digital digs

presenting on Second Life

On Friday, I'll be presenting with a number of colleagues on our campus' adventures into Second Life. Last year I wrote a small campus grant that funded the initial purchase of the island and a few other things. Information Resources came through with the money for the monthly fee. And so we began.

My colleagues in the library did the building on the island. (I still haven't given myself the task of learning to build.) I piloted using SL in my classes, including a learning community. I wish I could say it was a great success, but it wasn't. I will take the blame for that. It was a bigger commitment than I thought it would be. You'd think I'd learn. However I learned some things that I'll take with me into next fall.

1. This might be a fairly obvious observation, but only b/c it's foundational. The 2d web shifts time and space. Come to my blog from anywhere in the world and at any time. It's here.  We can converse asynchronously. SL is primarily a synchronous environment. Yes, there are installations you can visit, but the emphasis is on real time interaction. This strikes me as a challenge for course use.

If you have an FTF class, there's little point in using classtime to go to SL and interact. Maybe once just for the experience or to get people up and running, but not as a regular practice. If you have an online class, you have the challenge of getting students on at common times, unless you have an online class with an established meeting time. But I don't think anyone is ready for that yet. You could make this work with a hybrid/blended course, but still it would really only make sense if you are doing something in SL you can't do FTF.

2. The leads me to another obvious observation. We all know SL is somewhat like online games but w/o the purpose of gaming. We need to invent purposes for SL. This is especially the case for the classroom. There seem to be several common purposes: building, sociological observations, and educational simulations/installations. None of these really work all that well for me in a professional writing curriculum. At best I think we might investigate how people communicate/use writing in SL. Yea, there's probably some work to do there.

But what interests me more is using SL as a collaborative environment for working with students from other institutions. Of course there are serious logistical problems with meeting up, as mentioned above. It's like your worst GRE nightmare (that's for everyone in the crowd old enough to have encountered the analytical portion of the GREs). But assuming that you can make it happen, I think SL can help to establish group cohesion beyond what happens in asynch networks.

So that's where I am with that. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. The exciting thing is that there seems to be some real interest among my campus colleagues with SL. The more people who take it up, the more potentially useful it will be I think.

Ludo-capitalism and metanomics

Julian Dibbell gave a talk last month in Second Life on the subject of ludo-capitalism. It's a concept that arose in this last book, Play Money, a memoir on Dibbell's experiences in making a living selling virtual goods (like gold pieces in online video games). (See his recent NY Times article on this subject.) Apparently, it is also the focus of his upcoming book. It's an interesting subject and one that would give many of my old grad student colleagues conniptions.

Essentially, the idea of ludo-capitalism explores the relationship between playing games, having fun/feeling pleasure, and creating value (in an economic sense). Of course playing a game isn't always fun or result in pleasure. Setting aside the experience of losing a game, there's also many work-like activities involved. When I was a kid and into Dungeons & Dragons (yes, I know), my mom would look at me pouring over charts, shake her head, and make some comment that it looked like I was doing my taxes or something. Contemporary online role-playing games aren't much different, the "grind" of acquiring gold and experience (much like in real life) remains. And yet millions choose to do this work/play; indeed they pay for the privilege.

Synchronous learning in asynchronous courses: another lesson from Second Life

So this is fairly obvious... I'm teaching an online course, which, like just about every online course, is offered asynchronously. No meeting time. In the pre-SL, 2-D web world I suppose there are reasons for scheduling meeting times for online courses, primarily so you could have some live discussion or presentation I guess. At Cortland though, where we don't have any distance education students, if you want to do something live, you might as well do it on campus. (This is particularly true for undergraduate students; the grad students are commuters and might appreciate live, distance education.)

But I digress. The point is that we have no common meeting time. This proves to be a problem for working in Second Life. So in the future, if I am to teach in SL, it would be useful to schedule a common meeting time for my online course. That doesn't mean that we would do all our work in SL at the common time, but I think it would be useful for several purposes:

• Orientation
• In-world presentations
• Coordinating meeting times for students (at least we know one time they can meet!)

However, I don't think that's enough. I am seeing that one of the advantages of SL is the opportunity to collaborate internationally. Thus it would be useful not only to have a time for my online class to meet but also to coordinate that time with partners. Thus all of our students could meet during a set time.

Second Life World University Exchange

I haven't had much time to write here. All the normal excuses. One of the things I've been busy with is our Second Life Pilot project. Last week we finally got ourselves set up so that students could get access to SL on campus (through use of flash drives we provided). So now the students are getting into SL, customizing their avatars, going through orientation, and exploring the wide world of SL.

