New Basic Viewer for Virtual World Second Life: Video Glimpse

There is a new easy-to-use viewer--the program you use to access a virtual world--for Second Life. This means that a person can get going in a virtual world faster. Once you're comfortable, you can move up to the other viewer and learn some more functions. I think this is an excellent development, and so I made a quick, hopefully fun machinima video that shows the features of the new viewer that people can use for their students, friends, or anyone. It takes advantage of one of the amazing things about machinima (or the moving image in general): the ability to be able to show people what you have experienced or seen that they have not without them doing it themselves--yet!

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

Mahalo

I was editing machinima I filmed during the last days of one of the loveliest surfing sims in Second Life, Friends Beach at Mori Pwani, which I had already set to a reggae cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" (Alpha Blondy's "I Wish You Were Here") when I saw the announcement about the discontinuation of the discounted pricing for education and non-profit sims. I wish it would not signal an exodus, but I fear it will. I hate seeing creative and innovative people depart, and beautiful builds dissolve into nothing but memories and machinima. I guess it is time to move on to a new beach, hopefully to meet up with friends there, too.

UPDATE: Linden Lab sent a letter to its education and non-profit customers offering them a grandfathered price extension for up to two years, which may or may not make a difference.

Mahalo, Mori by L1Aura Loire from Lori Landay on Vimeo.

Filmed during the last week of Friends Beach at Mori Pwani in the virtual world Second Life, this video is for the places--and people--we wish were here, wherever here may be.

A virtual world is impermanent, ephemeral, and as quick as it is to create entire environments, they can vanish in an instant. People come and go, as well. And then there are the places and people you wish were really here, wherever you are, not only there in a virtual world.

Mahalo, in Hawaiian, means thank you, and also has some of the same connotations as peace or namaste.

New Video: CLICK: Immersive & Interactive Virtual Art

This machinima video showcases some of the prize-winning entries in the year-long University of Western Australia Imagine 3d Art & Design Contest held in Second Life. It focuses specifically on "clickable" art, that is interactive and immersive, to highlight a unique aspect of virtual art. I plan on using this in my classes as a quick way of introducing them to virtual art, so I put in a list of the formal elements of art: line, shape, value, form, color, space, and texture. In some of my classes, we'll go into a virtual world and have a workshop on how to build/basic scripting, but in some of my classes, machinima and slides have to suffice. I hope others might find this video useful, too.

To see the video in full size, go directly to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sf3Q2VAlKE

Virtual Subjectivity--Immersive Education MediaGrid Summit

SL Viewer 2: Media on a Prim!!

Here is some machinima video I shot of my first attempt with putting web media content on a cube in Second Life with the new viewer. One on face, I am playing a broadcast I streamed on UStream from my iPhone, and on the other I have Twitter. I think this is amazing. I haven't really experimented with Flash on a prim yet, but that is next.

You may notice that yes, L1 is still in the non-house. I like it. Soon (I think), the piece I was filming when I accidentally deleted my SL office/house, which is about commodification and place and, um, houses in virtual worlds, will be published in The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, and I will post that link when I have it. Maybe it is a comment on that work, but I have not really felt the need to put a house back around all my virtual stuff and the new sculptures I am working on there. It's all still in a moon. :) See machinima of house deletion here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRI5JCGhafU

Where the action is: DIGITAL NARRATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICE

I will try not to neglect this blog, but I am pretty excited about my new course, Digital Narrative Theory and Practice, and will be posting on the blog for that a lot this semester. For the past 4 years, I have been teaching a course in the Film Scoring Department at Berklee that I designed for the film composing students, to help them better understand the movies that they will be scoring and be better able to communicate with the directors with whom they will be working. Now, with the explosion in audio for video games, reported on by the Boston Globe (with a great picture of my student Nazer who is President of the Video Game Music Club!) and picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, I've created a new class, Digital Narrative, to explore gaming and other forms of new media in their wider contexts, to provide the students who are working in this new field with a stronger background in storytelling and to start to think about what the people who make the games, DVDs, and immersive environments they will write music for are thinking about. In the Fall, we'll start having minors in the Liberal Arts, and Visual Culture and New Media Studies will be one of them, and I am completely thrilled to be developing this area at Berklee.

