I see that the discussion on this subject is still keeping on! And very interesting ideas are emerging!

My post is a short one, just to let you know that M2life and I published the very first draft of the research that Gwyn refered to.

If you are interested you can find it here:

http://cleobekkers.wordpress.com/2007/06/16/mundos-virtuais-de-aprendizagem-e-de-ensino-uma-caracterizacao-inicial/

Only the abstract is in English. Even that, if you are curious… just pass by!

Well, apparently, I was very wrong, but at least I wasn’t the only one — I asked a few of my very friendly “competitors” in the metaverse development area if they would accept a contract for a US$25-30k build in SL without talking with them over the phone at least. They said “NO WAY”, loud and clear, and I nodded to myself, believing that this time I got it right.

I was so wrong. Suddenly I realised that in half a year, over half the income from Beta Technologies came from “voiceless” business. And we would even have more “voiceless” business if we hadn’t two partners that simply delight in talking over the phone (I’m so glad they take all the calls, lol). But on my other job as an IT consultant I tried to count on my fingers when was the last time I had talked to a customer on the phone, and how many customers I did actually meet in the flesh. You could count them all on the fingers of your hand, and some fingers would be left over. One particular case of a very nice customer I hadn’t met for several years of a very good business relationship — and when we finally met “in the flesh”, we spent most of the time talking about Second Life and not “other business”… since… well, we had email and MSN for “handling business”.

All these things started to fit, as a very complex puzzle that suddenly makes sense, when I saw that Linden Lab was removing phone support and doing webchat support instead. I was revolted! In three years of SL, I never managed to get them on the phone (mostly to get one of my old alts back), and now that they are introducing tiered support, I was hoping I could finally get someone on the phone… when it suddenly went ‘click’. If for so many years I never managed to call Linden Lab, why should I worry? They’re giving us a better tool (webchat), not a painfully hard to use (voice!), so I should be happy, not frustrated?

Why do I tell all my customers that they can get 24/7 technical support if they do it by email, but only “a few hours” during business days when on the phone? (this has been on all contracts I’ve signed since uh… 1994 I believe).

The “moment of enlightenment” came to me, of course, when I attended the academic workshop and heard people talking about exactly this issue. All suddenly made sense. Well, being an avid book reader (and hating podcasts) as well as a (former) amateur writer, I was naturally eager to embrace the notion that the written text wasn’t outdated yet — after being in widespread use for 6,000 years or so

Now I start to think that if business doesn’t want voice, if educators think it’s impossible to use for remote training, if roleplayers don’t like it, and if people like me — with an ugly, heavily-accented voice — simply hate it (and have hated it for ages), I wondered who is left…

Well, the answer to that is quite simple, actually: everybody who uses the phone for entertainment. And these are certainly the majority of the users in Second Life

—

Kisa, you’re right, my own article is a bit incomplete. A very good example of a virtual presence is using a RL building — specially if it’s a lovely one! — but do the interiors completely adapted to SL needs. After all, this is not unheard of in RL buildings: people started building castles, then rebuilt their interiors for monasteries, later turned them into hospitals, briefly used them as army barracks, and now they become universities… in the mean time, their interiors were done over and over again to fit different purposes! So I agree that the same should happen in SL!

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JJ, thanks for pointing out your comments on NWN which I ashamedly admit to have completely missed — they provided very refreshing reading. I’m still undecided about if a “SL that imitates RL” is better than a “SL that complements RL” (and it would be worth thinking about how it complements). I think it’s rather soon to tell…

As you may or may not have read I’ve uttered on these topics before (coincidentally I bring up the RL-building-in-SL issue too) and, like you, will do so more confidently now it’s substantiated by scientific research.

I guess we, the humans, have to practice how to augment RL with technology – at least when said tech is not created to meet a specific, already existing demand.
I usually compare all these new-fanglede web innovations (they call it 2.0, don’t they?) with the invention of the steam engine:
- the steam engine was invented to do a lot of heavy lifting which, until then, had to be done manually (because it had to be done, period)
- pretty much the whole internet (meaning not just 2.0) was invented mostly because we could, and apparently it’s still somewhat unclear what kind of heavy lifting we want it to do, and if it’s really necessary.

I am being pointy, of course, many of os do indeed need the internet and don’t know how we’d work without it – one might also argue (I have) that the means of digital communications have grown from the same root that gave us language, namely our need to communicate.

Even so, we seem to need to think pretty hard to find out what the “right” uses for these technologies should be…

Jj

Gwyn’s summary of the Workshop on Communication, Education and Teaching has got me thinking about education, and reflecting on my past experiences as an Instructor in Second Life.
[the researchers are] stepping over the barrier between the “tea…

Well yes, I agree, but having spent the past couple of months doing just that, I do think that RL re-creations have some value within SL, providing that their use doesn’t try to re-create RL.

Providing you do it well, and then reuse the space for activities that are inherent to SL and couldn’t be achieved anywhere else, then a re-creation can act as a transitional space – bridging both worlds, and throwing up jarring inconsistancies that force users of that space to really think about the environments they inhabit.

Your comment about communication via text seems to be supported by IBM, as this quote from Tataru Nino’s Mixed Reality Mondays shows:

‘IBM sales representatives are always at work, just switching between the medium they are using to communicate with the customer. Immediately, I wondered how they weighed in on the voice/text debate.

“We aren’t doing voice,” Zsigmond told me, “For a few reasons.”

She cited lack of universality, noise-clutter and crosstalk, privacy and difficulties identifying a given speaker. She indicated that IBM might move into the voice arena at some time in the future, but not yet. For now, your IBM sales experience in Second Life will be a melange of text, object interaction, notecards, and the 2D Web’.

However, I do not want to give the impression that I think Voice has no use at all. No doubt either form of communication has its benefits and drawbacks, which will be emphasised depending on the nature of your current activity in SL. For instance, a builder could explain what they are doing while continuing to work if they chat via voice. That would not be possible via text.