Caerleon Museum of Identity: "Somebody"

Machinima of my installation, seen on Viewer 2 (see previous post below for details about that). Watch in full letterbox format on youtube.

The Caerleon Museum of Identity, and my installation, "Somebody," best seen with, yes, Viewer 2, with media enabled to play automatically, opens Saturday, Oct 2, at 12 pm PDT. SLURLhttp://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife//219/65/3438

Download Viewer 2 HERE

Feeling even more experimental??? Download newest beta version of Viewer 2 HERE

Socializing with Out of the Box Avatars

L1 had her first surprise visitor of someone I actually know on the SL land yesterday, a very welcome one, the avatar of one of my colleagues who had read the JVWR piece and decided to check out Second Life.  He picked the Male Musician avatar, which is the same one my husband picked when I convinced him to join me in SL for an experiment, and so I was doubly confused: suddenly someone else was there, looking just like my husband, but with some strange name.  Eventually we sorted it out, but not after a little confusion with a few layers of identities: personal, professional, and virtual.  Then we had a great time, teleporting around as we could do only in SL, also crashing and experiencing enough lag to make us occasionally asynchronous, which may have a real world analog, but it is not nearly so dramatic or visual.  It was a blast, especially when his hair suddenly disappeared, and luckily he got it back.

One of the things I noticed is that when we were using text chat, it was our avatars talking, but as soon as we switched to voice chat, it was us.  I wonder if that would happen if I were talking with someone I didn't know in real life, someone whose disembodied voice I wouldn't recognize.  I certainly didn't recognize my friend in his avatar, at least not right away.  I am also curious to meet people in real life whose avatars I've come to know.  

Here are pictures of L1Aura talking with our colleague Tiak8 (who almost immediately mastered gestures like the shrug) and L1 with her husband Tich.  You can see why she was confused and has since given Tich a makeover.  The wonders of the virtual world. Tiak8's gesture below says it all.

CCK08: Too Much Openness?

One of the questions that came up in Alec Couros's excellent presentation in the Wednesday afternoon Elluminate session was whether there can be too much openness in this kind of networked, massively open teaching and learning environment.  It is a good question, and one that gets at some of the aspects of CCK08 that I've found less than cozily enjoyable: the back channel chatter.   Although my professor's p.o.v. makes me have a knee-jerk response to shush chatter, I know from my meeting participant's and student's p.o.v. that it is not necessarily disrespectful or off-topic, but can be a way of actively participating and creating connections among the group members (albeit not all members simultaneously).  

But in Wednesday's session, the text chat was a separate discussion that did not riff off of the audio presentation.  It was so distracting to me, a self-confessed text junkie who can't not read something (which is why the ever-more cluttered television screen is driving crazy), that I had to push the window off to the side so I couldn't see the text.  I thought it was rude, and was surprised to see who was doing the text chatting.

I have, however, decided to stick with CCK08, as a mediocre student, muttering to myself, writing my comments about the experience in the margins of my notebook/here on this blog.  The ideas are intriguing even if I don't burn for the details of the theory of connectivism, and the questions raised are important ones.  

In particular, I have been thinking of one of the themes that has recurred: digital identity (or digital citizenship, which isn't my favorite term), and how my students may or may not be thinking about how the traces they leave online might affect them later on.  I for one am glad that there wasn't a permanent, public face to my college years, and part of the separateness of the college experience as a place of experimentation and making mistakes that, certainly, can have consequences, but also can be separate from the "real" world of adulthood and worklife has been lost.   It's like we're all a little more stuck living in a small town.