The Second Life component of Digital Narrative is something we are going to evolve together as a class. It is an easy platform for us to use as a group, to try out some gaming, computer-mediated communication, ideas about immersion and interactivity, synthetic camera, virtual subjectivity, etc. We can of course also use it to make machinima or for screen shots for comics for the the projects. We want to do some gaming together as a class, so I am trying to figure out the best ways of doing that, without only doing what I already know. Should all be very interesting, and I invite you to see what we are up to on the class blog, and later, if all goes well, to check out the wiki we are going to make. I'll be using the blog to post things for students, and also projecting it in class as lecture/discussion resource.

Berklee Mixed Reality Panel on Music in SL

Here are some snapshots from the mixed reality event last Monday at Berklee College of Music. You can see the live video feed of Pathfinder and me in the actual room behind the inworld panel. Thanks to Joyce Bettencourt/Rhiannon Chatnoir for running the mixed reality tech and for the use of the Vesuvius sim. Note the twitter garden showing tweets with the hash tag #BTOT10, which is a good example of how something on the web is flat and textual, but can be 3-d and more interactive in a virtual world.

L1 Had a Busy Week at Berklee Last Week!

Last week, on Monday at Berklee College of Music, I was really thrilled to bring together an amazing panel of Second Life musicians inworld while Pathfinder Linden and I held down the fort in the physical venue at Berklee's annual faculty development conference, BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching).

Then on Wednesday night, I was just trying to show the new students what L1 looked like while I was welcoming them on behalf of the faculty at the Spring Entering Student Convocation, but you know her, she is not one to keep quiet . . . .

Virtual KinoEye

My "Working Theory" piece, an essay with machinima and images, that pulls together much of my sabbatical work on Second Life, is now published in the Journal of e-Media Studies!! See

Virtual KinoEye: Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life

http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/340

Everybody Dance Now!

In my Technology, Self, and Society class, we have been doing experiments with being in class in person and meeting in Second Life. One day, a student was sitting in class but her avatar was dancing in our class space in Second Life. As she stopped her avatar dancing, she muttered, "If I could dance in class, I would!"

I started thinking about this and haven't stopped. Why not dance in class? What would be the differences between dancing in SL and dancing in our classroom? (We are musicians and artists, remember, so this is not as strange to us as it might be to others!) So we have been. Twice now, half the class has been only in SL and the other half in the classroom, with me and one other person in both the virtual and physical class spaces. And we have been dancing! I am going to invite my students to talk about that experience first, and then I will chime in. But in the meantime, consider getting up . . . . putting on some music . . . . and dance!

What Is Second Life? New machinima by L1

Watch on youtube here.

There's No Confusion Like SL Confusion: Identity, Alts, & Other Aspects of Self

L1's virtual head is spinning. She has often been confused in SL, as it can often be a confounding and quick-changing environment, but this experience beat all. First, I was talking to a SL friend inworld, then logged off. Then I got a friendship request in my e-mail from an avatar with the same first name as my friend, popped back inworld, accepted it, and said hello. I thought it was my friend, in a new account. I helpfully offered skins and shapes to the "noob"--what an insult, really, but of course only meant as a quick start! Because of the nature of SL conversation, perhaps, or various coincidences between my friend and this person, someone I know in the actual world, it took a while to unravel the misunderstanding, and we had a good laugh, and were glad to connect inworld.

But it made me think. Anyone could be anyone in SL, something I have not really understood fully before. No wonder some businesses are wary of SL, although I had previously thought about it primarily because of the general weirdness of the virtual world, the strong sexual content and the unpredictability of what can happen at one's shop or event. I have had a lot of confidence in my virtual intuition or something, and now I think that is a lot of bunk. Unless we choose otherwise, identity is shrouded in SL.

