Language Lab uses Second Life to teach foreign languages for profit. They have built an entire virtual city with various buildings and public spaces to immerse students in the target language. The city is meant to provide opportunities for natural interaction between students as they accomplish tasks, similar to how the founder learned languages through necessity while playing games and in real-life situations abroad.

1. METANOMICS: LANGUAGE LAB
AUGUST 11, 2008
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Good afternoon, and welcome to Metanomics. Today we’ll be
taking a close look at Language Lab, a business that uses Second Life to teach foreign
language, for a profit, and that clearly has a discerning eye as Language Lab is one of our
sponsors. Along with supporting sponsor Language Lab, Metanomics is brought to you by
Simuality, our primary sponsor, maker of SlippCat. We also have three other supporting
sponsors: Kelly Services, InterSection Unlimited and the Johnson Graduate School of
Management at Cornell University, my own institution.
As usual, our live venue in Second Life is the Muse Isle Arena, and we welcome everyone
who is at our event partners across the grid: Colonia Nova Amphitheater, Meta Partners
Conference Area, the Outreach Amphitheater of the New Media Consortium Educational
Community Sims and Rockliffe University.
As usual also, we ask you to join our Metanomics Group in Second Life so you can get
information on our show. For example, this week you would have seen an announcement
that we’re having a special show tomorrow at 2:00 P.M. Second Life Time, in which
Dusan Writer will announce the winner of his L800,000 content, to improve the experience
of new Second Life residents by proposing an improved viewer interface. I’m also
encouraging you today to join the Metanomics Group for a different reason. Over the next
few weeks, with the help of KGSM’s Idea City and Metaversality, we will be surveying our
group members to find out how we can improve our show. I’ll talk more about this at the end

2. of today’s show in my Connecting The Dots segment. But, please, do join our group so we
can get your opinion.
One of the signature advantages of live events in Virtual Worlds is the rich and varied
discussions that you can have in text chat at the same time that we’re having a more
focused conversation in voice. We use InterSection Unlimited’s ChatBridge system to
transmit local chat to our website and website chat in to our event partners. So backchat
can bring you in touch with people around Second Life and on the web, wherever you are.
You’ll also notice that Bjorlyn Loon and other Metanomics staff members will be pasting in
relevant links and other quotes throughout the session. Also, you can type “QUESTION” in
caps and then ask a question of our guests. Ultimately, the backchat becomes part of our
archives, along with the video, audio and the text transcript of the show itself. So chime in
and improve the conversation, which makes the show better right now and makes our
website a better resource for the people who are looking for insight into business and policy
issues in Virtual Worlds.
Before we get to Language Lab, we’re going to put Metanomics education correspondent,
Fleep Tuque, On The Spot, to tell us about the education track of the Second Life
Community Convention. Fleep, welcome back to Metanomics.
FLEEP TUQUE: Hi, Beyers. Thanks for having me.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, well, it’s always a delight. Now my first question for you,
Fleep, is that the Second Life Community Convention is SLCC, while the education track

3. has its own acronym: SLEDcc, and it even has its own website. Can you give us a bit of
background on that?
FLEEP TUQUE: Sure. Well, the Second Life Education Community Conference is part of
the official Second Life Community Convention. The SLED community, as it’s known,
Second Life Educators, that’s the name of the blog where most of us first got to know each
other. And, in the past, the education track has been a really small part of the overall
convention. But last year we had so many educators come to the conference that we literally
outgrew the room we were in so we wanted to sort of expand the program a bit and
accommodate all the things that educators were interested in learning about. And last year
some educators also had kind of a hard time justifying to their schools why they needed to
come to a community convention about a Virtual World. So this year, we’ve done some
separate branding with a pullout program just for the education part so that it’s a little easier
for folks to get funding and support to come. And considering how many schools are using
Second Life, we have a really terrific program scheduled for both Tampa and in-world. And
we hope folks will join us, even if they don’t consider themselves an educator since we think
there’s a lot to be learned from what the educational community is doing, even if you’re in
business or doing something else.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You mentioned expanded content, and there are six distinct
strands of the convention. Can you walk us through those real quickly?
FLEEP TUQUE: Sure. The strands came out of all of the different ways that we are seeing
Second Life used in education, and, if you go to conferences very often, you’ll usually see

4. different tracks so that people can focus on what they’re most interested in. So we’ve
identified six sort of categories of use of Second Life right now, and we just want the
rainbow color schemes to make it easier for people to navigate. So the red strand is games
and simulation. If you’re using any kind of game or simulated activity, then those sessions
will be under the red strand. Orange is mixed reality learning, and that involves both
activities that are in Second Life but use some component in the Real World as well. So
when you pipe out live Real Life conference into Second Life and have activities, that would
be mixed reality learning.
Yellow is theory, research and practice. So when educators want to talk about good
pedagogy and good learning theory and how that would be applicable in a Virtual World like
Second Life, that will be under the yellow strand. Then we have green which is differentiated
learning, international, diverse and special populations. I know many folks here are aware
that Second Life, and Virtual Worlds in general, can be a really great place to reach
populations who otherwise might not be able to come to a traditional educational institution.
So those sessions will focus on how to reach out to those different populations. The blue
strand is projects and events. I mean that’s kind of a general topic, but sometimes folks are
working on a very specific project, and we wanted to be able to highlight some of those. And
then the purple strand is tools and products. Some of the great things in Second Life that
users--and lots of times those are created by the business community. But, when we find
tools that make the in-world experience much better, we want to be able to highlight those
and discuss those at the conference as well.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Great! Well, that sounds like a lot is going on. But the convention

