My first skin was the skin that the LL gods gave me at birth, and which I had for over a year and half.  In 2007 one entered SL with freakin’ ugly skin, but since it was frustratingly way beyond my skill level to so much as lurch my avatar around the New Media Consortium’s orientation plaza, I logged off after 20 minutes and didn’t come back for a year and a half.  Skin problem solved.  I’ve learned since that this kind of reaction is not all uncommon among academic folks like me.  As much as our students often react badly to SL being so difficult to learn to use (and Iggy O. has a thought provoking blog post on this topicl), I think it’s even harder for educators to deal with.  When you're used to being an authority on a subject it’s hard to imagine teaching students in SL with any credibility at all if you look like a loser and keep running into walls.

Fast forward to the spring of 2009 and I found myself in receipt of an offer I couldn’t refuse.  The program officer of the organization that funds my RL research told me that he expected to see my virtual keister planted in a seat for a 1-hour session that was part of larger conference on virtual worlds the MacArthur Foundation was holding on its new SL island.  (By the way, that island is no longer in SL.)  And so, over the course of a couple of days, I managed to lurch through about 60% of the NMC’s orientation material, find myself a free change of clothing courtesy of NMC, change my appearance to something I thought looked better, and set off to discover the wonders of education in a virtual world.  My uptime was just beginning though: I’ll confess that I spent that entire hour at the conference reading the open chat trying to figure out what all the typed comments were about.  I had no idea that I even needed to activate streaming audio to hear the program.  Even if I had known what my problem was, I would have had no clue that day how to fix it.  Worse still, would you believe that I actually went out in public looking like this?

As with all high-end educational technology platforms an educator just has to reach a state of détente with SL and accept that it’s going to take a huge amount of uptime before anything educationally worthwhile can be accomplished.  I found some decent looking skin a month or two after that MacArthur conference, which was about the same time I figured out how to resize and reposition clothing.   So I began to tour the “educational” places on the LL Showcase that summer and began to see how educators are using SL.  I found a few places I liked, and one region in particular that seemed congenial enough that, by November, I started to learn to build stuff in order to contribute to the group educational effort there.  Okay, I’m a slow learner – it only took 2+ years since my SL birthday to get to that point!

Since that time I’ve spent a lot of time talking with the educators who have visited our educational region (it’s on ISTE’s board of places for educators to visit), finding out what they want and need out of SL, visiting many other regions in SL that have been designed or are being used for education, talking to the designers and users of those regions, watching what works and doesn't work educationally in a virtual world, and also being a voyeur on the Virtual World Educational Roundtable website.  I’ve even begun to visit some of the educational areas in other virtual world grids. 

The Right Skin

Just a month or so ago two important things happened to me nearly simultaneously.  I decided that I had developed enough of an overview and knowledge base of what educators are doing in virtual worlds that I could begin to write about what it all means.  And a friend sent me a skin that she had won on a Midnight Mania board that she couldn’t use herself and thought I might like.  You can see it right here.  It is the perfect skin for me, which I know because the first time I wore it in public (and even though my profile says I’m a college professor) two guys I’d never met before hit on me.  So here I am in the blogosphere, bringing the perspective of someone who has studied human learning and cognition scientifically in RL for over, ... um … well, for a really long time.  I’m finally in possession of the right professional and avatar skins to do what I came into SL to do: write about what works and doesn’t work when it comes to education in a virtual world.