Serendipity35

I wrote about Lively, Google's foray into virtual worlds, in July. I have had my doubts about the current mixing of educational learning objectives and virtual worlds, but I think the two will mix in the future as more appropriate "worlds" appear. Lively had possibilities, if only because it offered "rooms" rather than a huge world of islands such as in Second Life.

Google's announcement last week that they were abandoning Lively doesn't really explain what went wrong - low usage, abuse, monetization, tech issues?

After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down Lively.

Since Lively's launch, we have been delighted to see the creative ways you've used the product. We enjoyed hanging out in Jen's coffee house, and checking out the Brasil Party room. We got a kick out of the YouTube videos in a variety of languages telling stories about your avatars. And we've been awed by the elaborate rooms that you've constructed, using mosaic tiles and photo gadgets in novel ways.

We will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.

Between now and the end of the year we encourage you to capture all your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. Thank you for sharing this experience with us. We've learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments, and we hope you've enjoyed your time with Lively.

I had hopes that Lively might have educational uses, particularly because of Google's testing with Arizona State University.

Two thousand ASU students joined Google’s Trusted Tester program in September 2007 to try out Lively and provide feedback as part of ASU’s alpha-testing project, codenamed My World.

Rooms in Lively are unique, three-dimensional online spaces that are completely Internet-embedded, enabling users to link videos, photos and other Web-based media into their experience. Users can create their own characters to move around in different virtual spaces, use objects, and communicate with others over the Internet. Users can also build their own rooms and integrate them into any website, including personal blogs or Facebook.

ASU is introducing Lively by Google to the ASU Community as My World, a place for students to interact with their professors and peers, and plans to use this technology as an integral part of several educational initiatives. ASU will use Lively by Google to provide Advanced Placement (AP*) Calculus instruction to students preparing for the Calculus AP exam.

Second Life gets most of the attention these days, but there are other virtual worlds being used in educational settings like Wonderland. Whyville has been around since April 1999. Dr. James M. Bower and his students and collaborators at the California Institute of Technology launched Whyville as the first virtual world explicitly designed to engage young students in a wide range of educational activities. It has a base of over 3 million players. It doesn't try to be a Second Life.

On the other hand, Active Worlds is self-billed as "the web's most powerful Virtual Reality experience." The Active Worlds Universe is a community of hundreds of thousands of users who chat and build 3D virtual reality environments in millions of square kilometers of virtual territory - look at some of their satellite maps and their education pages.

One term you hear used in talking about virtual worlds in education is persistence. Beyond the interest level that a compelling game can have on student players, it allows for continuing and growing social interactions, which themselves can serve as a basis for collaborative education.

Virtual worlds can often benefit classroom activities because of:

• greater level of student participation
• allows users to carry out tasks that could be difficult in the real world because of cost, scheduling, location or safety.
• ability to adapt and grow the environment to different user needs
• provides user feedback
• can be accessed from different locations

If not Google, who will create the educational virtual world?