I think her ideas of mortality and the 'afterlife' (or lack thereof?) are really interesting.
In the Earthsea Cycle, which spends a significant amount of time discussing the afterlife, we get the sense of it being similar to a sort of Greco-Roman idea of a 'land of the dead' (though of course this is a vague generalisation) , where they exist in the shape of their lives, but without memory of it, wandering.
That world and this one are separated by low wall which I have always likened to Hadrian's Wall.
(Walls are two things at once - actual physical barriers that dictate actual limitations, and physical or symbolic barriers the power of which is to induce an imagined limitation whether or not the physical one is impassable. Hadrian's Wall is more a symbolic wall, as is it would seem, the low wall in the afterlife in the Earthsea Cycle)
Originally, as the story goes, that world and this one were the same, had the same qualities, etc. But because of the possessiveness of the deceased, a wall was built to fence off the land, and in so doing the dead, in trying to keep something for themselves, also trapped themselves; the land on their side withered and died, became dust. Its the unnatural and unwholesome nature of this place in the book that haunts you. Its not a heaven, though its not completely a hell; its a purgatory or limbo, created by human folly and possessiveness, and by our own unwillingness to let go.
The afterlife is not really discussed much in her other works that I have read. In one book that was part of the Hainish series, perhaps it was Left Hand of Darkness, there is a point at which it is mused that the other worlds experienced after death are actually just other worlds, people moving from place to place. In the Lathe of Heaven there is a sort of a sense of life being a series of dreams.. but in all this there is a kind of absence; there is no higher order than our own selves. Ars Lunga lacks an afterlife at all - but the multifaceted nature of our lives, and their innate wholeness, is given its full significance, so there is no room left for the fear and sense of inadequacy that might lead to the creation of an afterlife philosophy.
The Young is interesting for the same reasons, and bears a vague similarity to my earlier musings on the afterlife and water.
What do you think of these poems? What do you think is being expressed here, about the nature of life and death? Do you like the poems?
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Last Friday the 20th of July Lindy McKeown visited MLC School to introduce a class of senior school students to Second Life. With the help of the Tech team the thirty or so volunteers were provided with school avatars that gave them access to the MLC Island on Teen Second Life.
For starters the eagerness of the students to come and find out about second life was promising in and of itself. Several teachers remarked that the amount of signed permission slips they received with regards to the class was surely a record for any extra curricular event ever held at the school.
Lindy introduced the students to the world of Second Life with a tour of Terra Incognita, in which a number of MLC staff as well as myself (pseudo-staff) also participated. Appearance and building were touched upon, as well as basic movement and camera controls.
What was so amazing about the event was that when the girls logged into the Island, which at that stage was pretty much a bare peice of earth, with generic avatars all of them identical, almost immediately they were picking up skills and rapidly adapting to the digital environment.
In the space of an hour they were already eager to attempt semi-complex building techniques, asking about scripting objects, and changing the shape look and color of their avatars, so that the by the photo at the end, which I will get a hold of shortly, you could already see some amount of differentiation, and the students were if anything incensed (in the general sense of the word) with excitement and ideas about what they could do in TSL.
That night Lindy and a number of MLC staff returned to the island and were very surprised to find a dazzling dressed laughing girl, busily creating on the island. It was an outsider, an American girl from the mainland of TSL who, stumbling upon the island, was now proceeding to communicate with the girls at MLC, teaching them about building etc.
In the space of a single day there were several students and staff actively engaging with the space outside of school hours, learning skills about working in a digital 3d environment and collaborating amongst themselves and with teens from other parts of the world. A very auspicious beginning for the school-wide initiative.
What it does tell us from the beginning is that teachers' roles in second life will not need to include guidance about how to engage with TSL on a basic level, and they will probably not need to create spaces and objects for students to interact with and use, but rather, that teachers should direct students with projects in which they are the creators, collaborating amongst themselves and the wider community to build a space that reflects their own interests.
Already several programes have been suggested for use in Second Life, one such was for Ethics and Philosophy, where students could find ethical issues to discuss and debate with regards to Second Life as a virtual medium, (a task that is all the more relevant considering the recent media coverage fo second life that focuses upon this very subject)
Another suggested option, inspired by classes conducted by Sarah Robbins aka Intellagirl Tully, was to use the extreme malleability of the avatars appearance in second life, to explore issues of race and discrimination in ways that are impossible in the real world (not to mention much safer). For example do people treat an avatar different based upon the color of its skin, do they treat it differently if it is a different species, such as a penguin? And are there differences between how avatars react to one penguin in a space as opposed to a whole group of them?
