EDUCAUSE | Emotional Intelligence

Some Foundations for Second Life Pedagogy

HiredEd — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:47:30 -0500

Sex, commerce and stalking. In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns. Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS! It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses. And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life. In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Being a design-minded individual, my attention was more captivated by the unique pedagogical opportunities and challenges posed by the Second Life medium. We were lucky enough to have Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins visit our campus to give a presentation on educational uses of Second Life. She described a lesson she designed on self-presentation and identity (or so I recall, I forget exactly how she herself positioned the lesson) where students had to choose bodies from a box or treasure-trunk, don them, and go out and interact in Second Life in those bodies. One group of students chose to go out as Kool-Aid men, and they went to a bar, where they bumped into people, angered them, got marginalized, tried to hide, sought solidarity with each other, and in general behaved like members of a visually conspicuous minority group. They returned to the home island a very short time after venturing out, having learned an enormous amount about size issues, discrimination and minority identities.

She also discussed programs like Global Kids in Teen Second Life, and related "Gaming for Good" projects, that put kids in the position of various kinds of decision makers - everything from authorities to commoners in famine zones or child soldiers (actually, she focused on the Darfur project, the other topics came up in my own web search - must apologize for some memory haze here...).

Reflecting on these instructional anecdotes, I find myself thinking that Second life is ideally suited for (at least) two kinds of learning activities - empathy-based learning and encounter learning.

Empathy-based learning design requires the instructional designer to create a habitus, consisting of physical markers and parameters, position markings, behavioural options and the like that enable someone undertaking the lesson to experience social or instrumental interactions in a way that allows them to experience reality from a perspective different from their own. Some offline examples of empathy-based learning include the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment, having people who don't usually use wheelchairs use them for some significant stretch of time, having kids take care of a fresh, uncooked egg for several days to simulate the demands of parenting, having people dress as if they are destitute and homeless and have them try to carry out everyday social and commercial transactions, etc.

Second Life is a rich environment for empathy-provoking learning experiences of this sort. One might imagine "empathy islands" devoted to offering an empathic understanding of some issue or situation. A course on the history of the Klondike Gold Rush might be greatly enriched by challenging students to undertake the journey to Dawson in Second life on an island that replicated the physics and energetics of the journey.

On an activist front, rich and engaging empathy-islands for current social issues could be studded with "PSAs" or "ads" for social service/change organizations, which could be virtual "change boxes" to gather donations for those charities - thus generating a micro-billing stream of real support for the empathic focus of the island. Other calls to action could also be woven into the experiential rhetoric of the island.

Discussions about the educational use of Second Life should thus include some sustained reflection on the role and value of empathy-building activities in education more generally. It is likely that in many cases, a rationale for the use of empathy-based learning will further support a rationale for the use of Second Life as the environment for that learning activity. Others may already be talking about this, but as I enter this conversation about Second Life, I do so with this issue on my mind.

Another kind of educational activity that Second Life enables is encounter-based learning. Second Life allows one to transcend physical geography and bring diverse people together. A blindingly obvious way to leverage this for education is to bringtogether learners from different language groups together for foreign language practice. I haven't though as much about the possibilities here, but again, a sustained examination of the uses and roles of encounter-based learning in general will end up offering an important framework for constructing Second Life learning activities.

Sex, commerce and stalking do not strike me as the main challenges to building learning activities for college-aged adults in Second Life. As I said before, these things already characterize college campuses, and must be similarly managed in either domain.

For me the most interesting thing about Second Life is that it is a primarily spatial learning environment, which means that instructional designers lose the inherent contro lover instructional *sequence* that a primarily textual or audio-visual medium offers.

Second Life is inherently a random-access, exploratory environment. It even adds the degrees of freedom of flying and teleporting to an already free navigational paradigm of just walking around. Of course, instructional sequence could always be controlled by constructing a castle full of hallways to walk down, or a roller-coaster-ride through the lesson materials, etc. But in the absence of any such special construction, Second Life is non-sequential, random access and exploratory.

