Eloise's thoughts and fancies

In the mac users discussion group the other day, someone suggested, if you have a reasonable amount of spare RAM when Second Life™ is up and running you might be able to speed it up by using a RAM disk for your cache, rather than your hard disk.

I've been trying this for a couple of days now, and it appears to give me a fairly constant 15% improvement in my fps (which is not to be sneezed at), but the thing that did surprise me was the impact it made to teleporting. Not always, but often, when I teleported I would get a real grind as the new sim loaded. With a RAM disk cache that time is roughly speaking quartered. I'm guessing this is due to a mix of faster retrieval of common textures and faster notification that I need to download stuff.

If you're a mac user you'll want to navigate over to Make RAM Disk download the free software and read the instructions - they will tell you how to make a larger than 50MB RAM disk (up to 1GB would be good for your Second Life cache), and how to automatically re-create the RAM disk each time you restart your computer.

I can't vouch for Windows users that this is the simplest way to do it, but the price is right at least!

One word of warning - if you do this, and you don't have the RAM to allocate a spare 1GB to the cache, make sure in Second Life preferences>network you set the size of the cache to the same or slightly smaller than the size of the RAM disk. Second Life has a lovely tendency to crash if the cache tries to overwrite the available space.

How is Second Life looking after five years? I was asked, as so many were I'm sure, to contribute a message to SL5B. Sadly they only offered 140 characters and this is what I wanted to say: You will see it's a bit longer than a tweet!

Second Life™ has expanded hugely over the last five years, from a few hundred registered users to over 14 million. It's probable most of those few hundred were actually regularly using, but we're still in the hundreds of thousands of recent users territory today, so there's still a big expansion, even if many more have fallen by the wayside along the way.

Depending on your country, Second Life has probably become mainstream. In the UK mass media we don't have "the virtual world called Second Life" when they're announcing it, even on the news, the phrase is well enough known that it is assumed you will know what Second Life is. That's certainly a huge change, and interestingly although World of Warcraft claims more users, people still explain and justify what WoW is on the news. Second Life has moved out from being a geeky niche to a mainstream phenomenon in a way that MMORPGs still haven't.

One of the aims of Second Life was to be the future of internet. It turns out to be remarkably hard to track down sensible statistics on just what people use the internet for, however a quick look at this (not really child friendly) list of most common search terms suggests that the internet is for:

1. Porn


2. Shopping


3. Games


4. Pets

Putting these terms, plus education and genealogy (which is widely reported as the second most common use of the internet in the UK) into google trends we find something interesting, the order shifts to:

1. Games 119%


2. Porn 100%


3. Education 16%


4. Shopping 11%


5. Genealogy 1%


6. Pets Not significant

(Percentages are normalised to porn as a search term)

Based on these numbers you might have to suggest that Second Life is succeeding at being the future of the internet. Second Life certainly has its fair share of adult material (which you may or may not call porn), and both education and shopping are well represented, and games get a significant look in for some users. If you add in more recent phenomena such as Facebook etc. for social networking - something that long term residents of Second Life will generally tell you it's excellent at, the idea that it is reaching the places that the internet reaches, but in a new way, certainly seems to have some merit.

Commercially Second Life is, we are told, making money, which is probably a sign of success - it's certainly more of a sign of success than losing money!

The question remains whether it is succeeding socially and technically.

Second Life certainly has its old heads around, but it also loses old heads and replaces them in the numbers with newer ones. Perhaps this is, to some extent inevitable. But, as we so often hear, Second Life has a steep learning curve - so can it really afford to lose the older bodies and replace them with people who need to learn how to use Second Life, then need to learn the skills to build, script, make animations, textures and the like?

Over the last 18 months or so, Second Life has changed in tone as well. The tag line still says "Your world, your imagination" but how much more regulated by "them" has it become? I'm hardly the first to suggest it should be "Our world, your imagination" and whilst the destruction of GOM (now closer to 3 years ago) might have been the start, but the banning of ageplay, gambling and banks - however inefficiently this is actually achieved - have started to limit our imaginations. Maybe not yours personally, nor mine - I never wanted to indulge in playing as a child in Second Life, I never gambled and I never wanted to be a banker either - but people did do these things and now they can't.