I had been thinking of this anyway, and the other night took a picture of some willing but wanting to remain anonymous avatars at a fun club I like to go to inworld, Flashmans, (slurl) a place with an excellent 20s and 30s music stream, fun dances, and a surrealist bent in the decor. The clever club owner put a smooching poseball in front of The Lovers, a 1928 Magritte painting that sometimes scares the crap out of me when I see it, prompting thoughts of hostages, torture, and claustrophobia, sometimes seems right on about the illusions of romance, and at other times seems too cynical. Kissing aside, the Magritte image speaks eloquently to an aspect of SL social interaction, one that on one hand allows for greater intimacy because of anonymity, and on the other, puts up barriers, or operates as a barrier that is already there because it is a virtual interaction. And then of course there is the whole element of computer-mediated-communication I have discussed here and on the Toggle page, which leads people to put idealized selves out there, interpret the sparse typed words how they wish, and create feedback loops that reinforce positives over negatives (until, perhaps, they become caught up in a negative feedback loop, when that would take over, and amplify the negatives). Like the figures in the Magritte image, we are all stuck in our own heads, mired in our own subjectivities, and maybe the filter through which we see is more opaque than we ever care to acknowledge.

This also brings me to another topic I have been thinking about: alts. Alt is, I believe, short for alternate account, another avatar with which a person logs into SL. There are a lot of reasons to have alts, and one of my friends and I made a list once. Basically, there are personal and professional reasons. Artists and business people use alts to test things, to make sure permissions work on avatars that aren't theirs, or to see if something works with two or more avatars, etc. Machinimatographers use alts as camera people, as cameras, really, or as actors. I have a whole cast who were in a science fiction piece I made last year when I was learning about machinima that was so bad I never bothered to cut it together. Avatars who are well known, inworld or in both realities, might want some of the anonymity that most people have in SL, and will use an alt for that, either to be able to be incognito, or check out the business competition. Professional people just might want a social alt, and all their friends know who that is, so little deception involved, except maybe to acquaintances, who could of course become friends, and that could be murky territory. And then of course there are probably as many personal reasons to have alts as there are people who have them: to play with different identities, to start fresh, to have more experiences, to have peace and quiet to work or explore, to compartmentalize identity, to be malicious, to have affairs, to hide in various ways inworld. People can experiment with an alt, and might have an alt of the other gender, or one for a completely different purpose, like role play or gaming, or to participate in one of the many subcultures, maybe to have a third or even fourth life.

My camera alt, Kino, started off as a camera holder. I shrunk the avatar and hid it in flower pots and things for shooting. Then, as my scripting teacher was working on my camera follower eye object for me, and I couldn't get it to stop following me, which was hilarious, I realized I could log in as Kino and send him a message from that account: "This is the eye. I am on the loose and L1 cannot control me." Hahaha. Pretty funny stuff. Hilarity ensues. Machinima is made about the eye. Then I start to get some ideas for a screwball comedy, but I don't think I want these humiliations to happen to L1. Aha! These things can happen to Kino! She needs some good hair, an outfit or two, etc., became more of a character. I filled out her profile, because in the screwball comedy, which takes place in SL, the characters look at each other's profiles. I also realized I could join some more groups, having filled up my allotted 25 as L1. At one point, I considered trying a role play game, and almost enrolled as Kino in Star Fleet Academy, picked up the application and everything, but they are very serious over there. I contemplated trying to get kicked out of Starfleet, but I wouldn't want to disrupt their game. I do not think I talk or act any different as Kino as I do as L1. If Kino is around, I will tell people to ignore her because she is my alt, or say funny things as her once they know. Sometimes, if I am in as Kino, I will tell people I am an alt, and leave it at that, not sure why, maybe because her profile is kind of crazy.

To be sure, alts are deceptive. I went to a philosophical discussion at Thothica--as Kino--about alts. I was going to say I was an alt, but I thought the moment to do so passed and it seemed too dramatic. I did send IMs to the people there who knew me. It is just murky territory, I think, with absolutely no parallel in the actual world. How could you be right in front of someone, interacting with them, having a whole relationship with them, and have them not know they had met you before but you had a different name, and face? That you were being two people with them? Or used to be someone else and now were this person and they didn't know that? Even if the reason is innocuous, or justified, or none of their business, even if the alt-perpetrator was not trying to put anything over on anyone, but alting for some other reason known only to him or her, it is a rotten thing to do to someone if it makes them feel bad, or if it would make them feel bad if they knew it, or if you thought it would make them feel bad if they knew it, but maybe they wouldn't care less. Does the golden rule apply? Or does that just tighten the burlap around our heads?