5. is not just people talking about what they’re doing elsewhere. You actually have some
working groups that you want to put to task to get some things done. Can you tell us about
those?
FLEEP TUQUE: Sure. Well, the goal was to take advantage. I mean it’s not often that you
get all of these Second Life educators in one space, and we thought it would be a great idea
to take advantage of that and create some resources that would be useful not just for people
who are already in Second Life in education, but also all the new colleges and universities
and schools that are coming onboard. So we’ve organized these four working groups. I’m
assuming they’re going to be in Tampa sort of roundtable, but there will be in-world working
groups as well. And we’re going to be focusing on four different topics. So the first one is
creating some template language that teachers can use in their course syllabus or notices to
parents. What would the education community recommend that a new teacher tell parents
who are going to have their kid in Teen Second Life for the first time? And we give them
expert Peggy Sheehy, who I know you’ve had on your show. We’ll be helping facilitate that
session.
The next one is developing an institutional use policy and student code of conduct for use in
Virtual Worlds. So we’ve all faced that question: What might be a bad thing on a Real Life
campus, like a student showing up naked or something? Would probably get you in big
trouble on a real campus, but, in a virtual campus, it might be treated differently. So how do
we work out some good institutional use policies that are realistic? The third one is how to
organize a directory of institutions and courses that are using Second Life. We are asked all
the time how many institutions are here and what kinds of courses are being offered, and,

6. unfortunately, the answer is nobody really knows right now. So we’re hoping that at SLEDcc
we’ll be able to get everyone together and figure out a way to create a directory that will be
a good resource even for Second Life residents who want to take a class, that they’ll be able
to go to and say, “Okay, this is what’s available.”
And then the last one may be getting the most attention right now. We are organizing formal
feedback to Linden Lab from the educator community, and we’ve focused on a one- to
three-year time frame, and we’re hoping that anyone involved in the education community
will participate and help us give Linden Lab good structured feedback, “These are the things
that we think might help us as educators moving forward.” So I’m really looking forward to
that aspect of the convention this year.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now have you already been in touch with Linden Lab on that so
that you know there’s a mechanism on their end to receive that feedback?
FLEEP TUQUE: Yes. They’ve been really terrific. Actually Claudia and Pathfinder are going
to open the SLEDcc proceedings with the first session. And they basically asked us for
feedback, and so they’re very open to it and want to hear what education needs from Linden
Lab, so we’re really looking forward to having a good dialogue with them as well.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Great! Now for people who can’t make it to Tampa, can they get
involved in those working groups and the sessions as well?
FLEEP TUQUE: Sure. If you go to the website, it’s sledcc.wikispaces.com. On the left-hand

7. side, you’ll see there are two registration links, one for the folks going to Tampa and one for
the folks who want to come in-world. And I should note the in-world program is completely
free. We just need to get an idea of how many people are planning to come. And below that
are links to the Tampa and in-world schedule. I don’t know if the in-world locations are all
listed there yet because we’re still sort of nailing down the venues. But we’re going to have
lots of things going on in-world. If you can’t come to Tampa, you can still fully participate in
SLEDcc. We’ll be streaming in the Tampa sessions to in-world as well. So if you just go to
that website, all the information is there, and it will be updated regularly. I think we’re going
to have a really great program so I’m really looking forward to it.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Thanks. Well, I am looking forward to the part that I’m going to be
involved with. I guess I’m giving a keynote on Sunday morning and was actually just talking
with Bjorlyn Loon about what I’m going to speak on, and I realize it’s probably good it’s a
plenary session because I’m not sure it quite fits into any of the six tracks. My topic is going
to be the business of Virtual World education. So the idea will be to look at the cost side,
especially for nonprofit institutions and the profit side for for-profit institutions as well. And so
that’s going to be interesting. It’ll sort of hopefully blend the education and business tracks
also a little bit. And, in fact, I guess this is also a nice time to announce that Metanomics is
going to be one of the lead sponsors of SLEDcc, along with ISTE, the International Society
for Technology in Education. And I have to say it was a tough call, whether to sponsor the
business track or the education track, but I’ll say you educators are such an incredibly active
and organized group, it was just hard to pass that up. So I look forward, Fleep, to seeing
you in Tampa, and I’m sure we’ll be having a lot of in-world activities as well through
Metanomics. So thanks a lot for coming On The Spot, Fleep Tuque.