That offers a third "E" to this list of educational modes that are natural to Second Life:

- Empathic/Empathy-Based
- Encounter-Based
- Exploratory

The design of exploratory learning is an interesting challenge. How do you design non-sequential instruction? In a blog entry I wrote earlier, I discussed a game-design book that offers some guidance on this design task. The book is called _Rules of Play_ . In that book, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe three layers of design:

- Rules: The logic and organization of possibilities within the system of the game
- Play: The human experience of the system - the constaints that enable people to move through the logic of the game rules in a structured and workable manner
- Culture: The larger activities, social and instructional contexts engaged with and inhabited by the system.

Without going into too much detail about this (which I couldn't do even if I wanted to), it seems to me that instructional design in Second Life must attend to these three layers of design. There is the logic or structure of the experience one wants to create, then one must attend to how learners will explore or move through this experience, and the fit between this experience and other social and instructional aspects of the course needs to be clear (enough) as well.

While it's not as dramatic as sex, commerce and stalking, the combination of:

- Empathy
- Encounter
- Exploration
   * Rules (Logic, conceptual/factual structure)
   * Play (Learning activity, processing)
   * Culture

...does offer a foundation for some pretty rigorous work on the educational uses of the Second Life platform. It's not the whole story, but it's a great place to start.

When Pay Ruins Everything

HiredEd — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:20:12 -0500

Getting paid to do something you love can totally ruin the experience.

Odd, eh?

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many investigators think we have more than one motivational system, and these systems compete - activating one can knock out the other.

One study I've found focuses precisely on this phenomenon. It's called Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science (Vol15—Num11: 787-793). They were studying "homo economicus", and they wanted to see if adding compensation to a task would affect how much effort people put into a task. If humans are rational self-maximizers, they argued, then the more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.

This is very interesting from a management perspective, particularly in knowledge intensive/creative industries. We have all of these smart, competent people on staff - programmers, designers, subject matter experts - and don't they all sometimes seem to seethe with resentment, even though we are paying them to do things they initially seemed very *eager* to do?

Heyman and Ariely suggest that there are two kinds of "markets": monetary markets and social markets. Different kinds of goods and services may be associated with each market, but more to the point, the form of compensation offered differs as well.

When you offer to pay someone, you signal that you want to situate the transaction in the economic modality. If you offer to pay close friends and extended family members for helping you move apartments, most would energetically resist receiving money (except those recognized to be in need, but then the payment becomes a supportive gesture - sublimated into the social economy). However, the same friends and relatives who would refuse payment would gladly help themselves to a fridge and kitchen full of beer and pizza worth much more than the dollar value initially offered them. (Unless you mention the price, in which case they will want to help you out, and again the monetary exchanges will be sublimated into the social market - as mutual aid).

Offering them an hourly rate and paying them to the hour would be unthikable, unfeeling, rude... they might wonder if you had some kind of social functioning challenge like something in the autism spectrum. You are trying to put a money-value on the asset of having friends and family who will help you. You will, in a sense, be rejecting them from the social market, driven by reciprocal altruism, esteem, social standing/reputation, social network position, and all the rest. You'll be treating them like hired help, and repudiating, in a sense, their claim to special standing in your eyes...

The consumate example of this error, of course, would be offering payment to somebody for sexual relations they entered into for entirely social and personal reasons. But that would be more than shifting from social to economic markets, it would also drastically re-position that person in the social market, so there would be two re-valuations happening at once.

Interestingly, creative/competent people often use this sexual metaphor to describe what happens to them when they accept employment in a larger organization ("prostituting" themselves and their talents). They seem to perceive their position as affected by this same double-shift.

