Second Life Is Great for Some; Requiring Its Use Is Not

Today I read a paper which ends with the authors' stated plan to move their courses to Second Life. I thought, please don't do this! Required SL in online courses: usually a bad idea. I am not anti-Second Life, but I'm opposed to requiring online learners to learn new Web 2.0 tools without good reason, particularly the complicated ones like SL.

As it happens, today I attended a meeting in Second Life. Although it took me about 10 minutes after arriving to actually find the place where everyone was gathered, I was able to walk up two flights of stairs, find the gathering place on a map, fly to the meeting location using the map for navigation, land reasonably well (although not w/o a bit of a stumble apparently), and adjust the controls quickly enough to introduce myself w/o blasting other people's eardrums (a problem I've apparently had in previous meetings). I got a folder from some sort of kiosk and received a "title belt" which enables my 'real' name to be displayed along with my avatar name. My personal takeaway from this session: SL enjoyment is directly proportional to SL competence.

But here's the thing: even simple tasks took some effort to manage. I flew into the 3rd story railing repeatedly before unexpectedly taking off on flight, not exactly knowing how. It took me a couple of tries to get the information from the kiosk. I couldn't remember the avatar name of the person dispensing title belts. And so on. In short, it's just such a heavy cognitive load.

As I've written elsewhere, classroom courses are easy for students to navigate because most of us have thousands of hours of practice hard-wired into our butts. Classroom courses are easy to navigate: show up, sit down, you know the drill from there.

Online courses create a higher cognitive load: newbies have to figure out how to navigate the course -- where to find things, how to show up online to do coursework, etc. It is not hard to learn for most people, but it does require more effort and thought than classroom courses until one gets the hang of it -- hence the emergent conventional wisdom about online learners needing more "self-discipline" to succeed. A lot of this supposed "self-discipline" is simply being willing and able to handle the increased cognitive load -- not entirely unlike, say, taking a classroom course in one's second language.

If online courses increase the cognitive load, what do courses in Second Life do? Now suddenly the most basic things -- moving, walking, talking, finding things -- have to be learned anew. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog, you can go to class in your bunny slippers -- until you take a class in Second Life, that is: now you have to be worried about clothes again, only this time you also have to learn anew how to find them, how to choose them. My avatar has a blue t-shirt and some very weird hair, and it's going to stay that way for awhile; I've got too much First Life stuff to master to worry about how I look all over again as if I were back in high school.

Surely many SL denizens, perhaps most, are more adept and motivated than I. Still, why put online learners through this? Especially newbies? IMO, there is a very limited set of cases where it makes sense to require online learners to use Second Life -- for instance, when the course itself is about Web 2.0 technologies, or perhaps for learners who are already adept at it.

It's tempting to think that I'm just being tired and cranky, except for this point: Web 2.0 technologies are a menu -- pick and choose instead of dictating. The corollary is that their use should be voluntary to the extent possible. A student wants to submit work via Facebook? Maybe you can accommodate them. Require students to use Facebook? Millions of high school students just shuddered in disgust -- don't think they'd be feeling that, as some high school students I know might say...