Linden Lab have a horrible role here: they clearly have to uphold several different laws, including US federal law, but also laws from other jurisdictions. For example in the UK (not the prime mover behind the ban on simulated paedophilia, that was Germany) it is illegal to download art depicting paedophilia. Would this have led to prosecutions for pictures of such things in Second Life? Not clear, but it's not going to happen now. What is certain if it had happened, Linden Lab as the hosts would also have been prosecuted under UK law, or by treaty through to US law. I'm not going to criticise them for acting to prevent that. However, the way they issue the bans without warning, and usually with horribly confusing language around it could certainly be improved. We are, largely, left not knowing why, not understanding precisely what is wanted, and even those of us that support one or more of these bans are left not quite sure whether we've won or lost.

In fact, communications between Linden Lab and the outside world - both the media and the residents - is a victim of their own success. Time was you could arrange a meeting with Phillip, Robin and others in world. Time was they came in world to make presentations too. Now, neither of those are, for most of us at least, possible and even office hours are hard to get to. We know Linden Lab is proud of its internal openness but, whilst they are more open than some, they are far less good at being open with us, and they're less good about communicating their successes to us too. I'm not suggesting they open their mouths and tell us everything - openness doesn't extend to letting us examine their accounts in detail for example, nor should it extend to minutes of all their meetings - but they do need to work out how to communicate their successes to us, and their plans in as much as they can.

For example, it has become relatively routine for log-ins to be down for part of the day, each and every day. That's a relatively new phenomenon. It has become, again only recently, a several-times-a-week phenomenon to find that we're advised not to go shopping, not to rez no-copy items and the like. Teleports failing is becoming no quite de rigeur, but far from uncommon. There is no real evidence that there is an end in sight to any of these situations and, worse by far, there is no communication to really suggest that there is a plan to solve them either. I suspect there is, I most certainly hope there is, but I don't know that there is. Linden Lab need to communicate to us better than they currently manage.

The public JIRA was, supposedly, designed to assuage this communication gap. It could have been a good tool, but it doesn't actually inspire confidence. Why not? Well, to start with it takes time and patience to hunt around and see if your bug is there or not, and if you do report one, the process to track it is not that clear. It is certainly doable, and it can be well worth taking the time to learn how to do it, but it's not really obvious and you have to want to report or find a bug to go through the process. In addition, a lot of issues remain open for a long time, and not even assigned internally to be solved. That doesn't make us feel like our complaints are taken seriously and worked on, despite each new update coming along with a raft of bug fixes in the release notes. It also doesn't really inspire confidence because we see, or at least we feel, that things are getting worse in Second Life.

The furore about SL5B, the in-world celebrations was also incredibly badly handled. First it's resident run, then when residents want to reflect all of the SL experience it's not. Child avatars creating children's toys and games can't be involved, but adults into kinky adult sex and slavery can be. Just because someone is in a child avatar doesn't mean they are indulging in illegal pornographic activity, but the reaction would have you think it did. The child avatars can attend, but not provide content, well gee. Then, even in mature sims statues can't have nipples showing. Has anyone from Linden Lab looked at fine art recently? There are loads of nipples, and quite a lot of genitals, on show there, but not in Second Life. Does that mean we don't make art, or that Linden Lab don't trust people to look at a statue and not shout "PORN!" I don't have the talent to copy the Venus de Milo (with or without arms), but if I did I wouldn't be allowed to display it at SL5B because it shows nipples. Is that reasonable in an adult-only world?

Second Life and Linden Lab really need to sort these technical and communication issues out. If they had said, from the start, PG material only, no children's material, and whatever other rules they've decided on post hoc, then there would probably have been some complaints, but not the level of on-going bitterness that this has engendered. Most people understand there are rules and limits, and can accept that. What is much harder to accept is changing the goal posts which is what has happened here. If we knew that the issue of stale transactions, or logins failing or similar were being worked on and a solution was in the days/weeks/months sort of timescale we would be, probably, more tolerant of what is going on. Think about it this way - I'm coming up rapidly to my fourth rez day. I know people who have passed their fifth rez day. Most of us in that boat are probably here until Second Life really gets out evolved or shuts the doors. Linden Lab don't need to work to keep us, but a bit more effort would help them keep us happy, and who knows, perhaps keeping us happy would also help them keep their new users happier too. Of course that would currently put more strain on the system, but in the long term they need to keep their users, new and old, or they will die.

You may or may not be surprised to hear I don't think that the divide purely on the basis of age that is actually proposed by the "Digital Native" vs "Digital Immigrant" debate is justified or useful.

