Hitching a ride on the long tail of SpongeFish

Many of my friends and colleagues have asked me why I would leave SUNY to swim with SpongeFish, plunging into the uncertain waters of Internet start ups. When I told Amos Guiora, an old pal, he looked at me like I was nuts and asked me directly, “Won’t you miss the trappings of privilege and power?”

Well, I don’t know about trappings, privilege and power, (I think more: bureaucracy) but my first response was: SpongeFish, San Francisco, young people smarter than me, constant action, 24 hours to implementing your ideas…. where’s the downside?

On the other hand, the biggest difference between working for a large institution and an entrepreneurial venture is that if you have an idea or see something that needs doing, if don’t do it yourself, it ain’t going to get done. And you can’t afford to be silent if you see something, which means you have to ride the wind. Sometimes you have to be the wind. Michael Neril, SpongeFish CEO, plays that role for the whole team. He’s not just the wind, he’s the hurricane. I’m usually just the hot air.

Again: why SpongeFish? In the sped-up world of Web 2.0, it’s now already way past a cliche, but The Long Tail by Chris Anderson gives me the simplest way to explain it.

From the big box store to the long tail of e-learning

At SUNY, among other projects I was responsible for the SUNY Learning Network. In terms of the “long tail” tale, the SLN is one of the big box stores of e-learning: 4000+ courses filling 100,000 virtual seats from 40 campuses across New York state. If you count revenue from tuition, fees, and state/county allocations for each enrollment, it supported about $100 million for SUNY.

I looked at the research about what made e-learning grow at SUNY. Students and professors came to the virtual classroom because of the obvious: access and convenience. Anytime anywhere was SLN’s motto. But, I asked, what kept them returning to virtual classroom? Or as they say out in Silicon Valley, what makes distance learning sticky?

It was simple, really: the virtual classroom forces teachers and students to comment on each other’s postings directly. Everyone has to post, and in most classes, everyone has to respond. The prof had to respond to the student, and the students were partly graded in how much they participated in discussions and responded to each other.

When I was a professor in the traditional classroom, I had a gratuitous line in each of my syllabi telling students that part of their grade would be based on the quality of their class participation. Nonetheless, 90% of the discussions were carried by 10% of the students. The shy, the reticent, the quiet, the discreet … I doubt their grades suffered, but the vocal and aggressive were rewarded.

In the virtual classroom, the content of the course - the value - was provided by everyone. Course archives show that students contribute collectively more volume of content than the professor. In the traditional classroom, I would collect the 30 (or 300) papers from the students, grade them, and turn them back privately. In most virtual classrooms, everyone’s papers gets published, circulated, shared and commented on.

As any professor worth their salt knows, the groupmind of the class is more powerful and precious than the authority of the professor — if you activate it through discussion and don’t lecture all the time. So in the most basic sense, the accumulating value of the thinking and knowledge in the virtual classroom is being provided by the “many” of the “one-to-many broadcast” channel of the traditional classroom. Or as Howard Rheingold puts it, smartmobs.

This is very powerful. Online learning shows the eagerness of this generation to express and share anything and everything. Just today, the New York Times called them not the “postmoderns” but “the post everythings.” I saw it — no I felt it — even from the shelter of my office in the castle of SUNY, a powerful and rising tide, an irresistible force of human nature emerging because the technology unleashed the means to satisfy pent-up desire. Maybe in some senses the technology called that desire into being.

Obviously the web de-institutionalizes the means to participating in this knowledge expression and exchange. It poses some pretty good challenges to the university’s control over the means of producing and consuming knowledge:

• What if we provided tools and a space outside the restrictions of the university setting for everyone to participate in the knowledge game?
• What kind of business could be built to capitalize on unleashing that force?
• What if valuable knowledge was established not by the canons and filters of disciplines and curricula but by a wide-open marketplace for anyone’s personal knowledge?
• What if the coin of the realm wasn’t credits and diplomas, but mutual appreciation and acknowledgement and the value that others found in what you had to share?
• What if the knowledge that mattered is based on who originated it and who thinks it’s valuable, rather than something prescribed and packaged by intermediaries?
• What if there was a guru for every seeker, just like there’s a tune for every taste. And if perchance, you couldn’t find one, what if you could summon it into being by challenging the collective to slake your thirst.