8. FLEEP TUQUE: Thanks, Beyers.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now let’s turn to our main event. David Kaskel is managing
director and CEO of Language Lab. A graduate of Yale University, David is currently doing
doctoral research into language acquisition models in virtual environments, the Center for
Computing in the Humanities at Kings College. After over two years of research and
development and many thousands of hours of student testing, Language Lab opened to its
first paying students this summer, and they’ve got a lot of things in store for us as well over
the coming academic year. David, welcome to Metanomics.
DAVID KASKEL: Thank you, Beyers.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, we’re really glad to have you on, and I’d like to start by
asking you: I understand you came up with the idea of Language Lab from one experience
in the Virtual World game Dark Age of Camelot and another experience in a taxicab in
Napoli. Can you tell us about that?
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah, sure. I would say neither of those experiences, in themselves, led
to the actual founding of Language Lab, but they were both instrumental in the way I thought
about how Virtual Worlds could be used. So the first was Dark Age of Camelot, which I was
playing in I think maybe the year 2000, actually 2001, all of 2001. And it was actually just
shortly after 9/11, and I was living down in Lower Manhattan, and it was a difficult time. I
guess to get my mind off of things and to have fun, I started playing a fair amount of Dark
Age of Camelot. One of the people that went on around the same time, started at the same

9. time, was German and initially spoke almost no English. Of course, we were just typing
then. He was on actually even more than I was so he must have been on about 16 hours a
day. And, within a month, his English was indistinguishable from anyone else. Now given it
was in a very specific context, but that stayed with me that someone who completely
immersed themselves and needed to use English in a Virtual World can learn it very, very
fast.
Then about three years ago, I was studying Italian at Berlitz and went to Napoli for vacation
and got stuck in a taxi. Heading back from one of the museums was stuck in the taxi, and
the driver spoke very, very little English. So I started using the Italian that I knew, and we
must have had about an hour together. And I realized, because I needed to tell him where I
was going, and he wanted to tell me about his cousin who was living in Texas, that the one
hour together where we had to speak English, where I was in, again, a very highly
immersive situation, I felt like my Italian got better at a rate that was very, very different from
my Berlitz experience. So I guess those two things, and then combined with the research I
did a little bit later at Kings College, led me to found Language Lab.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So if necessity is the mother of invention, then necessity along
with immersion is the mother of language acquisition. Is that right?
DAVID KASKEL: I guess so. Necessity. Also the social context: being with someone and
having a reason to talk to them.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And that really seems to underlie what, to me, is one of the most

10. fascinating aspects of the Language Lab instruction model, which is, you have formal
instruction, and we’ll get to that eventually, but the part I want to set right out in front here is
that you actually have an entire city here in Second Life so you can have all your students
get stuck in a taxicab and have to explain where someone is going to go. Now I hope I’m
joking on that, and that’s not actually one of the lessons. But can you give people a sense of
how many Sims you have and what type of content you have there?
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. We have actually about 12 Sims, some of which are void Sims, I
think, or are void Sims which actually are being upgraded. The main part of our city is four
Sims now, but it is actually shorted to be expanded to a full eight Sims. In those Sims, we
have everything from retail to office to hotels, cultural facilities, museums, theatres, cafes,
restaurants, cinemas, homes, shops, pretty much anything. Municipal buildings. Pretty much
any building that you would find in a real city is duplicated in what we call English City.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: One of the sad stories in Second Life is that so many people build
the types of things you just describe, but then they become ghost towns. No one is there,
and so there’s no one to interact with. But you actually have people, right, who are paid to
interact with your students.
DAVID KASKEL: Yes. We have characters that live in the city and work in the city, that run
the shops, cafes. And these are paid actors who perform roles. Currently at any given time,
there’s anywhere between three and five, up to maybe seven, but that’s an area that we’re
expanding. We try to keep coverage to about eight to ten hours a day so when students go
in there, there’s someone to talk to.

11. ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I’ll jump right in to a question here in the audience from
Azwaldo Villota: Will Language Lab be developing content for instruction in other languages
such as Chinese?
DAVID KASKEL: We are Beta testing and will, hopefully, be open to the public instruction in
Spanish in October. Chinese and Arabic are two that we’re looking at very carefully because
there’s a lot of interest in them. And we will keep looking at other languages. But our current
student base, except for the Beta test, is all in English. By the middle of next year, we’ll at
least have Spanish and, hopefully the other languages as well.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: We actually have another question here from Crap Mariner: Are
the actors one on one with the avatars, with the students, or do you run multiple sessions to
expand coverage of their roles?
DAVID KASKEL: They can be one on one, but it’s really if you picture going into a café, you
happen to be the only person there, then you’re one on one with Millie Ames. She owns the
café. But as many as, I would say, 12 students might be in and out of a space where an
actor is, and there might be multiple actors there at the same time, so it really depends on
what’s going on. If there’s a particular activity that’s going on or if it’s more just a functional
visit, going into a shop to buy something so you’re practicing language with shopping. It
could be one person right after another so you do have some individual time. Or, again, it
could be three or four people going up to the shopkeeper at once.

12. ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, so people are just jumping in with these sort of nitty-gritty
questions, which I admit I’m pretty interested in too.
DAVID KASKEL: That’s fine.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Here’s one from--this’ll get me to practice my Scandinavian. I’m
going to Denmark in September, and, hopefully, I can pronounce this name. I’m going to say
Hjoerdis Stenvaag. And the question is: How do you decide what hours are to be covered
given that we’re 24/7 here in Second Life?
DAVID KASKEL: That’s a very good question. It was something actually that we deal with
on a regular basis. So we have a welcome area that is open 24 hours. And we essentially
are looking at where we’re getting students from. We have nine of our students right now
from the Middle East, where we look to make sure that we’re covering their needs. But it
pretty much is dictated by the student population as they come in. So classes are--
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So you track that information and then try to keep up.
DAVID KASKEL: We track that information, then we--yes. But we do have some students
that do go to classes at 4:00 in the morning their time. Which doesn’t work for everyone.
Over time, as we get larger, hopefully, we’ll be 24 hours.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Great. Now we’ve talked a fair bit about the informal
aspects of this. And actually, let me just before I move on: First, Hjoerdis Stenvaag says,

13. “Close enough on that pronunciation.” Oh, and I guess it’s--oh, I can’t. I’m not sure the
explanation is actually helping me much. But we had another Q&A just in the backchat itself,
but I’d like to just say it out loud here. Sean Cinquetti asked about tours of Language Lab.
And one of your staffing, Champion, mentioned that you can send an instant message to
her, Ami Champion, or email her at marybeth@languagelab.com, and you can arrange a
tour, even if you speak English. So if you want to learn more, there are ways to do that.
I’d like to move on a little bit if I could, to the formal instruction that you do have through
Language Lab, and we actually have a graphic. Wiz, if you’ll put that one up. It’s actually like
a teacher standing at a blackboard, conjugating verbs or something frightening like that.
Makes me feel like I’m back in when I learned French in seventh grade. I had a teacher who
would drill into our heads that we needed to say “faire visite à,” in exactly that accent as
well. So I blame her for my French accent and, fortunately for her, I no longer remember her
name. Now I understand this is really just a promo shot, but so tell us a little bit about just
the formal instruction. Is it a lot like sitting in a classroom and having someone walk you
through conjugations?
DAVID KASKEL: Not exactly. For certain aspects, there is the more formal, and we do go
back and discuss grammar issues. But, in general, we really look at task-based functions,
uses of language. There was a study done about 20 years ago in Europe, that looked at
what are the best ways to teach language, and they developed what is called the CEF,
Common European Framework for Languages, and we use that to develop our syllabus. So
basically, we teach people at various levels based on the needs and the abilities at that
level. So at the elementary level you might be learning more simple introductions. At the

14. advanced level, it might be more complicated negotiations. They’re thematic and contextual
the way we teach. In terms of what happens in Language Lab itself, part of the time you are
in the World, in the city, doing functional things, and part of the time there’s a more reflective
aspect. So there’s discussions around what happened, either giving initial input before or
discussing the issues that occurred afterwards.
And grammar does come up when there are particularly difficult issues sometimes or to lay
out a framework of what’s going on. So in some ways, there’s some aspects that are similar
to communicative language courses today and some aspects that are pretty different.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, I am glad to hear that even formal language instruction has
made some advances since I was in seventh grade. To follow up on this, as I mentioned
when I gave your introduction, you are actually studying language acquisition models at the
Center for Computing in the Humanities at Kings College. To what extent did your
doctoral-level research inform what you’re doing with Language Lab?
DAVID KASKEL: I would say the bulk of the research actually started before Language
Lab, and it wasn’t initially on looking at languages. I was actually really studying how people
relate to their avatars through a theatrical paradigm. So it’s a little different, but I kept
thinking what is the value of immersion. And I had, as I mentioned, the Naples trip and the
German experience in mind. About a year ago, I switched to really focusing just on
language acquisition itself, in part because it was an area I wasn’t as strong in; in part
because I was doing so much work in it anyway. So I would say now, for the past six
months, that work has led me to understand much more how do you evaluate how well

15. someone is learning and to develop feedback mechanisms within our pedagogy, to look at
that and also to switch some of our pedagogy so that it’s more learner centered, that people
can determine how long they want to spend in various aspects to provide more flexibility. I
will have to mention, by the way, we have an incredibly talented director of education,
Paul Sweeney, and he really does actually do most of the pedagogy work, but I throw in my
two cents here and there.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Can you talk a little bit about your instructional staff? Are these
people who you just find, who are willing to help out? Are they certified?
DAVID KASKEL: No. All of the teachers have various levels of certification. They’ve taught
ESL or EFL professionally for at least two years. In the UK, there’s CELTA and DELTA
certification. In other places, we find equivalence levels. So they’re very, very top level
teachers. They're the kind of teachers that most people throughout the world wouldn’t be
able to find. You’d have to come pretty much to a major metro city. We’re top of the
language school. And then working alongside with these teachers, we have content
producers, people who are professional textbook writers actually. We’ve now converted it to
writing our material. And as I mentioned, we have people like Paul Sweeney, who will
actually come out of the e-learning area also, but with an ESL background.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And you’re saying so many schools wouldn’t be able to attract
these instructors, and you can because wherever they live, as long as the time zone isn’t an
issue for them, they can work for you. Is that the big advantage you have?
DAVID KASKEL: Absolutely. Yes. We have very, very talented people, some that are living

