IBM@Play on Second Life.

IBM@Play on Second Life, Online Training, 2007, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, $0.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I found myself in the oddest of places. There I was, looking about 20 years younger and walking around on an island with an occasional phantom figure passing by: monsters, vampires, animals, and regular folk. Suddenly, I received a message from on high, an invitation to teleport to another location.

Accepting the invitation, I immediately flew through time and space, landing from the sky on another island. There I stood face to face with Mr. Weeks, a man with spiky-white hair and plaid pants. No, this wasn't a bad dream induced by a late night pizza. This was my introduction to Second Life, and Weeks served as our Celtic tour guide.

When presented with an opportunity to review Second Life, I jumped at the chance to take Morpheus's red pill to see how deep the rabbit hole went. However, instead of following the white rabbit, I followed Chuck Hamilton of IBM's Center for Advanced Learning, an authority on the use of play and work to create optimal learning. Mr. Weeks is Chuck's avatar in Second Life. Frank Nguyen, the manager of emerging technologies at American Express, accompanied me on the tour.

Frank has managed the design, development, and deployment of learning and performance solutions for various Fortune 500 companies, including American Express, Intel, and MicroAge. He is coauthor of Efficiency in Learning (see the TMR review here) and has written articles on instructional design and performance support. Frank holds an Educational Technology masters and doctoral degree from Arizona State University.

According to Wikipedia.com, Second Life is an "Internet-based virtual world where residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items and services from one another."

Residents create an avatar, or visual online presence, to look any way they want. They navigate using their keyboard and communicate through text-messaging. Audio with a headset is on the horizon, and, of course, you can always use conference calls. Simulations like Second Life are sometimes referred to as "3D," meaning users encounter or build objects they can walk around, climb over, enter and exit, and so on.

A basic membership is free, but more privileges come with the paid premium membership. An up-to-date computer and fast connection are recommended. The tool itself seems easy to use. Most savvy computer users should be comfortable after a day of exploration and training.

While Second Life attracts a lot of strictly entertainment-seekers, there is an ever-growing community of learning professionals from colleges and corporations exploring the virtual classroom uses of Second Life. You can even find a section of the Second Life website devoted to business and education. IBM is an early adopter of the learning capabilities of Second Life and is using it for, among other things, cultural on-boarding of Chinese new hires.

Chuck Hamilton provided a tour of the public sections of two IBM Second Life islands for Frank and me. We started with a discussion about how the Internet is evolving into a more 3D, highly social, user-created, and immersive environment. "It's all about people and virtual collaboration," said Chuck as he showed us a virtual meeting room and an amphitheater where people can gather, as anonymously as desired, for presentations and interaction.

Some important capabilities of virtual worlds like Second Life emerged from our discussion with Chuck:

* Sense of self: Ability to create an avatar to look the way you want to look

* Death of distance: Ability to bring together people from across the globe

* Power of presence, space, and co-creation: Ability to collaborate and interact socially

* Pervasiveness of practice: Ability to learn in a safe environment by practicing

* Enrichment of experience: Ability to create diverse experiences, e.g., battlefield simulations, building molecules together, walking through a rain forest

Chuck also showed us examples of how to take advantage of Second Life's collaborative, expressive, and navigational attributes. His department works with groups internal and external to IBM, and he has worked on Second Life projects ranging from lessons on molecules, products in a Circuit City store, and simulated life on an oil rig.

Second Life seems to be a perfect place to quickly build simulations of people, places, and things that may not have been easy to simulate in the past, bringing disconnected people together to collaborate and learn in an interactive way.

IBM is investing liberally in the Second Life environment. It would appear to be the beginning of the next generation of online learning environments. At its current stage, it is somewhat difficult to see all its applications. But with a robust educational community and companies like IBM using Second Life, unique and creative applications are imminent.

Providing the Second Life application to a large employee population could invite distraction, age polarization, and security issues. However, Chuck mentioned that these issues have not posed a problem in IBM's adoption of Second Life. Over 4,000 IBMers of wide-ranging ages use Second Life at a given time.

Nevertheless, security could potentially be an issue for some organizations. While Second Life provides some security features, proprietary information would almost certainly need to fall behind a company's firewall.

I definitely see how Second Life could be effectively used in a more controlled environment like a classroom, and anything that could improve weeks-long call center training in conventional classrooms would be welcome.

While the original intent of Second Life was to be a virtual world where people from around the globe could interact, collaborate, and build, the potential applications of Second Life for training and learning are both obvious and obscure.

IBM has largely used Second Life as a beefed-up virtual classroom replacement. Instead of linking to two-dimensional web collaboration tools with chat panels, presentations, and polls, IBM has used Second Life to provide three-dimensional access to similar capabilities.

Few organizations really know how to best leverage the functionality of the traditional two-dimensional virtual classroom. With the advent of a three-dimensional alternative, instructional designers and trainers must once again reinvent their virtual classroom strategies and skills in order to make the best use of this new technology.

In addition, Second Life is touted as a place where residents can easily build and create new 3D constructs. In this respect, it may be more relevant to training on physical processes and procedures and tasks rather than facts and concepts.

Imagine building virtual airports, warehouses, or factories in Second Life and training your employees how to move baggage between terminals, drive a forklift, or work on an assembly line before ever setting foot in "First Life." Robust simulations that once took months and millions of dollars to build might potentially be created in a fraction of the time.

Another division of IBM has studied the influence of game playing on leadership skills. To read the report (in PDF format requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader), click here.

Michael Nelson, IBM director of Internet technology and strategy, recently suggested a couple of blogs that provide good information about simulations and games: Eightbar and Gametomorrow.com.

Recommendation

I would highly recommend investigating and exploring Second Life as well as the other virtual worlds and environments (Entropia Universe, The Sims Online, There, Weblo, Forterra, Protosphere, Open Croquet, and Google Earth/Maps) if for no other purpose than to see what is on the horizon for online learning and immersive-collaborative environments. Note: the rating below of three and a half stars ("very good") should be something like 3.7 on the four-point scale, but it's hard to depict seven-tenths of a star!

Review by Tim Hall and Frank Nguyen

Product Ratings

IBM@Play on Second Life

Overall rating  *** 1/2