Except of course that it is in SL, in a context in which the social contract is often based maybe not on lies but not on truths either. It does not automatically include revealing actual identity in the way that a face-to-face interaction might. Alts may be deceptive, but so is SL, or it can be, even if no one is trying to make it that way on purpose. Isn't the avatar an alt for the actual person behind the computer, the typist? What difference does it make who else an avatar is, if we are interacting with an avatar on the level of SL?

I am sure there are all kinds of deliberate and malicious uses of alts, but my interest doesn't tend there, and it all makes me think of some of the scenes in the screwball comedies of the 30s, like The Lady Eve or The Awful Truth, or even the jail scene in Bringing Up Baby. The Lady Eve has an edge to it, in part because it is Barbara Stanwyck, so maybe not the best example here, although it is a sort of alt revenge now that I think about it. (And maybe there is a good machinima noir of an alt story, a femme fatale who is genuinely unknowable, maybe even to herself, lost between accounts!) I saw a production of the play The Importance of Being Earnest in Second Life, and thought that was a particularly resonant and funny play in the SL context. Shakespearean comedies, too, would have excellent significances, with the cross-dressing impersonations, mistaken identities, and overall investigation of self, appearance, and social customs.

And, yes, all this makes me more interested in what I call the mixed-reality works in progress of friendships, ones that bridge the boundaries of the virtual and actual worlds, and have been enjoying playing with some new gadget/applications that facilitate those border crossings. There is an app for my new lovely iPhone called Sparkle, that logs me into SL and I can IM or have local chat with the folks inworld with it. There are the new avalines, phone numbers for avatars, and yesterday I called Sage Duncan and talked with her with me on my home telephone and her on SL voice chat. Earth calling Sage, Superhero/Fox!! These are the kinds of technologies that make toggling between the actual and the virtual possible.

Video of the NMC Keynote!!

Here is the video of the Keynote Nettrice and I did at the NMC Symposium--and here you can find the entire program with links to video.  What a fantastic event!  Also check out 2009 Virtual World Best Practice in Education Conference

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY--NMC KEYNOTE

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY

Lori Landay/L1Aura Loire

NMC Keynote, March 25 2009

Definitions

Subjectivity is the experience of the “I”.  Subjectivity can be defined, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, as “structures of feeling.”  It encompasses a person’s feelings, thoughts, and perceptions; it emphasizes their individual encodings and decodings of their environment, social interactions, and experiences.  The term comes from the French verb asujettir, which has a double meaning of both to produce subjectivity and also to make subject--it is both creative and restrictive.

If subjectivity is the first-person experience of the “I,” shaped by both individual psychological experiences and wider cultural forces, and it is intersubjective—created socially—then the people behind the avatars certainly bring their actual world subjectivities in here.  However, once inworld, instead of having a body through which to experience the world, we have an avatar and visual and sound input that are not necessarily connected to that avatar’s position.  There are "mirror neurons" in the brain that respond to what the avatar does, but it is different than direct sensory input.  Therefore, the already blurry line between the self and the world is completely smudged in virtual subjectivity.

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY  

In the rich visual world of Second Life, there is intense visual stimulus. Throughout the rise of visual culture, physical point of view and subjectivity have been connected; to some extent, all visual representation explores this, and as each new visual medium arises, that relationship is recreated and extended.  In a virtual world, the viewer position is both immersive and detached, both connected intimately to our experience of the avatar—but also strangely outside of him, her, or it.  

So, instead of an "I," now we have an "I/Eye" of virtual subjectivity, which is a mode of first-person experience in a virtual world that is founded on a fusion of visual and metaphoric point of view, shaped through "self-design" of the avatar and environment, reinforced and extended through social interaction, and enacted through virtual agency.   Part of virtual subjectivity is the extent to which the mind/body connection translates inworld experiences into embodied sensations that feel "real."  To sum up, there are four major factors that contribute to virtual subjectivity:

1) virtual point of view

2) virtual self-design

3) virtual social relationships 

4) virtual agency

From the conclusion:

I also have a glimpse of something in here—a kind of virtual subjectivity that I would associate with the trickster—a shapeshifter who uses the avatar as a mask, a crosser of boundaries, culture hero or heroine who embodies and enacts central cultural conflicts.  I glimpse a virtual subjectivity that would reveal all of the virtual world as installation space and oneself as a performance artist within it, calling our attention to the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds by finding new ways of crossing them, looping between them, shifting the borders, again and again.