16. in Greece, Turkey, in the UK and the U.S., Australia. But that is the major advantage. Well, I
think some people like to be involved in more innovative learning methods. We’re attracting
people who are drawn to that in the first place. But secondly, if you think of every place
around the world if we want to get a teacher to teach outside of Seoul, for instance. It might
be one thing to get English teachers in a major city in South Korea, but it’s harder to get
them in a lot of the cities.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now one of the problems that so many educators face, especially
here I’m thinking kindergarten through twelfth grade education in the United States. There’s
so much emphasis on assessing learning outcomes. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit
about whether you have formal assessment models in place, to see how well your novel
strategies are working, and if you can tell us a little bit about what those assessment models
are.
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. Well, actually right now I would say they’re more informal, and
they’re really based on student feedback and observation. So it’s the teachers watching,
tracking where students are going, and then it’s talking to students about their experiences.
In some ways, that ends up being one of the best indicators of where students are and the
effectiveness of a program. We’ve had some students report back to us on tests that they’ve
taken within their universities. One of our students from Saudi Arabia recently came back
and said his English level went up by 40 percent in six months, which is a very, very huge
jump. I don’t know how that was measured, but that was measured at his university. We are
looking at a more formalized regular forms of evaluation, both self-evaluation and observed
evaluation. But to date, it has been through surveys, through interviews and things like that.

17. ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. And, let’s see, we’ve got a few questions coming in. Now
they’re moving a little more quickly than I can track them. So let’s see. Okay. I can see how
this would work for grammar and building confidence in conversation, but how do you deal
with the grunt work of learning vocabulary?
DAVID KASKEL: A few different ways. I mean vocabulary is learned through usage so you
introduce words in context, and people tend to remember it a little bit better. To take a
simple example: If you’re learning the word for different foods, like banana, you drop a giant
banana on someone’s head and repeat it three times. It’ll stick with someone a little bit more
than you’re just taught in a classroom, say the word “banana.” So we’re able to add in
contextual and visual stimulus to help reinforce vocabulary. We also have the ability, as you
know and pointed out already, to both talk and type at the same time, which some people
find easier. They want to see what the word is. So vocabulary is actually one of the easier
things I think to build.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And we have a question from Bluewave Ogee on the number of
students that you’ll typically have at one of your Sims at one time, and also are they using
in-world voice to communicate?
DAVID KASKEL: Everything is with voice, and it really depends what’s going on in their
particular Sim. So a class can be anywhere from six to 12 usually, I would say. We have
more at social events. Again, we have a lot of Sims. We’re open a long time, so I don’t think,
in general, it’s rare to find more than 12 people in a Sim, often find four to six if they’re just
students walking around with each other. So I would say that’s not really an issue right now

18. in terms of lag or things being overcrowded.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. I’d like to move on a little bit to just flushing out your
business model since, after all, this is a for-profit educational enterprise. And I’d like to start
with your target audience. Preparing for the show, your staff sent a bunch of your
promotional materials, and one of the slogans was something along the lines of learning
English “Talking Business.” So are you primarily targeting a business audience, a corporate
audience?
DAVID KASKEL: I wouldn’t say we’re primarily. I mean we have two different strands so
we’re looking, yes, at the business side of things, but also at the general consumer.
Depending on the businesses themselves, they are looking at both the need for general
English and for business English. But business English is a very, very large market, so it
does draw in people. Also, for us, in some ways, it’s a contrast because there are people
who feel Virtual Worlds aren’t that serious. So putting out the idea of business English lets
them know up front that this is a serious place, that this can really help you with your career,
for instance. It’s not quote “a game,” which I’m sure you realize can be an issue for some
people.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yes, that actually is a topic that comes up just about every
session of Metanomics.
DAVID KASKEL: Okay.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So we’re very familiar with that issue. You haven’t had a full

19. launch, is that right? You’re not in Beta really, but you haven’t done the big promotional
campaign yet?
DAVID KASKEL: Correct. We’ve done a very, very soft launch.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Mm-hmm. And so can you tell us a little bit about the students
that you have now?
DAVID KASKEL: Sure. I would say that they are typically ranging from about 25 to 35 years
old. A high number are from the Middle East, where we’ve done our initial test markets
because it was a small controlled area. Many of them have never [spoken to?] native
speakers of English in their entire life, and so that’s part of what drew them in. It was the
ability actually just to meet native speakers. Ami is smiling at ling, who’s one of our students
who’s done incredibly well.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hello, ling. Welcome to Muse Isle.
DAVID KASKEL: And we have really a very, very strong dedicated group of students who
are using Language Lab in very, very full ways, so it’s not generally just people who want to
go to classes. It’s people who want to talk to native speakers, get to know other students. A
fairly multicultural group. Even we have about 60 students we’ve got in the past couple of
months from maybe 20 different countries already. I don’t know if that answers the question.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, that does help give us some insight. That’s sort of the soft
launch part. Can you tell us now about the major launch here. That’s mid-September? Is

