Has SL Become Less Tolerant of Noobs and/or Students?

[Cole Naire]

There's not much question that SL has tumbled from grace as an educational facility since the heady days when NMC and the like were advocating it as the next Big Thing. There are a number of reasons for that fall, but an important one was their decision to revoke the discount for non-profits (something to which I see they are now quietly returning).

There are other tech options; for theatre, for instance, there is now a stand-alone platform called SET ("Simulated Environment for Theatre"). And there are of course also such alternatives as Open Sim and ReactionGrid; John Lester convinced a number of educational outfits to jump ship there.

It depends on what you want to do. If all one is looking for is virtual teaching space, or a way to do 3D modeling, there are certainly other options. If, on the other hand, one is looking for a rich cultural experience with (for instance) a vibrant art scene all its own, then SL remains the best place to be, for now anyway.

[Cole Naire]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

I'm very curious to know how that conversation went after you realized your students were getting tossed during it. You've only given us half the drama here.

 

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It was an odd conversation to begin with, as the owner was a child avatar who was intent upon RPing during our discussion. I did ask why my students were disappearing, and got something that was barely intelligible.

At that point, I decided to cut my losses, and leave.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

I'd disagree for the kind of course Cole has described. If you want to study virtual cultures... you kind of need a space with people in it.

But I'm also not sure SL is the ideal choice. I'd put them in WoW - larger active population.

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There is much truth to this, although this is not an ethnography course, so we don't study "cultures" in quite that sense. But certainly there'd be much less point in the course without the art, music, and other facets of that culture. And, because part of the course is about 3D modeling and building, we need the capacity for that as well. In both of those regards, WoW would be much less satisfactory.

 

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

It is very strange that a whole class got zapped. But also strange that, if I read you right, no student has ever been zapped before.

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If it's happened to any of my previous students, they've kept quiet about it. That's why this year seemed so anomalous, and why I am wondering aloud whether there hasn't been a subtle shift in the culture and tolerance of SL residents.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Cole Naire wrote:

If it's happened to any of my previous students, they've kept quiet about it. That's why this year seemed so anomalous, and why I am wondering aloud whether there hasn't been a subtle shift in the culture and tolerance of SL residents.

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Forget Occam or Hanlon's razor... when it comes to LLs, apply Bill the Cat's Razor:

Ack! Thbbft!

The logic often begins and end there.

Stuff just... happens...

 

[Storm Clarence]

Hello Mr. Cookware (stealing a line from above,)

What is your definition of a n00b--your capitalization in the title is uncalled for, anyway?   I'm having a tough time with your OP and I don't know why.  Incredulousness?   8 months is a noob?  I don't think so.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I was thinking about the students getting thrown out of the club.  

Obviously I wasn't there, so I'm only speculating and I don't know the numbers involved, but if 20 or so people who were obviously students on a field trip, as opposed to guests coming to enjoy the performance or whatever else the club had to offer, turned up unannounced somewhere I managed, I wouldn't be terribly pleased because it would be disruptive for my bona fide guests (who've come to relax and have fun, not be peered at like animals at the zoo) and the performers.

Could that have been part of the problem?

 

ETA -- Oops .. replied to Storm rather than Cole.  Sorry.

[Cole Naire]

Hi Innula,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, with which I quite agree: if 20 people suddenly show up en masse at a club -- and perhaps especially if they are noobs -- then that might well cause alarm and consternation.

In fact, although there has been a general assumption here that I was talking about a club, the places from which my students were banned were not such. I'm sorry, I should have probably made that clearer early on. The sim at which I was speaking to the owner as she banned my students was actually a sort of amusement park with a Dr. Seuss-theme. I don't recall its name offhand, I'm afraid. It was also deserted when we first arrived there.

I was careful, when students went to social venues such as clubs, to divide my class up. There were four project groups, so each group went to one of four different clubs. One, as I recall, was Fogbound, and another Alt7. I did this for precisely the reasons you mention. I didn't worry so much about this at places like art galleries or malls (or, apparently, amusement parks!). Possibly I should have extended that practice further.

I also want to just briefly address another point you make, which is an good one. This is not an anthropology or ethnology course, nor even a new media course: it is digital humanities. The focus of the course was upon the expression of "the human arts" -- narrative, music, visual art, history, and so forth -- in a digital context. In other words, when my students went to clubs, it was to experience the music, not to gawk at the patrons. (In fact, one of my project groups focused their work upon music in SL, and built a very nice interactive drum kit, the components of which played different sounds when they they were touched.)