In short:

• What if anybody could teach anything to anybody else, in any medium - words, sound, video, image?

Welcome to the long tail of knowledge, where the digitization of content and instant posting over the Web means it costs zero to stock the shelves with every conceivable bit of knowledge. Where iTunes puts Tower Records out of business and blogs send newspapers scurrying for cover(age).

As Chris Anderson explained, in the big box stores the overhead comes from sustaining the physical plant. Shelf space is limited, so choices have to be made. Additional overhead comes from creating a way to make those choices: hiring the people to select the stuff that goes on the shelves (or in the movie theaters or into the classrooms or the bookstores) so that you maximize profits and minimize mistakes. Choices and channels are narrowed, naturally enough, as producers and retailers focus on the 20% of stuff that makes 80% of the profit. Idiosyncratic, unusual, exotic, rare are squeezed out or become prohibitively expensive. The personal becomes invisible in favor of the public of mass cultures. This is the “Big Head” - a term with special irony for higher education (the shaded blue area below).

Image by Frank Gens, IDC.com [http://blogs.idc.com/ie/?p=53]

Those questions listed above were just some I was asking myself at SUNY. I realized the e-learning programs we sponsored, as many lights as they turned on, were just the big head of a huge dragon - or should I say SpongeFish  with a long tail of opportunity.

SpongeFish has been my attempt to answer those questions. What if anyone could express and teach anything to anyone else? We’ve been swimming ever since, transforming some of those questions into some very potent answers, making it real and more tangible and adding stuff I never conceived of.  Our CEO, Michael, assembled a remarkable team - Sunny Madra, Adam Durfee, Isaac Dudek, Lesley Beatty, Stewart Bonn, Bill Gannon - and together we’ve been able to make SpongeFish a site with global potential.

We’ve just launched a limited beta, listening to the wisdom of the groupmind as it guides us in our constant iteration and improvement of the site so we can help them swim and catch the rising tide of this very big ocean of possibility.

Unleash your inner graffitist.

My very old and dear friend and colleague, “Uncle” Bill Benzon (co-author of Visualization) has turned his considerable genius to tracking down graffiti artists around New Jersey and New York. His splendid photos of graffiti are wrapped in his very keen sense of the furtive, beyond the edge marginalism of the images and artists themselves.

Benzon’s Photo of Triceratops Graffit in NJ

These images evoke stories of young kids in urban guerrilla gear, sneaking onto the grounds of subway trainyards. They climb 12-foot-high chain link fences topped with razorwire. They dodge security cops, with cans of spraypaint in their backpacks. They work quickly, stealthily, but produce some amazing art. Many signature pieces are on the subway cars or on pillars under trestles that can’t be seen from the street.

So these artists put themselves in considerable jeopardy…and for what? Who is going to see their work? Thousands of commuters whizzing by an underpass, catching it, maybe, for a quarter of a second? Or thousands of commuters on subway platforms, watching it roar by, if they happen to glance up from their newspapers or blackberrys?

As I’ve said before, find an itch that needs scratching and you’ve got the basis for a good product. These graffitists are in the grip of a pretty compelling itch.

One of the desires SpongeFish wants to satisfy is something I call this graffiti impulse. I know something and feel something and must share it with the world. I have no hope of getting paid, but there’s a deeper reward: thousands or even millions of eyes on it, if only for part of a second.