Of course what I think won't affect those who love this simple, simplistic even, mechanism. But, perhaps more surprisingly I think there is a useful kernel in here. What I think we need to do is strip the analogy back a little, then extend it, then think about using it.

Digital Native and Digital Immigrant suggest links to learning language and culture. Native speakers tend not to struggle with their language, at least in daily use, and feel at home in their culture. Immigrants may, often do, become fluent in their new language, but retain their old one and may switch back and forth. They more rarely fully integrate into the alien culture, although they can do and their children often do.

What I'd like to propose is a different classification, based on learning, effort and exposure. Let's think about language learning for a moment.

Native speakers grow up, essentially from age 0, surrounded by their language and culture. They are corrected and taught by family, friends, TV, etc. before going to school, then they are probably formally taught their language for several years at school, whilst getting more exposure in all their other classes as well from their school-mates etc. As educators at University level can tell you, students in many disciplines arrive with a terrible grasp of the structure, grammar and spelling of their own language in a formal setting, such as academic writing.

Adult immigrants on the other hand, at least those who will be exposed to their new culture, will make a concerted and usually quite successful attempt to learn the language. They have a grasp of their own language and they add to this a grasp of their new language. English, my native tongue, is hard to learn NOT because of impossibly complex grammar (look at Lithuanian if you want impossible grammar) but because we have poorly used rules and we use a lot of irregular verbs and nouns, as well as extracting our words from a wide range of roots so we have French, Latin, Greek, Germanic, Indian and other words (including Welsh - Penguin is a word with Welsh roots) and so we have a wide range of spelling rules and pluralisation rules. Plural of octopus? Well the -pus part if from the Greek (not Latin despite the -us ending) so it's octopodes of course. Those who are well educated in their own language generally learn English well, often better for formal English than native speakers.

The final group is the linguistic tourist. Even Australians, Kiwis, Americans and Canadians don't speak proper English. Trying to communicate in French (Parisian French if you like) to a French Canadian speaker is hard work. It can be done, but it's hard work because their French is about 300 years out of date and it confuses even natives of France. Tourists may or may not, depending on their culture and where they're going, learn some of the language of the place they're going, but with the best will in the world they're not great communicators in general - they get by and they get the job done, but only just. Tourists, of course, can be of any age!

It strikes me that this should be our categorisation.

There are natives, who have grown up in and surrounded by digital technology. Just how old do you have to be though? Who hear remembers being taught to use slide rules and log tables? I was, but I also used electronic calculators from early in my life. Like native speakers these people know quite a lot, but may well fall down on the formal acquisition of knowledge - for example learning how to use new software.

Then there are the DSOL (equivalent to ESOL) individuals who have learnt how to learn and use. They often use incredibly fluently and well, and they often, because they have learnt how to learn the new language, are more able to learn new skills than the natives, or at least they will learn them more readily in a way that we as teachers might recognise.

Finally there are the digital tourists. These might be 5 or 105. They can't cope with cars on the wrong side, they're not quite sure what any of it means. They may learn how to order a meal or ask the way to the museum: send an email or find a website I guess as obvious parallels, but they're not confident, they're not capable and whilst they might acquire some of the skills, they're just as likely to leave them behind with a great deal of alacrity once they go home. (Do you really remember you holiday Spanish?)

Graham pointed me to a blog entry about a teaching experience that went horribly wrong in Second Life™

I'm not highlighting this to poke fun of the poor teacher - in fact she goes on to have some very useful comments about how she would do it next time to do it better that are well worth reading for everyone. So, to some extent I'm doing it to share access to her blog and the information. However, I am also doing it to link back to some of my earlier posts about teaching in SL and how that relates to teaching IRL.

For example, Margarita points out that:

If I were in a F2F setting, i would have never carry on with the activity: I would have stopped, said to participants let’s change and tackle the basics. Or i would have split the session into two groups: guiding newbies step by step, provided intermediate participants with a self-paced tutorial and just giving feedback on demand.

Definitely an object lesson for us all! Most of us teaching in SL are teachers IRL first. Whilst I would maintain that there are differences in approach in some aspects, we each have our accumulated experience of whether a class is working or not and often some immediate response as to how to fix it. Don't ignore that voice - you worked hard to acquire it and it does know what it's talking about.