20. that right?
DAVID KASKEL: Mid-September, late September, early October. We’re still working on
some things internally, some backend systems that we’re still putting in place. And we’re
getting together some of our marketing material and sales material. So obviously--
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I guess there are two things I’m interested in. One is: Who are
you targeting? Sort of like where should we expect to see Language Lab advertisements
and commercials and so on? And the other is if you can talk a little bit about how you’re
going to scale up and what you feel you need to have in place to handle the students you
hope you’ll get from the major launch.
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. Well, there are certain administrative systems that we’re still putting
in place because we essentially track everyone along their progress, you know, which
classes they’ve taken, how they’ve done, who they’re going to see in terms of our city
people program, what level they’re at, which teachers they like. Things like that. So there’s
some work to be done there, particularly in the front end and getting to understand what
expectations are and matching them very closely with the correct program. But aside from
that, our system is fairly scalable. I think we could up pretty easily up to about 5,000
students right now. So some of the scalability issues come above that number. And, in
terms of where you’ll see us in which areas, we’ll continue in the Middle East because we’re
actually getting a fair number, a very good interest from there. And we’re getting to
understand that market fairly well. We will focus more on Europe. Probably Italy is one of
the countries that we’re looking at.

21. We tend to look at countries where we make sure that we have the language issues
handled, some of the cultural issues handled, and we can really place the correct kind of
advertisement to the right kind of people. We’ve gotten a fair amount of interest initially we
got from people who are gamers so we’ll probably look again at that, the gamer community.
And we’ll also look at the [B to B?] side of things.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Would you be reaching out directly to, say, multinational
corporations that you know have budgets for English as a second language--
DAVID KASKEL: That’s exactly, yes.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: --or would you be advertising in the Economist?
DAVID KASKEL: No, no, no. No big advertising. No. It would be focused directly on
corporations and universities too. And actually some ESL schools. But we can provide to a
school that’s teaching English in a place where there aren’t native speakers around is the
native speaker component. So we have a program specifically designed for schools that
already offer the classes. We can essentially supplement that with a native speaker
program. So those are some of the areas we’re looking at.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, I also hope you will work actively to get covered by the
non-English press. You can offer them some free classes, and then they’ll write about you.

22. DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. A very good idea. Yes.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now it sounds like the way you’re going about this, you
mentioned that you would be promoting to gamers, but that doesn’t sound like necessarily
within Second Life. So it sounds like you’re going to be bringing a lot of people into Second
Life, who have never been here before. That’s got to have its own challenges for you.
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah, that’s true. Actually, I don’t think we’ve done a particularly good job
of really focusing on Second Life community, which is slightly ironic because I’ve been
around Second Life so long. And I think we need to do more to do that. But our focus, the
vast majority of every student we’ve gotten, 95 percent, they’ve never been in Second Life.
Most of them never even heard of it. [AUDIO GLITCH] talented great group of people that
Ami actually runs that help people very quickly get onto voice, and, once people get onto
voice, it’s fairly fast for people to get used to what’s going on. We have found that, if you
don’t get to voice, and you’re still texting a lot, the interfaces are slightly more confusing,
and it’s hard to move text and do a lot of different things. We’re talking to actually Linden
right now about doing a little bit more with them of some of their non-English speaking
people up front, to help them acclimate a little faster. Ami just reminded me of that.
But aside from that, we have seen, for instance, someone came in last week from Saudi
Arabia, with no gaming experience, and it took about 15 minutes to get him to the point
where he was comfortable talking and moving around. Once you get to that point, the rest
can fill in over time.

23. ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. And now I see SLCN just recently put up maybe one of the
most novel aspects, a graphic demonstrating one of the most novel aspects of your Second
Life business, which is that you actually are charging a significant fee for subscriptions. I
think it’s from about $30 a month up to $79.95 for the complete package. And we actually
had a fair bit of a discussion in the Metanomics chat channel a week or so ago about the
difficulties that people have charging for content within Second Life. But you don’t expect
that to be a problem. Can you describe the differences between the different subscription
packages and which ones are suited to which types of students?
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. Let me just talk just briefly about charging versus not charging and
what some of the issues are. What we’re offering at the prices we’re offering is an incredibly
good value. It’s very hard to find pretty much anywhere else in the world. So we’ve looked. If
you want to study English, well, in Saudi Arabia for instance, you might be spending $150
per hour for classes, if they’re small classes, by certified teachers, the level we have. So
we’re incredibly price competitive to people who want to and need to learn a language. Up
front it looks like a lot from a Second Life perspective, but, from the world of actually
needing to learn a language, it’s not very much for the quality you’re getting. The difference
in our subscriptions is really based on the amount of class time you get versus the amount
of time practice you get with our native speakers, the actor program.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let’s see. I’ve got a couple questions for sort of looking
ahead and thinking about what Language Lab might look like in a year or so. My first
question is that you talked about scalability. There are technical sides to this, but the other
aspect is simply getting enough instructors trained in a novel way of teaching. Do you see