Stowe Boyd has written about this phenomenon on his blog:

“Graffitti is a creative act. What is considered defacement is in fact an innate socializing impulse — to leave our mark on what we behold, and thereby denote our liaison with the greater world.” - Stowe on “Social Architecture: The Foundation of the Blogosphere”

The Web in general and sites for sharing what you know like SpongeFish in particular put the spraypaint cans in the hands of everyone and stands them in front of the public wall with an implicit challenge - and the permission: Go ahead and spray away! There are many companies in this space. The one that puts the better can of spraypaint in the hands of the most people will win. But it’s a noble enterprise: to unleash the inner graffitist in everybody.

ITunesU … where’s the me?

In February 2006, I flew ten professors and e-learning folks from around the state to Cupertino to listen to the Apple team for higher education, led by the legendary John Couch. John unfolded a vision of iTunesU that was pretty compelling, and the SUNY folks were initially dazzled. Here’s what impressed them:

• Podcasting is stupid simple (my favorite kind because it means I have a hope of using it).
• The ubiquity of iTunes and iPods opens a channel to students that’s hard to resist. iTunesU holds out the promise of getting ‘em where they live, extending the reach of the classroom to students’ backpacks, dorms, strolls on campus ….

OK, OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably also add a third convincer:

• Cupertino weather was nothing like Buffalo’s, Albany’s, Binghamton’s or even sunny southern New Paltz’s. We had a seductive dinner at a superb restaurant in Saratoga, CA, some silky Napa wines. And when we got down to business, the gleaming Apple campus in the dazzling corporate conference and media center seemed pretty, uh, gleaming and dazzling.

Now the very things that made John and his team’s pitch seductive also make iTunesU problematic for knowledge sharing

We’re talkin’ ’bout U,U,U,U,U, …. But What About Me?

• No dialogue: Podcasting and vodcasting don’t encourage the interaction that fuels really good learning. As one professor noted, What the heck is the difference between vodcasts and podcasts and good old VHS tutorials and books on tape?  Podcasting is another form of talking-heads lectures.

Thanks for the dinner, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch

• When a professor puts his lectures out as podcasting, he’s creating value, both intangible (knowledge, baby) and tangible (more students now need to use iPods and you know how seductive those little suckers are). Podcasts have to be served from the iTunes corporate servers or from campus servers configured with the Apple proprietary hooks on them. When you tug at the thread of how to get this stuff from institutional servers to the corporate servers, questions, shall we say, arise.

What does work, as studies of distance learning show, is engagement, or to put it more simply, people paying attention to other people in the virtual classroom: teachers commenting on student posts, students commenting on each other’s posts, and, as I found out from talking to lots of online professors, students acknowledging the profs with the kind of back-and-forth that text messaging, discussion threads and comments make so easy online.

WHat brings students and professors back to the virtual classroom over and over again? Amazingly, some students who were even living on campus chose to take the online course over the on-campus course? What motivated that? Was it simply the convenience of taking the course in your pajamas and not having to cross the quad in those Oswego or Buffalo blizzards?

How to really motivate knowledge sharing

Beyond getting grades and degrees - the old school touchstones for motivating students to learn - studies of e-learning at SUNY and elsewhere shows over and over again that people are universally compelled and enticed to share what they know by other rewards, too.

Like simple, sweet recognition. Touch me, touch my mind.

For me, the proof is in the pudding: professors also told me that one of the top things that brought them back to online teaching was the dialogue with all their students. It had to be something, because most studies show teaching online is more difficult and time-consuming than showing up for those three hours a week on campus for a traditional class.

So anytime you can identify an impulse this strong in these many people - millions of people learning online - then you have the basis of a good business. Scratch an itch.

I have no doubt that iTunesU will continue to expand, especially as Apple adds comment threads other socially dynamic tools to their version of the virtual classroom.  But it seems to me that it has to bend its core business to accommodate the core desire in knowledge sharing, which is SHARING very dynamically and being recognized for it.

Imagine building a business from the ground up on that premise: building tools for people to express everything in their heads and then sharing and recognizing each other with social tools. That seems like a better backscratcher. It was on this foundation that we built SpongeFish. If the question about elearning is “Where’s the me?” then SpongeFish is the attempt to answer that question.