I'm reminded of an earlier blog entry on this blog about a class I attended that was, frankly, a disaster and some of the comments attached to it. Good classes in SL, I believe, still need the planning and structure to be a good class. You might well (depending on how you teach IRL) teach in a different mode (more socratic, no lecturing etc.). Some of the challenges and mistakes that Margarita identifies are dependent on Second Life and it's structure (arranging students in a ring of 20m diameter so they can all hear each other for example), but others are dependent on general teaching principles - review required knowledge first, start with a simple exercise and then build up, pretest students for basic competence with pre-requisities etc.

Finally one really worth mentioning to new teachers in Second Life. Practise FIRST! Margarita mentions it as something to do for next time (if you read this Margarita and want a 'victim' to practice on, let me know and if I can, I'll be there). Ages ago I commented that Beth did it with her classes too - she would put out an appeal to the educators lists asking if anyone would like to come to her practice class so she could see how it went. Her classes went well, and she no longer does this regularly, as she has grown confident about teaching in Second Life. Depending on how you did your teacher training, you almost certainly had practice classes, trial runs, tried things out. Think about the last time you changed institutions (or presented at a conference away from 'home'): Do you try to get a feel for the technology, how easy the projector is to turn on, can you access the internet, will the machines they've provided run Second Life etc? Of course you might not manage this, but I bet you try. Why not try it in Second Life too?

Over on his blog, Art Fossett comments on a move that is suggesting chat logs and transcripts are harmful because they pollute google searches.

Whilst I have some sympathy for the original thought - I find for many formal meetings reading minutes is far easier and more productive than reading a transcript; so much so I will take the time to produce the minutes if no one else will. Think, for a minute, about RL meetings. With the exception of the UK parliament and courts of law, where word-for-word transcripts are produced routinely (other parliaments may also do this), although the reporting is usually a summary remember, every other meeting I've been to offers a summary. The barest sort of reporting I've seen takes the form:

Motion: To abolish use of chat transcripts, For: 2, Against: 1. Motion Carried.

More usually you end up with a summary of the main points in the arguments, and where there isn't a formal motion, you also end up with action points, but hours of bitter wrangling can be reduced to 2-3 paragraphs. It's part of the reason that a good meeting will have Minutes and Matters Arising at the beginning - people are not only checking for gross errors, but they're confirming that the summary from whoever took the minutes is reasonable too.

Chat transcripts, on the other hand show every meander, every twist and turn, every typo and the like. Tools such as Kisa's chatlogger produce transcripts which are colour-coded and display the profile picture of the person talking. Speaking personally I find this much easier to read than a simple text transcript. You can see an example transcript of the SLCC discussion as well.

Many "meetings" in SL are more of the order of formality of a "water-cooler meeting" IRL, or they are brain-storming sessions, or discussions in class or similar. I would argue that many of these actually benefit from the warts and all level of detail that chat transcripts can provide (although ideally without the "X is online" messages that can pollute it beyond legibility. Outputs from brainstorming sessions may include a series of action points (they may not too), but often they include a mess (to use a technical term) of mind-maps, diagrams, doodles and the like - and these are often far more useful than the action points. Good discussion classes can, do even, ramble over all kinds of territory. Often the main points are well nailed down, but there are useful minor points that wouldn't make the minutes version of the class - but do come back later on as main points of their own either in a later class, or in an assignment or similar. Having that full transcript is invaluable then. Most people will also acknowledge that water-coller meetings are often incredibly useful, but they're almost never documented in any form.

Rather than a blanket ban, or a blanket posting of chat transcripts, it would be nice to see people actually thinking about what the best route would be. Are minutes a good, useful, sufficient/preferable method of recording the meeting, or is a transcript the best way to go for this one? The answer will vary depending on the meeting and the situation - but surely it's a choice we should all be making for ourselves?

In this picture you can see me between two picture frames. The one on the right is a "graffiti board" that lets you paint within SW. I need to try and hook my tablet up and draw that way, but you can produce some fairly typical computer art quite easily. On the left is a Flickr™ slideshow "picture" more on that below!

It was bound to happen wasn't it? I build in Second Life™ so I'm going to try and build in Small Worlds. There's not convenient "build" button, you have to buy the things you want to decorate your home with.

