Immersion, Topophilia, and Second Life

I've been trying different things at Connected Health Island as I duly do the daily relaxation exercises.  I am keen to trigger the carry over effect I read about, when the calm and centeredness of the meditation carries over to everyday life when you're not meditating.

But I find it hard to focus and concentrate on the meditations in SL.  I guess I am a closed-eye meditator.  I like imagining vivid images in my mind's eye, perhaps informed by the SL scene, but not replaced by it.  I don't think I would have come up with the underwater imagery that is possible in SL, though, discovered by accident when I was bumbling around and fell into a shallow part of the brook, and found it a pleasant place to stand.  I ventured into a deeper part, discovered some nice fish, hung around for while while I listened to the relaxation mp3.   

Standing in the brook reminded me of one of my strongest memories of a learning experience, and how I started a conference paper on "Topophilia and the Garden Ethic: Experience and the Pedagogy of Place" at one of the nicest conferences in which I've participated, Representing Place, held at Northern Arizona University in 1998.  When I was in 6th grade, we went for a week to a camp in the woods for some kind of ecology program.  I think it was the first time I was away from home without my family.  There was a list of things we had to bring, and when I got to rubber boots, I remember thinking, what could we need those for?  But then I found myself standing on rocks in a river, with cold water rushing all around my feet, kept dry but not warm by the boots, a distinct physical sensation I can recall to this day.  The experience of that moment, of understanding  that a river is movement, of being in the river yet separate from it, of feeling something that I could not have imagined, is something beyond words, images, or sounds, beyond someone else's expression, no matter how eloquent, of that place.  To love place, to want to take care of any place like we nurture a garden, means having direct experience of some place, any one place, and then that experience can offer a metaphor for other places and understanding other people's experiences of other places.  The paper discussed a honors course I taught on "The Place of the Wilderness," in which I took students to a field campus, where they walked in the woods as they talked through Thoreau's essay "Walking" with a partner, and a deer came impossibly close to us as we sat discussing Michael Pollan, and on another clear Illinois fall afternoon, a woodpecker seemed eager to join in the commotion.  We stayed over one night at the field campus and took a night hike, so now we know what dark is.  

Can you have those kinds of experiences in a virtual world?   Maybe not unless you've had some real life experiences, or analogous ones, to trigger the mirror neurons.  How much of an experience is necessary?  Or how much of an imagination?

Let the Relaxation Begin

Last night was the first class of the MGH Study on the teaching the relaxation response in Second Life.  The island is a beautiful space, with lovely sound and particularly shimmery water.  I still am blown away by how much I am affected by the virtual nature in SL, especially the water, and this space was no exception.

The class itself had some interesting aspects.  Like the "Creativity in Second Life" course I took in the summer through MassArt, we sat on cushions for a lecture/presentation part and then moved around for other parts of the class.  It was less active because unlike the other class, we are not building or scripting.  There were nine of us; two avatars I know and the others I don't.   I resisted the temptation to make an in-joke on the text chat, which definitely operated as a "back channel."  YES, I just criticized that precise behavior in the CCK08 Elluminate session a couple of posts ago, but last night I participated in that discourse.  Maybe in a smaller group it is different, or if there are only short comments that in a real life discussion might be uttered.  Still, it is a bit like passing notes in class.  Which is fun!  Everyone can see them, though.  IMs are the virtual passed-notes.

Instead of using the voice chat, the tech wizards have it set up through Skype, which is pretty interesting.  Some people were new to it and didn't have their mics muted and that drove me crazy.  A good case for using the text chat for group feedback is so we can all keep our mics off until we really have something more to say than a couple of words.  The Skype conference call also disconnected a few times, and then the text chat was the only way we had to communicate.  There was a blissful, peaceful silence when the Skype quit, sudden and surprisingly isolating.

Part of the commitment to the study is agreeing to do a meditation at least once a day and do 20 mini-relaxations.  I don't know if I got 20 in today, but I did do some, and listened to the CD from the Mind/Body Center they gave us for the 20-minute mind-focusing meditation.  I am supposed to set up a place where I can do these meditations, but the only place I know I can be uninterrupted is in my office at home, which is cluttered with the detritus from the I Love Lucy book manuscript I finished yesterday (!) and all manner of other positively stress-inducing sights.  Me sitting in my chair at my desk looks nothing like L1Aura Loire on her cushion on the Connected Health Island.

I have some other comments about the teacher's avatar (mist!), but I am going to hold them until I have a picture of it, which I hope to take on Thursday.

Connectivism, meanwhile, suffered a little this week.  I tried to attend the Elluminate session, but I got frustrated after I lost the connection for the third time.  I've been doing the reading and will try to catch up with the Friday discussion session, which is on a tool I'm unfamiliar with, UStream.  

Relaxation Response

By "relaxation response," I do not (only) mean a summertime post, but the counterbalancing response to stress theorized by Herbert Benson, M.D.; click here for the Benson-Henry Mind-Body Institute's website.  There is a study starting in early September in which I've agreed to be a subject that will investigate whether people can be taught to elicit the relaxation response in Second Life.   There is one session in which the avatars do yoga, but the people do not.  The researchers postulate that the people will get a real-life benefit from their virtual yoga.

This is pretty interesting stuff.  It explores the mind-body connection as it applies to people's relationships to their avatars, to how their avatars' experiences effect them.  I wrote previously about how much more fun it was to have L1Aura do physical things like dance at a rave, jump off a cliff with Nettrice, or hang glide than I ever would have thought they would be.  They are experiences, more so than if I had only watched them in a film, but not fully physical, either.  Is the difference the participation, being able to control the motions?   Is it the identification that we build up with our avatars?  

On another note, there is an article about my Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship Award in the current issue of the Berklee Alumni Magazine, Berklee Today.  I took the picture they used of me myself, so figure that one out.