Harvesting wild mushroooms

Imagine a professor, let’s call her S., who is retiring from her university after a distinguished 35 years in the profession. She has just come from the wine and cheese party in her honor at the department. On the way to the real party at a colleague’s house in the quainter section of town, she decides to make one last stop at her old office, telling herself she’d just check to see if she’s left anything behind.

S. slides the key into the lock and opens the door in one practiced, unconscious motion. As she surveys the empty office, she notices the light fade from the day through the old familiar and dusty window overlooking the academic quad. But she’s beyond all wistfulness and sentiment now. She opens the drawer to her desk one last time, decides she won’t be embarrassed at leaving behind a few paper clips and stray pennies, closes the drawer, stands up resolutely, and for the last time, leaves her office.

As she leaves, though, another kind of regret steals over her. What has S left behind besides the paper clips, stray pennies, and the fading light in her office? The unwritten papers. The research that couldn’t be conducted because the grant never came through. The thousands of classes, meetings with students hopeful or tearful, hours in committees, millions of papers graded, books that lined the shelves, the drafts of journal articles written and manuscripts reviewed, a gazillion memos - and then since the 1980s emails — answered or ignored: all the detritus of a long life in academia.

The underbelly of a wild mushroom

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE

Now think of the non-obvious stuff that’s been left behind: the things she’s learned but never got to say. The accumulated wisdom, some of it never expressed or captured for posterity. The personal knowledge she just is carrying with her out the door, the stuff that’s not quite institutional not quite academic didn’t quite fit into the discipline or the profession and for which there was no real outlet, both the gold and the dust: How to pause at just the right moment during a lecture about mushrooms edible, inedible, and … hallucinogenic. How to handle the tenured colleague who never grew up. How to get student teams to work together. How to persuade a colleague to join you on a grant proposal. How to give a troubled student a break without breaking the rules. How to influence a committee without taking charge. How to conduct an interview for a job candidate. How to deal with the discouragement of waiting two years for a paper to be published.

More hidden treasures from wild mushrooms

WILD KNOWLEDGE

And then there’s all that other wild stuff for which there aren’t even categories because it’s all crossover wisdom and quasi-conscious influence between different continents of her inner world: How her professional research in genetics informed her choice to volunteer leading teen tours of nature. How raising her children gave her tools to deal with difficult colleagues and eventually, serve as Chair (for those horrible and glorious five years!). How what she knows about preserving species genetics could be a multi-million dollar business, if only she could find the time and the folks with business savvy to make it happen. How much of her field knowledge of botany is not worthy of publication but is worthy of dissemination beyond a small circle of grad students. The network of friends and former students and colleagues that crop up with increasing frequency in those small world events, where they’re least expected, and her fantasy of connecting them together. What she learned working with troubled teens about the healing power of focusing on the small intricate things in nature during a walk in the woods in the rain. Ah, the desire she has just to express that stuff that falls between the cracks and outside the boxes.

Where does that universe of things worth knowing go when S retires? What happens to its value? What can a large university like SUNY, or any institution for that matter, do to preserve this most precious resource, this PK?

And this is not just a challenge - and an opportunity - for universities. I know from working in the corporate world, even a fairly open and enlightened company like Thomson Learning, how damnably difficult it is to express the stuff that your boss isn’t ready to hear and that isn’t in your job description and for which there are no journals or classes or room in the workday. The cliche about not thinking out of the box is not just true, when you find you’re unable to even express it, it’s a form of pain.

A cover piece in the magazine INC. (May 2007) highlighted the problem: “Find It. Use It. It’s a good bet your company possesses intellectual property it isn’t exploiting.” The article goes on to discuss the intellectual property left on the table (or behind the closed door) by many corporations and strategies to find those hidden assets. In the corproate world, as in academia and indeed for all enterprises, it begins with a definition of what is valuable.

