Lego Universe
Information
This is a group to support the educational uses of Lego Universe
Website: http://universe.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx
Members: 71
Latest Activity: Oct 3
A New Collectively Creative Participtory Virtual World from Lego?
As Teen Second Life continues to fail to deliver on its potential, I am as frustrated as ever by the lack of competition. But today I learned of a bright light in the distance.
While there are many interesting and entertaining virtual worlds, and a handful with good opportunities for education, few offer ANY combination of affordances that make TSL such a powerful learning environment, such as:
- The ability to create items from scratch and direct them with internal code,
- The ability to sell or trade objects and afford the new owner the ability to modify them,
- Ownership of the intellectual property within their creations, etc.
Most youth-oriented worlds share a common set of tools - avatar creation, object collecting, communication tools, currency, a personalized "home” - but only Linden Lab has created a powerful tool for collective creativity, empowering its users/residents with tools required to construct the world around them and give shape to their dreams and desires.
That is, perhaps, until now (or some time in 2009), when Lego Universe is revealed, which to the best of my knowledge is a combination virtual world/MMOG (that is, it will be a creative, social space but also contain a larger narrative with points and missions).
The video below offers some concept art:
These short previews all look great but the second of the bunch, however, is the one that interests me the most, depicting one avatar building a car followed by a second avatar collaborating on its construction. Can it be that Lego can successfully transplant what has been so successful in the physical world into their digital equivalent online, one which is so desperately needed and is so well aligned with both virtual worlds and participatory learning?
On one hand, it is somewhat surprisingly easy to overlap the concept of building with Legos offline with building with prims in Second Life (the basic building blocks). And for those who might not be aware, Lego has a very active fan community who like to build and share what they build; the web site for Lego Universe takes good advantage of this community and interest in participating by offering numerous opportunities for fans to post photos of their own designs for items within the Universe.
Second Life is, in large part, defined as well by its community of engaged individuals sharing their creations. Second Life's toolset, powerful as it is, tends to be accessible to only the most dedicated. Lego bricks, however, are so easy my two year old plays with them.
Lego, in addition, has the advantage that most brands in virtual worlds do not - Second Life is so hard to describe because we have few lived examples with which we can relate it to; brands like McDonalds and Disney’s Cars have little to say about the core mechanics of virtual worlds, the very things one does when logged in. Legos, however, are all about building, a mechanic which translates so well to a virtual world, so immediately intuitively relatable, it has the power to tip in ways Second Life and few brands can.
If Lego can leverage their existing fan community and offer collaborative creation tools and ownership rights as powerful as Second Life's but with a user interface as simple as connecting Lego blocks, the potential for a new vibrant community for participatory learning might be right around the corner, build one virtual brick at a time.
I created this group on RezEd as I am interested in exploring the participatory potential of this space and connecting with other educators who have similar interests.
While there are many interesting and entertaining virtual worlds, and a handful with good opportunities for education, few offer ANY combination of affordances that make TSL such a powerful learning environment, such as:
- The ability to create items from scratch and direct them with internal code,
- The ability to sell or trade objects and afford the new owner the ability to modify them,
- Ownership of the intellectual property within their creations, etc.
Most youth-oriented worlds share a common set of tools - avatar creation, object collecting, communication tools, currency, a personalized "home” - but only Linden Lab has created a powerful tool for collective creativity, empowering its users/residents with tools required to construct the world around them and give shape to their dreams and desires.
That is, perhaps, until now (or some time in 2009), when Lego Universe is revealed, which to the best of my knowledge is a combination virtual world/MMOG (that is, it will be a creative, social space but also contain a larger narrative with points and missions).
The video below offers some concept art:
These short previews all look great but the second of the bunch, however, is the one that interests me the most, depicting one avatar building a car followed by a second avatar collaborating on its construction. Can it be that Lego can successfully transplant what has been so successful in the physical world into their digital equivalent online, one which is so desperately needed and is so well aligned with both virtual worlds and participatory learning?