So the question becomes "What are we going to do in here?"

As it happens, I'm teaming up with faculty from Japan, Korea, Canada, France, and elsewhere in the US on this project called the World University Exchange. The basic premise is that students will be divided into multinational teams and will then be given a series of challenges on which they will compete. Many of the challenges will surround plots of land they have been assigned where they will essentially be asked to build their community. So there are a number of cross-cultural, technical, and rhetorical challenges that the students will need to face as a team.

But how does this fit in with a Professional Writing course?

Island life begins

Here I am on our newly acquired Second Life island, so island life begins for SUNY Cortland. Fortunately, I have colleagues in Information Resources who have some experience with building, b/c I know nada. However I am hoping that I'll get a little experience in the next couple weeks.

So what will we be doing here? A good question. I'm sure we'll find out. This much I do know...

Thoughts on teaching with Second Life

                 

A discussion of some of the ideas shaping my thinking as I approach teaching in Second Life in the fall.

transmedia pedagogy

Transmedia storytelling is one of the key characteristics of convergence culture as Henry Jenkins explores it.  The concept is likely familiar, even if the term is not. In it's most common and often lame incarnation it is the movie novelization, the cheap plastic junk with the kids' McLunch, the video game, etc. I suppose we have Star Wars to thank for much of that, or at least for the explosion of this practice. However, transmedia storytelling can be a more enriching and engaging experience, but that begins with making a difficult choice.  Typically with this kind of merchandising, the film remains the be-all and end-all of the experience. The toys, video games, novelizations, whatever can't really add to the story as they would require giving up some amount of control over the product. Jenkins discusses the Matrix as an example of a different approach where important parts of the world and narrative are only hinted at in the movie and are then explored in more detail in the video game, comics, and in it's online game. The drawback from a commerical standpoint is that the average moviegoer may not be willing to engage at this level with a transmedia experience.

However, I believe that the experience so far with commerical transmedia storytelling might offer some insights into how a transmedia pedagogy might function.

From Second Life to Metaverse

In Technology Review, Wade Roush offers an article on the intersection of Second Life-type virtual worlds and Google Earth-type "mirror worlds" that examines the potential future of such a mash-up combined with mobile networks. It seems likely that these technologies will combine:

• mobile networks and devices
• highly detailed 3-D maps of the real world
• geo-tagged, cross media, participatory databases
• virtual world ability to interact with simulated spaces as an avatar

As we think about these technologies coming together, however, one might imagine them as mixing in different amounts and ways for different kinds of purposes. The producers of the Metaverse Roadmap offer this schematic as a way of understanding the different potential trajectories of the web and virtual reality. The vertical line maps movement between technologies that emphasize augmenting our perception of the real world and creating simulations that might either model real world contexts or present alternate realities (a la Second Life). The horizontal line shifts between a focus on providing users with information about the external world and allowing users inttmate expression within an environment. I see this latter dynamic as roughly along the objective-subjective line.

The result are four different trends the roadmap details. It's not so much a question of which direction we'll move in, but understanding the dynamic relations between these technologies. One might imagine swinging from one space into another.

Why does Second Life look so much like Real Life?

This is a recurring question on the Second Life educators' discussion list. The question arises in relation to issues of both avatar construction and island/space design and use. Why should an avatar look like a real person (albeit usually an impossibly beautiful person)? Should professors in SL be professional attired, wearing what the might in the classroom (or maybe even better! flash clothes in SL are pretty cheap)? Why have buildings or roofs or classrooms? And so on.

The basic premise is that, given that a virtual world might look like virtually anything, why make it look like the world we've already got? Well, I'm happy to offer some answers, though I dont doubt they've been offered in other places before.

So why does SL look like RL?

• It doesn't. Yes, there is some resemblance, but SL is a fantasical, sometimes nightmarish, often trashy, extrapolation of RL. I don't mean to just dismiss this question, but no one is having trouble differentiating between these two environments, right?
• Because communities rely upon some common logic of engagement, context, and space. How do a ball of light, a pointer-finger icon, a doorknob, and a twelve-legged, spider-cat-fish-giraffee-thing on wheels have a conversation in a swirling fog of jello and banana peels? Only by ignoring the space  and avatars and focusing on the humans behind the curtain so to speak. To a large extent, virtual worlds function by immersion, the feeling of getting lost in the world, as any game studies person could tell you. Virtual worlds can be wildly fantastical, but they must be consistent and they must be comprehensible to the human user, as anyone who has read fantasy or sci-fi can tell you.

desert of the real