“Baruch Lev, a professor of accounting and finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who once calculated that approximately 85 percent of a company’s value resides in such intangibles. Unfortunately, many of those assets go unexploited because they are hard to inventory, manage, or even recognize. ‘What drives me nuts personally and professionally is to think about all that good stuff being wasted,’ says Sherman [an IP lawyer featured in the article], shaking his shaggy head. ‘All that innovation. All that intellectual capital. It’s just sitting there collecting strategic dust.’ “

Gills of the mushroom

What’s the solution? Well, to start I’d suggest two things:

Recognition: A broader definition of - and recognition for - what is valuable from within the institution and for the people who have the blooming in their heads, potential to be harvested. Beyond the syllabi and disciplines and journals there’s personal and wild knowledge that never gets expressed or recognized… wild mushrooms.

The Means: The tools to extract and entice the people in our institutions to express what they know, to share and broadcast it simply and without too many restrictions. A platform that gives people an invitation, the permission, and the simple but robust means to show all that they know, whatever they know, and find their audience.

Obviously, the Web, and especially Web 2.0 has shown us the pent-up world-wide desire for self-expression is there, and it has shown us some of the tools. Wikipedia and YouTube and MySpace suggest people are content to have their stuff projected in a public spcae even if it whizzes by anonymously, like the elaborate graffiti on a NYC train. Whoah! I’m famous!

Why not unleash these Web 2.0 lessons and technologies in the academic space to both treasure — and dig up the buried treasure — of the wild personal knowledge that we all leave behind in the office, like spare change in the folds of a couch or the hidden but wondrous underbellies of wild mushrooms?

We would all benefit from the harvest, providers and seekers alike.

A Second Life first at SUNY’s Conference on Instructional Technologies?

Every year, my office sponsors the Conference on Instructional Technologies, one of SUNY’s largest conferences. This year almost 600 of us met on the campus of SUNY Plattsburgh way up there on Lake Champlain near the Canadian border.

[And let me take this chance to thank the staff at Plattsburgh and President John Ettling for their wonderful hospitality and the FACT Council and Center for Professional Development who organized and supported the conference, especially Nancy Motondo and her team.]

Every year at the CIT, there’s one or two technologies that cause a buzz. This year it was Second Life and iTunesU. Beyond all the demos and excitement of how these environments can be used for learning, we may have had another SUNY first:our keynote speaker, Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium had his flight from Austin, TX cancelled. Instead of just talking the talk, he decided to walk the virtual walk. With the help of Craig Lending, Chair of FACT and the great media folks at Plattsburgh, we projected his presentation, including a PowerPoint show and live voice, from SecondLife. At the same time, there was an audience in the NMC learning space. Some were recruited beforehand, some were literally drop-ins (they flew down into their seats as you can do in Second Life). And - here might be the breakthrough - at least one clever person was in the auditorium at Plattsburgh and signed onto her SL account and teleported to watch the NMC show in virtual reality.

 

Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium ( in the distance, right) live” on Second Life to the CIT at SUNY Plattsburgh, May 30, 2007.

I need to interview her to find out what it was like to be in two places at once. Was it like being nowhere at all? How did she deal cognitively with the stereopticon performance? Did the time lag cause a little schizophrenia or cognitive dissonance? Which experience was more satisfying and why?

SUNY & The Web: Connecting the castles

The loaded question of the day is one right out of The Dating Game (or match.com): What do the World Wide Web and SUNY have in common, and what can they do for each other? (OK, that’s two questions.)

SUNY’s own website makes our first cut at an answer obvious: SUNY is already a Web.

SUNY’s 64 geographically dispersed campuses bring educational opportunity within commuting distance of virtually all New Yorkers and comprise the nation’s largest comprehensive system of public higher education.

What “largest” means is that even though the California system — University of California, California State University, and Community Colleges — is larger, they do not act as a comprehensive system. SUNY puts together community colleges, four-year colleges and universities under one umbrella.

What “system” means is a little harder to pin down. SUNY is definitely a system because it is funded by the NYS legislature and organized and administered by a single entity here in our castle-like home. All the money flows along one course, more or less. And as they say, follow the money.