It is reassuring that teachers so quickly came to realise that TSL has applications not only in the immediately obvious multimedia and design syllabuses but also within ethics and philosophy, etc. Indeed it may well be that a lot less guidance will be needed than was originally expected given the speed, and importantly the eagerness with which teachers and students alike are learning about and appropriating the space.
The Action Learning group's activity for last week, which I was unable to attend, was to visit the Edu-Gallery in Terra Incognita and from there gain inspiration for our various projects. I am using Italics here because I am not exactly sure what the framework is for such a project, what it will actually involve and what indeed it is expected to be - besides the fact that it is to be a group project within Second Life.
The Edu-Gallery is spartan, and the notecards about the various exibits were not overly revealing as to the intention of the project, its inspiration, its functional implementation and so forth, or at least it was not easy to discern these from my perusal of the gallery - which is inhibited by the fact that my slow net connection makes Baxter's responses lethargic. Which makes two of us I suppose.
To get to the point, in preperation for next week's activity I decided to uncover something within Second Life that might become motivation for my project. Obviously I went with Vassar Island, which I had already been impressed with, but chose this time to focus upon Vassar Castle, which is one of the more significant building projects on the Island.
The castle is basically what I would imagine as the kind of presence MLC may well end up constructing, in so much as outwardly it appeals to a sense of adventure, as a gothic-style stone wrought castle, and because internally it employs a number of fairly interesting methods of displaying information and offering interactivity.
Firstly, from the Lobby of the Castle, to the right is a Gallery (linked to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Centre) which currently ( 10/07/07) displaying a series of photographs by Paolo Nigris entitled Reflections on a Study Abroad, and purportedly related to the Exchange Programs offered at the Colledge (according to the blue poster you see in the screenshot, which has even since I read it thisafternoon been taken down).
It led me to consider the possibility of stengthening ties with sister schools by letting students design a gallery in which they present their favourite images of their time visiting the sister school, linked to notecards detailing information about the place displayed and their experiences there.
The follwing room is a gallery of art by Harry Roseman. It gave me the idea that the SL HQ could also be used as a showcase particularly for, but not limited to, outstanding graphic design and photography projects by the students. Moreover since music can be fed into any such space, it is possible to similtaneously play a feed of a recording of a musical performance by students at the school as well.
Furthermore, the "Lounge" located up the stairs from the Lobby, has a number of simple yet intellectually stimulating puzzles and games which could be emulated to add an interactive element to the HQ.
On a personal note with regards to the A.L project, I do not imagine, especially in light of current circumstances, that I will be tackling the design element of Second Life to any great extent if I can help it, since its a very steep learning curve for a researcher with no background in programming etc. My focus as far as I can tell at this stage will be more or less what it has been, which is discerning the optimal design for an SL HQ to fascilitate the interest of current and prospective students, teachers and parents and the ways in which the space can be used as a showcase of the opportunities offered by the school and the talent displayed by its students.
Last night was the first actual meeting for the Action Learning Team run by Decka Mah.
Thankfully, despite my laborously slow satelite connection, I was able to receive an audio feed of the discussion, much of which was preliminaries.
At one stage all of us were playing with various games (at this location), including Hangman, mud and arm wrestling simulations, a wheel of death etc... we also used a levitating platform to reach a... larger levitating platform. On this Decka pulled out a cardboard box, and from this - like a digital Mary Poppins - proceeded to pull out a waterpark, then a shed, an information desk, etc (in other words pre-created buildings)
It did bring up the point that really, to advance beyond the voyeur stage, and actually become an effective participant, its absolutely necessary to know how to build virtually, and to script, so that whatever is created may also have functions- links to websites, teleportation capabilities to other locations in second life, producing info cards... or just generating halos of stars or what not.
(as much as I'd like to continually conceive of myself as existing completely outside of programming and graphic design, it would also mean my existence as more or less external to second life itself, which defeats the whole purpose)
As such I have now subscribed to some YouTube blogs detailing these sorts of things. Starting with this one by Onic51346 (a bit dry, but seemingly useful) and this more interesting but maybe less useful one in terms of construction (by Torley). I am providing these not because they are the definitive guides so much as to represent the usefulness of these kinds of tutorials on Youtube, and that you should definitely look into using them if you are so inclined.