No avatars were harmed (or harassed with badly-designed surveys) during this course.

[Cole Naire]

Hello Storm, and thanks for your post.

I'm not sure what precisely about my account strains your belief. It doesn't really matter however; you are of course free to believe or disbelieve whatever you choose, and I'm not at all interested in trying to compel you accept the veracity of my story.

Nor am I sure where you've got the figure of "8 months" from? My students created their first set of avatars in the second week of September, and their second set a week and a half later (after the first wave was banned). They are, as of the time of writing, about 13 weeks old.

[Aethelwine]

I am afraid having had my sim griefed by newly created throw away avatars, I too have put a system in that bans avatars less than 15 days old. It is maybe on reflection a blunt tool, but I have only had to add one person in a year to the exception list.

 

I am used to groups visiting the sim to notify me in advance (it is usual practice with biker groups). Had you done so I would turn the age restriction off for the duration of the visit. Maybe prior warning the sim if more than 8 turn up at once would help in future.

[RudolphFarquhar]

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Cole Naire wrote:

 

It was an odd conversation to begin with, as the owner was a

child avatar

who was intent upon RPing during our discussion. I did ask why my students were disappearing, and got something that was

barely intelligible

.

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Well, there's your ******* problem.

**********Rudi**********

[Celestiall Nightfire]

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Cole Naire wrote:

Hello!

I have just completed a 13-week course in Second Life with 19 students. This was a course about virtual worlds. The class itself was taught almost entirely in-world: our home base was my parcel at my university's in-world campus, but we took extensive "field trips" throughout Second Life. ...

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There have been various greifer attacks at sims I've been in this year, and it's usually from newly created avatar accounts.  Many sims will ban avatars under a certain age as a precaution.

 

This week I was contacted mid-day by my inworld collaborator, whilst he was working on a data set project, the sim underwent a griefer attack.  The sim owner was off-line, and he couldn't located the object doing the spawning.  He asked for help. I TPd in, and it took me about 20 min to located the griefer object (much longer than usual!) I reported it.  Before doing the abuse report I sent detailed instructions to the team on how to turn off Alpha, so the particles that were flooding the sim would not be seen. 

But, all this takes time!  It's a huge headache.  I had to interrupt a meeting to attend to a grief attack.  That's why so many sims will do a preemptive strike, and ban a new account.   It's just too much trouble waiting to happen otherwise. 

May I suggest that if you're going to take a class full of newbies on field trips around the grid, that you contact the sims, groups, or land owners in advance.  Provide a list with the student  avatar names, and advise when you'll be bringing them to visit.  Don't just spring a horde of newbies on some place. 

 

 

[Cole Naire]

Hi Aethelwine, and thanks for the response! And thanks to Celestiall too, whose comments were similar to yours.

Your advice makes good sense, although I do still tend to think that automatic age restrictions are, as you put it, a blunt instrument, for reasons I've delineated above. I have, in the past, done something like this, but only when I particularly wanted a group to meet with the sim owner for some reason.

The only real wrinkle is with regard to live shows (mostly music), which are sometimes not listed on the "Events" calendar until quite late in the day, or are subject to change at the last moment.

However, I concur with both you and Celestiall that some sort of advanced arrangement, when it is possible, is a good idea.

Thanks again.

[Cole Naire]

The child avatar in question was accompanied by a number of siblings and her "mother." I was initially a little taken aback to discover that it was the child who was the owner. A reflection, I suppose, of the RL assumptions that we all still sometimes carry with us into SL.

As it turns out, in any case, the "mother" was not much easier to understand than the child.

[Cole Naire]

And thank you to everyone who has contributed to this discussion, which has not only permitted me to rant (a little), but has also been instructive and useful.

Thank you, in particular, to Perrie and Cerise who have suggested some plausible reasons for both the AR bans and the indiscriminate way in which they were applied. I still find aspects of this puzzling, but perhaps Pussycat's evocation of the principle of "Bill the Cat's Razor" to the mystery does, finally, explain all.

[nuBko1]

what are you taught that the entire class of banned ahahahah what they already have done in 20 people trained from scratch scary to imagine

[RudolphFarquhar]

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nuBko1 wrote:

what are you taught that the entire class of banned ahahahah what they already have done in 20 people trained from scratch scary to imagine

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Don't you just hate it when the Moderators make alts and post on here bragging about what they've done!