SUNY System Administration occupies the old D&H Railroad HQ building in Albany overlooking the Hudson. It’s a stunning Gothic-style castle, completed in 1918, often the feature of postcards and pictorials showing Albany’s landmarks.

An old postcard of the D&H Castle (1918), now SUNY System Administration’s building

Castles are strongholds — and symbols — of feudal hierarchies. But SUNY, despite its integrated budgetary systems, not to mention the symbolism of its headquarters, is also something of a confederacy. Thirty campuses are community colleges, one for most of the counties in New York, and they are additionally funded with allocations from their counties. This arrangement gives them both another master to serve - their counties — and a degree of freedom from complete oversight by SUNY System Administration.

The four-year colleges and universities are bound together by the SUNY allocation from the state legislature, but they each have their own colorful histories and personality. Many began as private institutions or teachers colleges with legacies dating back long before SUNY was consolidated in 1948.

Institutions generally have deep genetic codes that survive despite environmental changes, and this may be especially so for universities. If you’ve ever spent time working in the academia game, you know adminstrations and students come and go but tenured faculty, the guardians of core values, are forever.

This creative tension between hierarchy and confederacy makes SUNY boisterous, wonderful, and strange. Meetings of all the presidents or provosts from the campuses convened by SUNY System seem like conventions of feudal lords, though none are likely to swear an Oath of Salisbury. System makes demands on them, they make demands on System. Consensus emerges. I wake up every day with a keen sense of the untapped potential that could be unleashed if we could find a way to forge cross-campus collaborations, without demanding that the campuses sacrifice their individuality.

Even among a confederacy, everyone’s gotta get on the same page about certain basics. Like what language you’ll use at your parlays. And some things ought to be networked and interoperable just for the sake of civilization. Like standards - if not systems - for highways and money and energy grids and telephony. Sixty years after SUNY was founded, we still have a long way to go.

From the campus perspective, having individual fiefdoms with incompatible standards, redundant operations, and duplicate investments — every campus its own moat and pile of stones — isn’t very painful. Each campus has its own flavor, its own distinctive mission, its own local climate and culture, its own ratings on US News & World Report. But the price of such independence - I wouldn’t call it real freedom - is expensive.

I encapsulated this principal about 10 years ago, for better or worse as a corollary of Porush’s Law (a minor one, to be sure):

The natural state of everyone’s communication device is on, listed, and connected.

Like an inverse MasterCard commercial, the price is incaculably high of remaining off, unlisted and disconnected.

If the university is about finding and circulating knowledge in order to make the most good of that knowledge, then some common means of communication is necessary. Campuses should be on, listed and connected to each other. The cost from basic friction at the interface — call it the translation overhead — is just too high.

To its credit, System tries to do reduce the translation overhead and has had some successes in integrating the 64 campuses over the Web. The IT group here in Albany along with the ITEC technology farm in Buffalo have us riding on the same network backbone. There are System initiatives to create a single integrated e-mail system for all students and employees across SUNY. We’re making headway in getting all campuses on a single Student Information Service for registration functions and the like. We have wrangled SUNY onto one magnificent online libary system, SUNYConnect, giving access to the catalogs of all 64 libraries. We’re trying to get as many of the campuses as we can on the same learning management system, the SUNY Learning Network.

But there’s a whole other enterprise whose surface we’ve just skimmed, and it goes to the heart of what the university is about in the first place. For simplicity, let’s call it “knowledge sharing.” If you want to put it as a business proposition, put it this way: knowledge, the most precious property of the university, is one of those commodities that grow more valuable the more you share them.

The beauty of Web is that this is exactly what it does best. Furthermore, it unleashes the power of multiple individuals without necessarily creating a command and control hierarchy that demolishes their individuality. They only need to agree to be connected, on and listed … and of course, to contribute. There are by some estimates 55 million bloggers on the Web. Millions of users create videos and animations and photos and other content. 99% of this user-generated content is provided freely and for free and by private citizens, acting outside institutions of education. I often reflect on it as the single most breathtaking world wide example of generosity and optimism, unprecedented in human history.