24. that as being one of the more difficult issues? Or do you see other things that are likely to hit
you first as challenges to scaling?
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. I don’t think actually the instructor issue is that difficult. We’ve run
two teacher training programs, each with about 20 teachers, so we’ve put about 40 teachers
through teacher training. The first time it was fairly slow and a bit difficult because we were
learning so much of what we were doing as we were teaching. Next time it was faster. Now
when someone comes on, we make part of what their learning process is observation, and
that really does speed up the process a lot. You can watch three or four classes, reflect on it
and understand what the students were learning. It isn’t that difficult. And, again, when we
run ads for teachers, we get responses from all over the world, so there are a lot of very
motivated teachers and people, so I don’t think that would be so much of an issue.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. A second question on where you might be in a year or so
is: Do you fully expect to be in Second Life alone? And I’d like to point out that you said
you’ve been in Second Life a long time. I believe you were here for day one of the Beta. Is
that right?
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. I came on.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So you’ve seen--Second Life has developed tremendously since
then, and obviously voice is a huge boon for a business like yours. But the other thing we
have is, we have a lot of other Worlds that have come up on the horizon. We’ve got Lively,
HiPiHi, Twinity, Multiverse. So do you have plans to look in these different Worlds, and
would you expect to either have a presence in multiple Worlds or move?

25. DAVID KASKEL: I would say probably the former, have presence in multiple Worlds. We
are very aware of all the other Worlds, and we’ve talked to people at those Worlds. We’re
actively exploring what they mean and what could be offered. And I do think Second Life is,
by far, the most developed stable, so we’re really happy with it right now, but we keep our
eyes open for what’s out there and what they can offer basically our students. We all know
of some of the limitations of Second Life and some of the things that are difficult with it, so
we look for other Worlds that might complement what Second Life can offer.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let’s see. We’re just about out of time. We have a number
of questions now in the chat on bringing people in-world. And so one question from
Nany Kayo is: Are you using entirely your own resources, or are you sending them through
Linden Lab’s Help Islands or outsourcing that routine to yet a third party?
DAVID KASKEL: It’s all of our own resources. We have specially trained people that greet
so when our new people come in, they’re met by someone--it’s always staffed--who really
walks them through and talks them through the whole process of how to really work in
Second Life. Furthermore, some of our initial part of the orientation in becoming part of a
Language Lab student does deal with some of the complexities of user interface and getting
to understand Second Life more. We have a very talented group of helpers who speak I
don’t know how many languages, but at least a dozen, so we’re able to do very well on
language support.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Wonderful! We have time for one more question, and I guess this
is a somewhat more personal one, David. You haven’t yet completed your degree at Kings

26. College. And so having advised many doctoral students and directed the doctoral program
here at Cornell’s Johnson School for the better part of a decade, I’m wondering how you
balance running a for-profit business, raising capital and all that, with being a doctoral
student?
DAVID KASKEL: Yeah. I guess I don’t balance it so well. I have suspended the doctorate at
this point, but I’m in discussions with the department. I do a fair amount of work in the
department itself at CCH because I tend to be the one who knows the most about Virtual
Worlds at this point. So I lecture and help out with various grants and things like that. I’m in
discussion, trying to figure out exactly what I can do. Running Language Lab is more than a
full time job.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, and we should all be cursed with such interesting and, to
me, very salable business ideas. I wish you the best of luck in getting any additional funding
that you need--
DAVID KASKEL: Well, thank you.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: --and the students that will help it grow, and probably help
Second life, in the balance. I notice, by the way, someone says--I think it was JenzZa Misfit,
who said, “Well, you came here on day one of Second Life’s Beta, and you’ll probably be
here when they leave Beta, whenever that might be.” David Kaskel, Language Lab, thank
you very much for coming on to Metanomics.

27. DAVID KASKEL: Thank you for having me, Beyers.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And I look forward to seeing how you develop.
DAVID KASKEL: Great. Thank you.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, now we, as usual, close our session today with Connecting
The Dots, and Connecting The Dots today is about survey research. I’ve been increasingly
interested in survey research lately because I am on the advisory board of Cornell’s Survey
Research Institute. I’m in the process of conducting a survey on accounting standards for
the Financial Accounting Standards Board. But today I actually want to talk about surveys
for a different reason, with the help of KGSM’s Idea City and the folks at Metaversality. We
are going to be surveying Metanomics viewers to understand who you are and what you’re
hoping to get out of Metanomics so that we can make this a better show for you. We’re
going to run our survey with the help of two bots that you can see one over in the corner.
Hopefully SLCN can get a shot of our big red dot bot called, I believe that is Vogel Ideator,
and we have another one: Roxy Ideator. Bots are avatars run by computer programs rather
than people. And so here, if we have that on the screen. Vogel, welcome to Metanomics.
Oh, that’s right. We communicate with bots strictly through instant messaging, not through
voice.
Now mechanically the survey is very straightforward. You go to either bot's profile. You load
a web page, and you log in. Then you IM the bot with the word “begin,” and you start
answering what are really fairly predictable questions. It won’t take you more than ten