The other thing is, having ceased for the moment being a giant Scottish Zebra, I visited Vassar Island which is the SL presence of Vassar College, and was really impressed with how they are using the space, in particular by devoting particular sections to particular departments and classes... the most impressive thing there is a replica of the Sistine Chapel, with copious detail in the interior of the building that is really fascinating. Vassar Island will probably become a chief source of inspiration for my own work in the future.
I am very soon about to participate in a research project conducted by Linda McKeown of the University of Southern Queensland which is to be held in Second Life. As such I will be becoming much more familiar with the VRML - a good thing considering that, very soon, MLC School's intended presence in Second Life will soon enter its actualisation stage, in which the team will be expected to contribute to the construction of an MLC-SL-HQ and the development of educational activities in SL.
So, after a skosh more tinkering with my Second Life Avatar R0BBIE Baxter, I made my way to Miyajima, an area of Second Life largely consisting of adjoined Japanese gardens and temples. There is a SANDBOX here in which people are free to build objects, and there are often competitions held there in which people are tested in their ability to design objects in Second Life with speed and skill.
Thats not for me just yet. Today I went to the Miyajima Sandbox to actually try my hand at creating something more complex than a great hunk of wood.
Creating objects in second life is (much like the creation of life itself, actually) about joining particular base shapes together to form more complex shapes, and joining those together to create detailed objects.
(There's a lot more you can actually do, but thats the level I'm at)
So, painstakingly, I created and aligned several base shapes in such a way that I created a very crude, blocky object that wasn't entirely unlike an owl, or birdlike snowman. Since I wanted to work quickly without having to worry about being very careful - and also because I can - I made the owl about twice as large as a human being. People would walk idly into the arena, notice a man in a kilt building a giant owl, and wander nonchalantly out again.
Once all the objects were aligned, I learnt that you can join the base shapes together by holding shift and clicking on each object, then pressing the Control Key & the "L" (Link) key at the same time.
Lo and behold, my bunch of loosely tacked together objects was a single object.
I was impressed, 5 months in, and I was finally doing what anyone who stays more than average beginner's 3 months does in Second Life, creating.
I then decided to take the next step - and vest my object with gravity, because all objects in second life begin as weightless and with virtually unlimited mass.
The moment I vested the object with gravity and hit "OK" , the owl, which had been stock still in front of me, promptly dropped about half a metre to the ground and lolled forward like a drunkard, hitting me in the shoulder and then proceeding face first into the ground (because the base was spherical and there was more weight on the front, where the beak and eyes were).
For about 2 seconds I stood horrified. Had an actual 4 metre owl made out of blocks fallen on an actual me, I would be filing workers compensation with a pen in my mouth as we speak. But after the initial shock I couldnt help but laugh, because if you give something like that gravity of course its going to fall on its face in the dirt -- it made complete sense, which made it really exciting. So I took the gravity off the owl. It shimmered, and then vanished into thin ether, leaving me staring perplexedly at nothing for a few moments, and then yelling out (in-world) "If anyone finds a large, poorly made owl, please return it to R0BBIE Baxter.
2 hours of building lost, but some good practice gained.
A friend of mine from Japan came over to my house today just to spend a rainy Thursday afternoon.
We talked about quite a bit, but somehow, and quite close to one another actually, the topics of religion and scientific theory came up.
That is, when talking about the theory of the Evolution of Man, it seems that there are those who hold theories different to the Darwinism that is largely taken as scientific fact. The example was a certain teacher of this friend of mine, who would often insist to his primary school students that the Emperor was an extra-terrestrial -- which led to his informing me of two things,
1) There does exist in Japan the theory that life has come in fact from outer space (which is actually, a theory widely supported by the scientific community, in so much as bacteria have been found to exist in metior rock.)
2) Darwin's Theory of Evolution is not compulsory education in Japan.
My friend then stated that he did not believe that 'humans came from monkeys' to which I responded that in fact he was right, the two species are quite different and have evolved seperately from a common ancestor.
Which prompted an impromptu explanation, in badly tacked together Japanglish, of Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its various principles.