It is up to us who are caretakers of the university as a system to embrace this vision of connecting the castles. It is up to us to harness this generosity. It is up to us to sponsor and coordinate the deployment of the best web tools for contributing knowledge and collaborating u-wide. This is not just desireable, it’s a necessity if SUNY is going to survive and evolve as a system. One might conclude that because SUNY already has a special balance of hierarchy and robust, noisy independence, we can exploit this opportunity with special vigor.

[To come: SUNY and Web 2.0]

CosmosCode: Open source launches NASA into a future we’re nostalgic for

Today I read in a Wired news story posted by Aaron Rowe that two young scientists at NASA are launching an open-source project this month called CosmosCode. Its goal is to get volunteers in the public sector - world wide? - to write code for live space missions.

I was immediately stung by a flash of boyhood nostalgia. Remember all the space operas which just assumed that the world would unite to explore space together and of course do battle against evil aliens and make friends with friendly ones? This soaring galactic vision still persists in our Star Wars and Star Trek mythologies.

Well, it seems to me that NASA has put us on the road to achieving this vision, leapfrogging any UN decree or international parlay or official collaboration among nations. Now, anyone in the world with the good will and the talent might help launch, navigate, and explore space, not as agents of their governments but as citizens of Spaceship Earth.

That’s the fond dream, anyway. Chalk it up to nostalgia for an oft-imagined future by an aging SF junkie, a future that - with the help of NASA and an open source global collaboration — we may be able to resuscitate.

Anyone who has followed the adventures of SUNY Learning Environments over the last four years knows we’ve been advocates for open source collaborations in large, diverse environments. They seem especially promising for SUNY because of the way they can unleash the “intelligence of networks” — the wisdom of the crowd — if they are managed wisely. I hope NASA’s project will help demonstrate the virtues of such an approach, even when undertaken by a government agency.

Second Life for the Levin Institute?

Today I had a conference call with leaders from the Levin Institute, SUNY’s newest school in New York City.  Organized by Lynne Rosansky, Vice-Provost, her goal was to introduce Levin to Second Life, see if there was potential .

The Levin Institute was created by a bequest of the family of Neil D. Levin, Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York, who was slain in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Levin has no campus of its own (yet), and their mission is globalization: “International Relations and Commerce.” So it’s natural for them to consider opening a virtual campus to reach the world, leapfrogging the cost of a huge traditional campus and its cumbersome infrastructure.  Second Life is a good place to start, since it has already been colonized by over 100 campuses.

Garrick Utley, Levin’s President and a former CNN news correspondent, cut right to the chase during our discussion. “Is there anything you can show us with a ‘Wow’ factor?” he asked. So we looked at some videos (machinima! - more about that new video genre in a later post) of Second Life, including the New Media Consortium’s “Seriously Engaging” demo, which is one of the best promos for what is possible for learning in the metaverse. Thomson Learning’s NetG campus gave us another glimpse of how a virtual campus can be arranged, with video viewing rooms, bulletin boards to post and exchange text files and assignments, and control booths behind a lecture hall.

The Levin team quickly grasped the possibilities for their mission. They imagined “negotiation rooms” where students could visit spaces dedicated to practicing different cultural styles - French, Middle Eastern, Asian, American… They asked how much artificial intelligence could be built into SL, so that simulations could run themselves. They wondered whether anyone had already studied learning behaviors in SL formally. It was a great, lively discussion. We’ll be looking at next steps. Stay tuned.

On a personal note, I have to say it’s fulfilling to see the sheerly academic exercises I followed in the 80s and 90s — when I was writing about cyberpunk, VR, and Neal Stephenson’s metaverse as sacral space — blossom into technical reality… and to be in a position to encourage the real world exploration of what once were just edgy postmodern ruminations.