28. minutes to do the whole thing, and it’ll be a huge help to us to make this event better. So I
thank you in advance.
But I’m an academic. I have the floor. I always have to stick a little lesson in here
somewhere so I want to talk about a couple of the issues that I have confronted as I learn
more about surveys and a couple in particular.
The first one is about sample selection. Traditional survey researchers typically are trying to
collect representative samples through a process of random selection. The researcher
selects a random sample of potential respondents and then contacts them through phone,
mail, email or whatever other medium, and then the researcher makes sure that these
potential respondents actually respond, through a series of reminders. This gentle nagging
process is essential to the validity of the survey results. If you let people choose whether or
not to respond, you end up only with those people who are motivated to make their views
known, and that is usually a different group than the entire population you’re hoping to
understand.
Now that obviously is a lot of work for the researchers, and so an increasingly common
alternative is to create a panel instead of a representative sample. The panel methodology
is far more convenience. A group like Market Truths here in Second Life or Social Research
Foundation, another group with a very large panel. They have created groups of thousands
of people, Second Life residents, who have expressed willingness to respond to survey
requests, and they collect a great deal of demographic data right up front. So if you’re
wondering how many Second Life residents support Barack Obama or John McCain or what
they think of the current Second Life viewer--the topic of tomorrow’s show, by the way--you

29. can go to one of these companies, and you can ask them to survey their panel members.
They can give you a really fast turnaround because they have a sample. Everyone’s already
answered all the demographic questions, and they’re not going to be following up repeatedly
to see who responds.
Just so you know, our Metanomics--I tend toward the representative sample side on the
research issue, usually. And, in this case in particular, it’s far more appropriate for us. We
want a representative sample of people who watch Metanomics. We can’t really use a panel
because the panel membership doesn’t overlap a whole lot with the existing viewership, and
those are the people we really want to reach out to. And we want to avoid self-selection
bias. What that means is that we’ll be sending out some reminder messages as well.
The last thing in favor of a representative sample is, we’re really only going to ask a few
demographic questions. Please be assured we’re going to keep all of this information
entirely private. None of us will ever be able to match your avatar, much less your real
name, with the other information you provide so you can feel confident in answering these
questions honestly.
But this raises a second issue that is coming out of my study of surveys in Second Life, and
it’s a Virtual World specific issue. Who is the target of the survey? Is it the avatar, or is it the
person behind the avatar? If this were World of Warcraft, I might ask, “Are we surveying the
warrior or the subscribing player?”
To understand the issue, it’s helpful to go back to a key distinction I made in my first

30. Metanomics show back in September 2007: Metanomics 101. And the distinction is between
immersionists and augmentationists. Immersionist Metanomics examines Virtual Worlds
from the perspective of residents who pursue their own economic interests within the World.
Augmentationist research examines how Real World enterprises are using Virtual Worlds to
pursue their Real World strategic goals.
Now let me say here at Metanomics we’re pretty unabashed augmentationists. Our
audience is of largely people who are running real businesses, who are interested in
studying them, who are interested in educating people about them and so on. So our
content is directed at those of you who, in your Real Life, are trying to understand the
business and policy issues of Virtual Worlds. And so it’s you, not your avatar, that we’d like
to hear from. This is your chance to help us make the show more like what you want. So
please, we will be putting information on our blog, announcing it on our shows, IM-ing and
noticing the Metanomics Group. Please let us know what you think about Metanomics.
Thank you very much for your time. That ties up Connecting The Dots. And just about ties
up today’s show. Before we go I’d like to quickly announce two upcoming events. Next
Monday, Zane Naboulsi, Microsoft developer-evangelist, comes to Metanomics to talk about
Second Life’s new role in the Microsoft Developers Network, MSDN, and we'll also be
talking about what the rise of Virtual World technology means to Microsoft and what
Microsoft’s plans in the industry might mean for the rest of us.
But, there’s more. Tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2:00 P.M., we’re having a special show on the
Second Life viewer. In Enhancing Your View, Dusan Writer will reveal the winners of his

31. L800,000 contest to design a better user interface. And then Adam Frisbee will discuss his
exploration of viewer possibilities associated with OpenSim, including XBAP, one possible
method for integrating a viewer with your browser. We’ll also be looking at the future of the
Second Life viewer with an eye to the challenges developers face, particularly when trying
to create an experience that works well for both new and skilled Virtual World residents.
So thank you all very much for attending, and, see you tomorrow, 2:00 P.M. Second Life
Time. Bye bye.
Document: cor1028.doc
Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com
Second Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer