SecondLife - How much will it support Learning and Employee Engagement?
SecondLife Logo
Stumbled upon this article (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/avatars_at_work.html) recommended by a friend via LinkedIn. It got me thinking about a project I was on many years ago which involves the development of Virtual Campus to deliver Virtual Learning Programs and knowledge sharing platform. For those who is not familiar with the SecondLife yet, I’d encourage you to find out more from:
It’s very much like a world within the cyberspace that uses single currency (The Linden dollars) and you could suddenly feel like a billionnaire overnight by becoming “owners” of lands, buildings or even Island! So is this just another fantasy game like “The Sims” or could it be more than that?
Finding it hard to imagine what is it all about? Take a look at this Youtube Video:
In fact, a lot of been talked about the greatness of using virtual world to engage employees and encourage learning. The benefits are apparent but I probably belong to the slightly skeptical group when it comes to using SecondLife for Learning and Development especially in Malaysia. Let me begin by listing down the Pros, followed by my thoughts on its limitations (until technologies grow further).
An Island
It’s borderless - Yes, you do not need to be present at one physical location to be having the training session or brainstorming session. But in reality, isn’t a chatroom sufficient? Don’t we already have conference call facilities? Isn’t video conference that allows us to see face to face better than avatars that doesn’t even look like us?
Anytime, anywhere! - Firstly, refer to the response above. Secondly, are you sure it’s anytime??? The timezone will plays a part here, just like it does with Video and Teleconference. If it’s a non-time sensitive discussion, probably a online forum discussion board may work better.
User's View
It’s for the Gen Y! - Gen Y is a whole demanding lot when it comes to technology. So better make sure there are less bugs or connectivity issues before rolling this out to them.
But it’s about having fun too! - This is one part that I’ll have to agree, employees learn while having fun and brainstorming is better when everyone is relaxed. I haven’t quite tried using SecondLife in developed country with very fast internet connection. But frankly, broadband in Malaysia just isn’t fast enough to make the character smooth, thus the fun factor often turn into frustration.
The Avatars
If it’s the next big thing, we better jump into it first - This is something you should only do if your organization has sufficient resources to continuously invest in such new technologies. The fact is nobody could tell when will SecondLife become THE world. SecondLife is the pioneer of the virtual world avatar concept, but remember this:
- eCircles, Friendster, Myspace - they pioneered social networking but aren’t the most used today.
- Hotmail - That’s the first web-based email, but I guess Gmail is still the preferred now?
- ICQ - Can anyone still remember what they are? The pioneers that got replaced by MSN and Yahoo.
- Yahoo, Altavista, Web Crawler - I guess only one is still surviving well but challenged strongly by Google.
It does become quite obvious that the pioneers aren’t often the most successful “Next Big Thing”. Early bird gets the worm but sometimes second mouse does get the cheese. You wouldn’t want to end up with large investment with many islands but living is a “different world” from everyone else in the future.
Bird's eye view of the map
Some other observations I made while in SecondLife (The last I’ve gotten in was more than a year ago, things may have changed now):
- There seems to be too many islands focusing on Adults theme: sex, casino … etc.
- The movements isn’t really smooth yet (that’s probably caused by the connection speed in Malaysia).
- Most people who hangs out there are just trying to “make some money”. There are many islands that are built to attract people to hang around and make some Linden Dollars (those seems to be the most popular islands).
- It’s ok doing brainstorming or roleplays, but challenging when it comes to experiential learning programs because we can’t really gauge the emotions based on purely words. The avatar’s expression may be different from the person controlling it.
- 3D modelling and programming in SecondLife isn’t exactly easy and straightforward. I doubt it’s going to be easy to find a freeland SecondLife developer (do let me know if you know any that doesn’t charge high fees).
How can you use SecondLife if your company still intends on giving it a try?
- Use it for employee engagement, not learning. Create a playground-like island for people to just mingle around and share thoughts.
- Use it for archiving in place of your Intranet. Ie: Files and forms for HR, Internal Operations … etc can be stored there for downloading.
- Integrate a discussion board into it and maybe to upload all the videos of staff townhall there.
- Run employee engagement survey via SecondLife.
- For SecondLife to be successful, the organization needs to ensure that every employee has fast and reliable Internet connection, then shut down the intranet and move them all the SecondLife. This may backfire if not executed seamlessly, but if the Intranet continues to be available, I doubt any employees would bother going into SecondLife once the excitement is over.
On overall, SecondLife (or any Virtual World for that matter) may have its excitement factor and innovation which may become the next big thing, but it does require a lot more development in its capability to make it reality. Technology is here to ease the human life, never try to adjust human behaviour to suit technology.
Share on Facebook
Comments