Selected Sources

Battaglia, D., ed. (1995). Rhetorics of Self-Making. University of California Press. 

Blakeslee, S. (2006). "Cells That Read Minds."  New York Times. Retrieved 2009-03-23, from  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.html

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton University Press.

Cooper, S.  (2002). Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine? Routledge. 

Curtis , A.  "THE CLAUSTRUM: Sequestration of Cyberspace." (2007). Psychoanalytic Review, 94(1), 99-139.

Landay, L. (2008). "Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life." Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1(2). Retrieved 2009-03-23, from https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/355/265

Ortner, S. (2005). "Subjectivity and

Cultural Critique." Anthropological Theory Vol 5(1): 31–52

Steinberg, M.  (2004). Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-century Music, Princeton University Press.

Vertov, D. (1985). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press.

Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1):3-43.

An Emergent Second Life, Video. [28 min] Paper Tiger TV.  Co- Producer and Director, Bianca Ahmadi; Associate Producer, Juan Rubio; Editor, Juan David Gonzalez; Content Director, Jason Pine.Watch inworld at Brooklyn Is Watching 􀀂 or http://papertigertv.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

Not Possible in Real Life Blog http://npirl.blogspot.com/

Credits

L1's Eye/I built by Cube Republic (Cube Republic store, Crimson Night (155, 90, 22)

KinoEyePlane built by Alexith Destiny (Destiny Blue Designs, Destiny Blue (173, 15, 1369)

& scripted by Simon Kline  http://www.klinelabs.com/

Interested in learning how to script?  Find out  about Simon's classes! http://www.klinelabs.com/

V-TV

Verbal Television

http://vtvart.webs.com/

Caerleon Art Collective (128, 74, 26)

Misprint  Thursday

with collaborating scripts contributed by Oberon Onmura and Cinco Pizzicato

V-TV examines the beauty in both the visual translation of text and the limitations of text communications in these forms.

Digital text communication like chat, email and texting have increased our ability to share ideas with one another. The concept for V-TV, or Verbal Television, is to translate text communication to a visual form of communication. V-TV responds to text input by creating a digital art display which becomes a sort of visual poetry.  The piece, is, however limited in its scope and function to respond which perhaps mirrors the idea of the limitations of non face to face communication.

SEE THE ENTIRE NMC SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM HERE

Reading around in anthropology

My excellent colleague, the anthropologist/historian/ethnomusicologist/multimedia artist DJ Hatfield, sent me in some intriguing directions for reading around.  In particular, the essays in the book Rhetorics of Self-Making, edited by Debbora Battaglia, have prompted a lot of thought.  In my house, we have a running joke that it is imperative that I start stories I am telling about what I did that day with a prefatory "In Second Life," or otherwise I say things like, "My friend Maya and I were both robots today," or "I spent the day falling again," etc.  Even little Sammy loves to say, "I'm waiting for you to say 'in Second Life!'"  Well, as I read the essays in the Battaglia book, I want to add, "in Second Life," because as I think through the various contributions to what she terms a critical anthropology of selfhood (2), they seem so fully applicable to how subjectivity and selfhood are created, circulated, and constantly recreated in a virtual world.  

One of the  most striking experiences I have had is when I have given my "shape"--the object that holds the dimensions of my body avatar's body--to my friend Shirah, who has put it on herself, adjusted the measurements, and then given it back to me to wear.  It takes the idea of the girlfriend makeover to a new level!  And shows how what anthropologist Jason Pine, in a fantastic television show available inworld at the Brooklyn Is Watching sim (slurl) calls "self design" can be so very social in SL.  

Of course, as I read around, I return to my old standbys, the things that form the very backbone how I make sense out of my experiences in SL: Bartky, Goffman, Pelton, Hall, Benjamin, de Certeau, Foucault to some extent.  Heidegger.  

 

My Mom is the Cutest Newbie Ever!

My mother has come into Second Life!  This is after just a few weeks ago telling Ray Kurzweil that she thought I was wasting my time with "virtual world garbage" when I introduced her to him!  Anyway, maybe he had an impact on her, or maybe it was Alex's flowers that caught her eye, but here she is in the Destiny Blue garden, really trying to move around!  Since then, just 2 days ago, she's come a long way.  We got her some nice hair today (she calls them wigs, and why not?) and a few outfits, and so she is well on her way.  Next is a basic lesson in building, and we will scan in some of her drawings and paintings.  Should be interesting to see what happens.  

Been Busy!

OK, I've been away from the blog for way too long, but if you notice the previous post, you will see that I bought a big piece of land in SL adjoining my original parcel, and so of course I have been very busy!  I have been spending a lot of time inworld, immersing myself in the place and experience as if I had travelled someplace for my sabbatical year.  I am living and working there.

Here are some things I have been doing, in no particular order, certainly not of importance:

1) Building an EduGolf Course for students to learn essential skills for being a student in SL

2) Making weird sphere sculptures that as often as not make me crash when I work on them

3) Experimenting with different kinds of video screens

4) Making some wonderful, very talented and creative friends and spending time with them

5) Meeting their friends

6) Making machinima single-handedly

7) Making machinima with others (as of yesterday)

8) Finding that having experiences in a virtual world is absolutely fascinating and constantly.  I am taking the approach that the Australian aborigines do to dreaming: it is another kind of experience that you can have in a different realm, no better or worse than everyday life.  

9) Spending more time changing my virtual clothes than I used to!  It is fun after all.

10) Discovering that I am a terrible driver in SL, but I do it anyway. 

11) Trying to adjust to how much and fast things change inworld--one day your neighbor has a big house, and the next day it is just gone.  The landscape changes, buildings suddenly appear, land changes hands, people look different in the blink of an eye, and so much that you can count on in RL is mutable and unstable.  It is beautiful and poignant and unsettling.  I am trying to flow with it.

12) Slowly, cautiously doing some scripting

13) Put a camera script in a diamond earring stud and wore it around--fun and fashionable!  I asked my artist friend Maya for help and just before she told me (in IM) to make a box for it before I started to edit the earring because otherwise I would lose it on the ground, I lost it on the ground!  Fortunately it is a huge diamond stud.  Every one should be so lucky; such diamonds really are a girl's best friend.

14) Gave L1 a makeover--new hairstyle, including a fair approximation of my silver streak.

15) Got a tour of the fantastic Virtual Harlem, where Bryan Mnemonic is breaking new ground teaching his students about the Harlem Renaissance and other topics in American literature and culture.

16) Been putting buildings in the sky, thanks to my neighbor's influence in showing me how nice things can be up there.  So I have a SkyOffice for students to come to, with a big video screen (where I have been filming lectures, too), an Art Deco house that can become a hangout for the increasing party of real world friends interested in SL but who don't know where to go, and another building that I think will be a gallery space.

17) Had a fantastic conversation with two talented folks from Mass Art who are doing fascinating things in SL--my teacher from the summer, the ever-fabulous Nettrice, and Vu Sosa, who is a professor at MassArt and getting ready to teach some parts of her classes in SL.  Her island, 4dmap, is an ongoing installation and an inspiration.  So I actually did what I wrote about in the description of my land when I first bought it: used it as place for conversation about the possibilities virtual worlds and digital media.

18) Getting ready to interview Ray Kurzweil on the big stage at the Berklee Performance Center as part of the annual BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching) conference next week.  He is interested in virtual worlds, so I hope that is a topic that we can explore.

19) Thinking about how the camera feature creates a totally new kind of subjectivity.

20) Playing with a pet wolf.

21) Celebrating New Year's Eve.

See, that is a lot.  And there is even more.

Power, Control, Authority: CCK08, Brave New Classrooms, & Cruises

I was reading around in this week's CCK08 material--undaunted by Stephen's e-mail stunt of introducing the week's topic of Power, Control and Authority by mandatorily subscribing everyone to the moodle forum so we all had nice, full mailboxes, brimming with quips and complaints--and came across Michael Wesch's blog post "Revisiting 'A Vision of Students Today'" which was originally part of a blog forum on "Brave New Classroom" at Britannica Blog.  It is an excellent post, and reminds me of what most traditional education is like: lecture halls, multiple choice exams, etc.