Heyman and Ariely make the following prediction based on the research they have referenced:

[This h]ypothesis...1 also predicts a distinction between exchanges in which payment is not mentioned (‘‘not paying at all’’) and those in which individuals are told explicitly that they will not be paid (‘‘paying nothing’’). Whereas not mentioning payment is likely to cause individuals to consider themselves to be in a social-market relationship, telling individuals explicitly that they are not getting paid is likely to cause them to consider themselves to be in a money-market relationship. Our framework predicts that not paying at all in the context of social market relationships can create higher levels of incentives than low levels of compensation in the context of money-market relationships, a prediction that is shared by many other accounts (Bem, 1965; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000b; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).

One might add a personal economy of pleasure to the social and economic, to add that activities that are done for their intrinsic reward as hobbies also lose their appeal when done for pay, but let's stick with the social and economic distinction for now...

The interplay between social and economic markets creates a situation that "economic-man" rationalism would not predict, i.e. "Effort in exchange for no payment can be higher than effort in exchange for low monetary payment."

Strictly economic rationality would not predict this, but strictly economic rationality has been slow to pick up on the impact of social exchange behavior on economic exchange behavior. Market capitalism had not spread easily to nations and cultures that have had a history supporting other exchange customs. I remember when I was in Fiji for awhile, and in some of the marketplaces where native Fijian businesses were predominant, there were signs all over the place telling vendors not to sell goods on verbal credit! In the traditional Fijian village economy, the social exchange market dominates material exchange, and so a lot of the culture gives expression to social exchange values. In a modern cash economy, however, people had to learn to insist that business be business, and that payment be made.

I think some of us are biologically more sensitive to different kinds of signals of gain or loss, and that there may be some link between this and the "artistic/creative personality". I for one basically don't notice money, don't think of it, would rather not think of it, etc. I care what my salary is, but mainly as an indicator of social status - or more precisely, my social standing - where I stand in the eyes of my employer.

I love the recognition that comes from do superlative work, but I would far rather professionalize my work than be paid directly for each deliverable. I prefer to make my salary a background indicator of my social standing and status, and to then ignore it. When I do good work, I want it to be for intrinsic reasons - because I value good work, and because I have a will to constantly improve things, etc. I want to present my work to others, to discuss it with them, to gain recognition and to thereby gain social sanction to continue my apparently valuable work.

Note that this is precisely the incentive structure of the traditional academy. Maybe this *is* the best incentive structure for intellectual/creative types.

Don't some of the better employers in the US knowledge economy copy some aspect of this university "collegial community" incentive structure? Places like Google and Genetech establish "campuses", and send a strong signal to employees that the company is committed to make things easier for them so that they can concentrate on their work - which by implication means that the workers are highly respected and the company cares about their work very much. Can't you just seen every brainiac and artiste you know coming alive at the thought of that kind of social contract?

In the book "This Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell describes the "rule of 150" - the observation that human beings seem to have a processing limit, similar to the working memory limit of about 5-7 items, such that they cannot work in single units or organizations larger than 150 persons and still stay in the social-processing mode. It is a very robust observation, historically and in more recent research. Above 150, anonymity creeps in, people become identified by role and title only, and things begin to operate using formal mechanisms, drastically slowing the flow of information and the ability for the organization to react as an organic, integrated whole. (Maybe the economic market is nothing more than the social market pushed past this point of anonymity. Maybe the "brand" becomes a proxy social stand-in or social-brain signal on the otherwise anonymized commodity market...) Some organizations have discovered this rule of 150. Gore Associates (mentioned in Gladwell's book) allows no more than 150 in any of their offices, and there are no job titles. Everyone is an "associate". The British corporation Virgin has also been mentioned by advocate of "flat-era" organization.

In such an organization, you would not be limited by job titles, held to a single task stream, forced to withhold contributions that do not fit your job title, etc. You would be paid for being there, for being you, and your task load would be determined by the interplay of personal, interpersonal and team commitments. You would also have a context within with to distinguish yourself by the quality or quantity of your output. Let the money trickle into the bank, but do it for the glory!

Again, can't you just feel all the creative types you know breathing a sigh of relief and unleashing the best of their talents?