**********Rudi**********

[nuBko1]

when I teach what I am still learning to hate makes no sense without it

[RudolphFarquhar]

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nuBko1 makes no sense

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FIFY!

**********Rudi**********

[jwenting]

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Cole Naire wrote:

Romania? Never been. Is that on Zindra?

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it's in eastern Europe, and a central point from which a lot of nastiness on the internet originates, from viruses to griefers to scams.

In many MMOs, Romanians are shunned by the community because they're extremely intolerant overall of anyone who's not Romanian (they tend to hang out in their own Romanian guilds, griefing and otherwise causing trouble for everyone else).

AFAIK LL doesn't proactively ban Romanians though, they might of course be more vigilant when trouble around Romanian based accounts is reported.

 

As to SL becoming less tolerant towards new people, not AFAIK. There have always been those who're intolerant of new people, and I've over the years not seen that percentage change much. What has changed is what those intolerant people consider "noobs". Used to be people a few days old who were still in their starter avatars and unable to move without bumping into everything and everyone. Now it's anyone who's less than X months or even years old, irrespective of knowledge or looks.

I'm for example seeing the occasional profile reading "if your last name is Resident I won't talk with you because you're a n00b or an alt". But I'm not seeing more of that now than 2 years ago.

Overall, the community welcomes newcomers and tries to get them started and happy.

As others have said, most likely one or some of your pupils caused trouble and the entire batch of accounts was suspended under suspicion of being all run by the same person.

Moderating several regions myself, I'm not seeing an overall increase in the number of people our staff ban or a shift towards younger avatars. Of course there are occasional peaks. For example during the school vacations we tend to have to ban more people than otherwise, usually underage kids who fake age verification to get around the (rl) restriction against minors in A rated sims. while there's a constant trickle of those, during school holidays there's a lot more of them (kids just have more time to be online at those times).

Maybe one of your pupils got caught by that, ended up in an A rated sim and got an AR filed against him. LL doesn't take that lightly at all, one of the few reasons they'll take such harsh action.

[jwenting]

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RudolphFarquhar wrote:

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nuBko1 wrote:

what are you taught that the entire class of banned ahahahah what they already have done in 20 people trained from scratch scary to imagine

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Don't you just hate it when the Moderators make alts and post on here bragging about what they've done!

**********Rudi**********

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he's just a noob, even his name says so

[Lexia Moonstone]

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Cole Naire wrote:

An interesting thought! But is there really such a thing as a "good pun"?

Thank you for your comment, however!

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I love a good pun, to me you can tell a good pun when everyone that can hear it chases the person telling the pun out of the room,  for a really good pun the audience becomes a Lynch mob.

Classes like your are likely much rarer then back in 2007, so it's more likely for some one to mistake a class of new accounts as an army of alts.  Best advice I can think of is to contact land/club owners before taking your class to a sim as a group.

When I started in 2007 people seemed more open minded, back then to many of us SL was new at the same time and  because of that more open to talking to strangers.  Now I think people are more set in their ways and more protective of personal space.  Sadly noobs all ways get a bad rap because of all the griefers and bots on new accounts. 

I'm not sure about hostility towards students, but if you want an ear full try posting a survey in the general forums here.   Not sure why that is,  but I find it irrational, if you don't want to take a survey just don't take it, but many people feel compelled to speak out aginst them all most any time one is posted.

SL has changed a lot it use to be a place where any thing could happen, IBM had 50 sim, there where many collages teaching classes here.  Now it's mostly a social gaming platform.  So may be people are less tolerant of students, because this is just their social space and they don't like feeling like they are being studied.

[Christin73]

In the 3 years that I have been on sl, noobs have always had a tough time. SL has always been rough on new people and people that are diffrent from the norm. I was lucky comeing onto sl with a friend who had already been on it several years prior. Knowing how tough being new can be I always try to help when i can. Seems to me the more helpful you are the more likely they will return to sl. One thing I hear alot, is people picking on others for wearing "noob cloths" or having noob free items. There is nothing wrong with either of those things. Just remember we were ALL new once.

[Roswenthe Aluveaux]

I agree with those who have suggested contacting location owners first. I'd go even further to suggest cultivating relationships with sim owners who own sims that might be conducive to your classes. Not just for bringing students once a semester, but as an active or semi-active participant in their sims at other times as well.

I also find the opensim community a bit more focused on cultural attractions now, or maybe they just get buried in all the sales and club sims on SL. There's some virtual world education groups on G+ like the Virtual World Teachers Network that deal with lots of different technologies, including SL. Might be a good resource.