When I was actually explaining these scientific principles- with the frame of mind that I was informing him of some quintessential fact about the earth that he ought to know - it suddenly occurred to me that both Scientific Theory and Religious theory have in common that they are essentially, well... theoretical, theories established with some fragmentary evidence to make sense of something incredibly complex, and that by and large most of us accept scientific theory when it is explained to us, without having to littereraly go and prove it for ourselves.
Its often the same thing with religion - just about every Christian accepts the acts of, existence for that matter, of Christ without needing to seek out any proof of their own.
In this sense religious theory and scientific theory are quite similar, and I wondered if my zeal to explain a 'scientific truth' to my friend could be at all compared with when I was once given a very enthusiastic explanation behind why and how Christ existed - a 'religious truth' to draw the analogy.
Which isnt to say that the evidence for the acts of Christ can be compared with the evidence for the theory of evolution - what I am talking about here is the principle of faith.
Is it, do you think, one and the same, to believe a scientific theory (such as the Big Bang theory) just because it is accepted as 'scientific truth', and to believe a religious theory (such as those of the Bible) just because it is accepted as 'religious truth' ?
The impulse to make a poem can be sparked, and kept from groping in a void, by having a given directionto take. Working in a specific form - tetrameter, sonnet, narrative - though it may begin as mere exercise in artifice, can release unexpected resourcefulness of language, and let self-hidden passion speak. Discipline, mastered, grants freedom.
I wrote poetry before I wrote stories, and ever since; early on, it was almost all in traditional forms, conventional and unexperimental, which I'd absorbed from reading poets of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rhyme and meter were my native poetic tongue. Only as an adult did I come to write the free verse of my own country, and to feel dimly ashamed to use end-rhyme, ballad meter, and such unfashionable devices - though I never quite stopped doing so.
So it was a joy to me to be required to write formally - to speak my own dialect again at last. And it was good to be required to try the more formidable forms, and to work more rigorously on rhyme, meter, and pattern, taking it all further than I'd dared to go alone...
- An excerpt from Ursula Le Guin's recent book of New Poems: Incredible Good Fortune, 2005.
Since rhyme and meter are the native tongue of my own poetic self,
these words come like a welcome company of re-inforcements to a
fortress beseiged by contempory poetics.
It is such a great relief to hear of a sense of shame in the use of
unfashionable devices from the author who has, unbeknownst and
unintentionally, weaned me into writing, science fiction and
philosophy, shown me how words can be woven. The first poem of Le Guin's that I ever read was "The Creation of Éa" which begins the first in her Earthsea Quartet:
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
Those words snared on something in me, in reading them they spoke
of a presence while highlighting an absence, of what was being said and
what was being intentionally hidden. They were like a thread that would
led to something much larger. A single hawk in an empty sky. Only that. But not only that.
That is the nature of all of Le Guin's work, to present you with a
situation, and not have to tell you that there is something being said
through it, beyond it.
So at least I have an ally for this presentation on Thursday!
Made alert by force of friction
Strives for synthesis, to blend,
And seeks, in doing so, its end.
- Self composed today.
Today's postcard is more of an informal 'blog' about the fact that very soon, I shall probably start using this space a lot more to detail ideas relating to the classing I am taking this semester, Research Methods, my International Studies Major (Japanese) which will focus this semester upon Linguistics based research projects, and Culture & Poetics, which again, has a focus on language , but in an aesthetic sense.
(So they actually tie in quite well together.)
Culture & Poetics is a class that, obviously, I am bound to love. There's just no question, language and linguistic aesthetics is what I do. That and social research. However this week, for only one reason I can possibly think of that I will explain shortly, was focussing upon the Romanticism movement that inspired, for a very short moment in the history of the literary arts, the Fragment, which is perhaps the most bizarre thing language has ever seen, (post)modern Streams of Consciousness not withstanding.
The movement arose chiefly in Germany, as a response to the Englightenment and the 'Dawn of the Age of Reason', Scientific Rationalism and so forth. These writers, the most notable among them being Novalis, reacted to the idea that Truth had become attainable to Humanity through Science and Reason with a sort of intense contrarianism, and created a genre, the Romantic Fragment, (perhaps better coined, the Irrational Fragment, since its chief purpose was to attack the supposed infallibility of rationalism).
Basically the movement indended to sythesise Art, Philosophy and Science in a single literary work, or series thereof, in which conventions of structure and even logic were completely undermined. German Romanticism, thus having set itself a goal, promptly imploded upon itself and died, having lasted only a few short decades and having spawned no more than, apparently, a few hundred pages of work.