On one hand, it is somewhat surprisingly easy to overlap the concept of building with Legos offline with building with prims in Second Life (the basic building blocks). And for those who might not be aware, Lego has a very active fan community who like to build and share what they build; the web site for Lego Universe takes good advantage of this community and interest in participating by offering numerous opportunities for fans to post photos of their own designs for items within the Universe.
Second Life is, in large part, defined as well by its community of engaged individuals sharing their creations. Second Life's toolset, powerful as it is, tends to be accessible to only the most dedicated. Lego bricks, however, are so easy my two year old plays with them.
Lego, in addition, has the advantage that most brands in virtual worlds do not - Second Life is so hard to describe because we have few lived examples with which we can relate it to; brands like McDonalds and Disney’s Cars have little to say about the core mechanics of virtual worlds, the very things one does when logged in. Legos, however, are all about building, a mechanic which translates so well to a virtual world, so immediately intuitively relatable, it has the power to tip in ways Second Life and few brands can.
If Lego can leverage their existing fan community and offer collaborative creation tools and ownership rights as powerful as Second Life's but with a user interface as simple as connecting Lego blocks, the potential for a new vibrant community for participatory learning might be right around the corner, build one virtual brick at a time.
I created this group on RezEd as I am interested in exploring the participatory potential of this space and connecting with other educators who have similar interests.
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Comment by Barry Joseph on September 8, 2009 at 10:57am - An extensive article on Lego, including coversation on this world, in the NYTimes.
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Comment by Barry Joseph on June 10, 2009 at 10:40pm
- Ah! Thanks Sabine. I posted a new one - hopefully this one will last longer.
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Comment by Sabine Reljic / Willow Shenlin on June 10, 2009 at 9:56pm - too bad the youtube video above has been removed. Great news nonetheless
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Comment by Barry Joseph on June 8, 2009 at 1:27pm
- Ooh, I finally have news. I was at a meeting last week where I met the co-founder of the company producing Lego Universe and, in addition, an amazing educator who is consulting on their board. They seemed receptive to being in contact with RezEd in the future and I hope this means, at least, a podcast interview down the road. Keep your fingers crossed!
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Comment by ShapingYouth on January 23, 2009 at 3:06pm - Speaking of Lego, seen this 'Magic Portal' site? One of our youth teams forwarded..."The Magic Portal is a short stop motion film that uses LEGO®, plasticene, cardboard and pixellated live action, made between the years of 1985 and 1989 on good ol' fashioned 16mm film."---wow: 16 minutes of film; 4 years in dev? Sounds like a worthy Lego VW youth inspiration: http://www.rakrent.com/mp/mp.htm
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Comment by Sus Nyrop on January 21, 2009 at 3:21pm
- My grandson,age nine, declares himself a LEGO expert, and although he may still have to practice hard he can indeed follow the instruction sheet. Those bricks are so costly, and we cannot affort buying all of them, as he would prefer. Building can be a fine group activity in the family and elsewhere, and I can easily imagine how some of our already existing RL skills with LEGO construction can now come to use in a virtual universe - I would enjoy to build with my grandchildren online! And, also as an invited guest teacher in the virtual classroom. There's so much math and figuring out mow to manipulate and organize things, where language skills are involved, too.
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Comment by Jonathon Richter / Wainbrave Bernal on December 19, 2008 at 1:16pm
- very interested in following these developments - particularly the ways in which collaboration and innovation might be extended in this and other virtual spaces. Thanks for starting this group, Barry!
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Comment by Daniel Voyager on November 11, 2008 at 2:37pm - Great stuff!!
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Comment by Sabine Reljic / Willow Shenlin on November 10, 2008 at 8:03pm
- How exciting! I have been slowly getting up to date with youth MMO in order to offer some interesting clubs for my son's public school. (I volunteer at the literacy centers on Fridays...and quite frankly the Word Bingo is starting to get boring)
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Comment by brock dubbels on November 10, 2008 at 4:39pm - I am very excited about this. I hope we can integrate mindstorms programming and take the things built for the robots and translate the routines into this -- how cool would that be?
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