Followup on Second Life Synchronous Discussion

I facilitated an online discussion about using e-books for my Instructional Applications of the Internet class last week. The technology we used to meet was Second Life (SL).

Initially, I was prepared to conduct this discussion using the voice chat feature. But as we were waiting on the Kent State island to all meet up as a group, I noticed that music was piping into where we were meeting. After asking some people in the class, you can turn off this music using your individual preferences. I turned it off on my client. But I wasn't sure if everyone else in the class had turned their background off, though. So, I decided to hold my chat via text.

I am a pretty slow typist, so the discussion didn't do as smooth as I think it would have using DimDim. When I would start typing a comment or question, it seemed as though we were already discussing another point by the time I finished my point. This was kind of frustrating.

I really don't think the avatars added anything to the chat either. They were more distracting than anything.

There were also two people in the class posting on the Vista discussion board asking where to meet in SL. I had to read their posts, get their SL handles, and invite them to teleport to where we were holding our discussion. Finding a place to meet in SL is much, much more difficult than just providing a link like we did with DimDim.

While I think SL has its purpose and applications, I felt as though it detracted from my discussion rather than enhanced it.

If we would have spent significant time as class learning the ins and out of everything that SL can do, perhaps we could used the discussion to leverage some of the more advanced features of SL. I fully understand that there is some value in using SL for discussion so that we are at least exposed to SL. If it wasn't for this class, I wouldn't have any real understanding of SL.

I think the overhead to getting SL to work is not worth the benefit for a synchronous, text discussion. I think that using SL for just a text chat is equivalent to only using car to listen to the radio (and not driving it). While your car certainly has a fully-functioning radio, it's main purpose is to be driven. And while SL has a working text chat feature, it is really designed to do something so, so much more than just text chat.