There are some good and bad features to this. I'm sure with practice I'd get used to it, but it wasn't clear to me just how many "iron railings" wide the space I wanted to fill was. I took a guess, got it wrong by one and had to go back to the shop and buy another one. Oh well, not the end of the world, but a little annoying. Moving the objects around isn't freeform either. Objects snap to a grid. Of course this makes lining things up easy! But when the edge of your "room" is half way between snap points on the grid, do you have a smaller room or a smaller patio? You can only rotate by 90º too. Now, I'm not exactly a 90º sort of person quite often, but it works pretty well. There is a nice feature of this snap to grid too - you know that Second Life "overlapping prims" issue? Small Worlds won't let you do that. You can't move an object on top of another one, unless, like a book on a table (in the picture below) it's meant to rest on something.

In this picture you can see me sat on a log bench (they don't really do romanesque couches that I've found yet) at a table with a guest book on it. Signing, and reading, the guest book is pretty easy. In the corner of the "room" you can see a steam-punk style TV, which you can easily hook up to YouTube.

The Flickr™ picture, guest book and TV bring me to another thing. There's no access to scripting, at least at the moment. Some of the stuff is very nicely crafted - the guest book lets you read other comments, "signs" them with a headshot and the like. The YouTube video seems to work quite well. The Flickr™ board... well if you don't sign in and search for "Eloise Pasteur" there are 62 results that come up (and they're all safe for work). If you do the same in the Flickr board there are 7 that turn up. I'm not sure I'd use all of the others, but I'd definitely use a couple of them.

The picture at the bottom of this piece shows the typical scripted object interface. This is the Flickr™ board interface, but the graffiti board, TV, guest book, crazy golf and other games are similar. You can stand and chat about what you're looking at to others looking at the same thing. So far that's not been helpful (I don't speak Spanish and have been surrounded by Spanish speakers), but it could be nice I guess.

And one last thing for the educators to think about. Small Worlds works on instances, at least for public spaces. If you try to go somewhere that's too full, you'll be offered an option for which instance you want to enter. This might make organising classes rather tricky!

Small Worlds is a browser-based 2.5 or 3D virtual world. It's flash-based, so you can pretty much run it in anything you like.

You can, to some extent customise your avatar (there are preset templates that you can choose between, and you can customise with colours and things), create a pet (but you're limited to a cat or a dog), and then explore the world. Personally speaking I found the lack of choices harder to cope with than the freedom in SL - but perhaps that's because creating an avatar shape in SL felt like a normal process to me, and this didn't really. I rather suspect that if you're used to WOW or similar, selecting colours and outfits from a limited palette will be much more natural to you.

Unlike Second Life™ there's no sense of geography: it's much more like a tile-game with teleports - you just jump from where you are into a new tile (if things work well, I had some problems getting to some places in the 15 minutes I spent there). In Second Life, since the disappearance of telehubs there's little need to fly around, but people still do, to some extent, even if the bulk of the travel is by teleport. In particular, I notice that I will land and look around, and moderately often walk into the next shop too, because it looks interesting. That looks like it won't be an option in Small Worlds.

The orientation, which I am still following, is set up (very WOW style) as a string of little missions. Go to the shop, buy a chair, bring it home, position it, edit its position. There's 5 missions for you! Once you've done the first few, you get a set of choices - artist missions, social missions, explorer missions and sometime there will be gamer missions too. It's not clear what the benefits of gaining a level in anything may be as yet, but they all generate skills about using the interface quickly and easily. I'm currently in the middle of the artist missions (judging by the 1-eyed cat on the wall I have a way to go!) but everything is quick and easy. I've not tried Second Life orientation in a long, long time, but this is fast and easy, and could be well worth a look by the powers that be at Linden Lab.

The interface is a bit clunky to my mind. But bear in mind I'm coming up to my fourth rezday in SL so I've got a lot of accrued memory with that interface. Rotating the camera is in 90º increments only. Shame. Moving is by clicking on the floor and you move there. Sitting on a chair is by left-clicking and choosing the "sit/stand" action (If you right-click you get your normal flash-movie drop-downs in your context menu. Opps!). That said, I've managed those things so far without problem, apart from seeing "about Adobe Flash" far too many times when I right-click. It also looks far more "toon"-ish than SL to my mind.

There are several shops, but I haven't explored really - and it's not clear how the various things get made, if they get made by residents at all... but I will keep on mooching around for a bit I think.

If you'd like to know more, there's an "invite a friend" option - so let me know.