In that context, connectivism has a lot to offer.  If you're talking about a 400-person class, there are possibilities offered by networked learning and a massively open (or even just a little more open) that can rock the lecture hall's world.  If the students are sitting in the lecture IM-ing each other and updating their facebook page, anyway, why not encourage them to tweet about the class?  It's meeting them at least half way.

The lecture hall that Wesch's TA's describe, with most of the students listening to blaring iPods (and their neighbors having to listen to it, too) or doing other tasks during class is a different experience from my 15-person maximum visual culture class, for example, where I can imagine intensifying what we do by meeting in Second Life and interacting with avatars, or using non-synchronous new media tools, like the VisCult blog.  

Also intriguing is the post about banning laptops in the classroom.  All our students at Berklee are required to have laptops and there have been times I've asked students to see their notes, or walked behind them to look at their screens.  Sometimes they are genuinely googling things related to the discussion, and sometimes they also uses their iPhones that way, too (I recall someone accessing the details of an etching technique when we were at the Museum of Fine Arts one time, for example, which was a much better learning moment than my usual I'll-look-it-up-and-tell-you-later approach).

About Power, Authority, and Control: as long as there are grades, there will be power, authority and control.  Period.  On top of that, as long as someone knows something that someone else doesn't and the one who doesn't know it thinks the other one can teach them, or help them learn it on their own, or set up a series of tasks that will reveal the knowledge, technique, or skill, there is authority, and there should be.  Authority is not necessarily the same thing as power, or as control.  And let us not forget our Foucault: power produces, it creates, it makes.  And if there is no control, what remains?  

I remember someone in a faculty meeting at a previous institution claiming that every college or university is like a themed cruise--students and their parents expect that theme, say the Disney cruise, and would be mightily disappointed and understandably pissed off if they got the swingers cruise instead.  Know your theme and deliver was the message my colleague espoused, and I have often reflected on the element of truth there (and the great hilarity of the metaphor).   If there isn't an appropriate exertion of power, control, and authority, it is hard to craft the cruise, and pick whatever part of the metaphor you want for a course: a day trip, a part of the ship, an activity (I've never been on a cruise, so I'm working off of the tv show The Love Boat here).   People can do what they want on a cruise, as long as the structure and infrastructure are working invisibly in the background, so that all they have to do is think, "I'd like to go to a midnight buffet!" and there it is, waiting for them (that one isn't from The Love Boat, but from my parents, circa 1978).  

So, if faced with a choice between a completely decentralized, diffused, anarchic and random educational experience, or one that is a bit more like a well-structured ride (to mix my transportation metaphors), I'm taking the ride.  I don't only want to sit in the 400-person lecture hall, straining to hear the undoubtedly interesting things Prof Wesch has to say over the kid next me's iPod blasting his or her hearing into premature oblivion, forced to take multiple choice exam after multiple choice exam.  But I want a teacher who is a teacher, who knows something I don't and will, uh, teach it to me.  I value that.  I can cede a little bit of my own power in the short term in order to gain some in the long term (and if that sounds familiar, folks, that's because that describes grad school.)

Building in SL

I think I'm starting to get the hang of building in SL.  I made a three-story labyrinth platform to practice working in 3 dimensions, and then I liked it, so I kept it.  I raised and lowered my land a bunch of times and met someone who thought it was interesting to watch it from her house across the way.   I made an enormous metal transparent ball and then transformed it into a seasonal pumpkin, which L1Aura likes to sit inside on top of the labyrinth platform, because, well, who knows?  It's nice and orange in there, and reminded me of Jeannie's bottle in "I Dream of Jeannie,"so I put a meditation cushion to sit on in there, too.  

At first I felt tempted to put up a house (and I did) and fill my land with all the things one needs or wants and can't have in real life, and at some point I will probably get a helicopter or some other flying device, but I am aiming for different (hence the enormous pumpkin).   I also want to build a space for people to have conversations, and also a teaching space.  Nettrice's cushions on the beach provide an excellent model, similar to the meditation platform on Connected Health Island, and of course there is the classroom, or seminar room, but I wonder what else is possible?