What the Romaticists were doing was trying to depict, through their Fragments, a sort of written metaphore for Humanity as minds (containing both Imagination and Logic) which each seperately engague with the 'Absolute' (Truth, perhaps) in part, but which as a collective form the entire engagement with 'the Absolute', and thus its attainment. This was why publishing Fragments as anonnymous parts of a book composed by a number of authors was popular practice.
The whole thing, for its emphasis upon the Individual and the Collective, for its intentional distancing away from concepts of owner and authorship, and for its bizarre brevity and complete implosion, has a very Socialist ring to it.
It seemed such a nonsensical thing to study given all of the vast poetic history at our disposal - and even more so because of the reading, Phillipe Lacove-Lasonthe & Jean-Luc Noney's contemptible 'The Literary Absolute', which made statements such as:
'The Fragment or the fragment-hedgehog is just such a hedgehog in its very proposition, which also, similtaneously, states that the hedgehog is not [...] It both completes and incompletes the dialectic of completion and incompletion.'
But the whole point of that week was so that the tutor could showcase Anne Carson's translations of Sappho, (qt. the world's most famous Lesbian poet from Lesbos)
If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, is an interesting peice. Carson takes the papyrus that we have remaining of Sappho's extensive works, and translates every intelligable word in situ on the page, and leaves us, just in case we are not content with that, even with the original Greek, including the portions of words half destroyed.
Her translations seem (and I say seem because we must trust our Translators to be giving us accurate information), to be literal, rather than taking fragments of the work and embellishing them.
However in taking one or two words and placing them on a page, with great swathes of ghostly space around them where the other words of the poem used to be, Carson is infact altering Sappho's intended work almost as drastically as a translator who elaborates and embellishes to fill the gaps. The little snippets of phrases and words are rich with a sense of punctum, a pithiness that is certainly poetic - but what we sense when we read those Fragments is not the poetic sense of Sappho but the poetic sense of Carson reading Sappho's tattered, incomplete papyrus.
In that sense the work is practically her own.
So anyway I then composed the title poem, Mind, to reflect that German Romanticist idea, that the Mind is in fact composed of at least two main elements, Reason and Immagination, which form a central dichotomy to consciousness. I then theorise that it is exactly dichotomy, of forces working against eachothor (or at least the friction between opposing and complimentary forces), that gives us our consciousness and our will to understand and to make sense of the world, and that the irony of this whole situation is that the mind's urge to link and relate, make patterns and understand, works against the oppositionary nature of its central forces and thus against its own existence. Born out of chaos, we strive for order.
However as I was writing this Berndt was saying that classical poetry, written for the lyre, had an entirely different ear for rhyme than we do today. The cat, is on the mat, with a bat. You hear it, he said, and you cant help but groan. Im sure that no one here considers rhyme to be a legitimate aspect of modern poetry. Do they?
Of course I respect Berndt's opinions on the poetic, which is probably why I decided that was a can of worms I would open carefully and slowly rather than declaring, well actually there is more to rhyme and rhythm than as a means to recollection of the words for muses and bards (which was their primary use (in a utilitarian sense)) in poetry.
But, if the German Romantics got one thing right in their philosophies, it was that poetry (in the literary), like the mind, bridges Logic and the Sensual, Imagination and the Rational, the Spoken and the Written word.
While there is a great deal of poetic work which demonstrates the power of the prosaic, the free form of language outside of a prescribed phonetic patterns, and can do so beautifully, still there is a plethora of poetry of this kind which is at best poetry only in intent or classification rather than in form, and at worst, dull, unremarkable, or banal.
Also with those peices that place a premium upon patterns of rhythm, or rhyme, or both, there are the good, the bad and the ugly, but to say that rhyme is inappropriate to our times or that it is obsolete is a gross underestimation of its poetential when used carefully and appropriatly. Rhyme draws the ear, it highlights the musicality of the language in which it is spoken, it demonstrates, when utlilised with care and forethought, the dexterity of the poet, and their sensitivity to the aesthetics of speech. It takes an idea, and through form and structure that goes beyond that of everyday speech elevates that idea to the philosophical, form highlights content, takes language, which is the scaffolding of thought, and shapes it to a design of the mind, that both the structure itself and the thought might be concieved of as art.
Music is the living, vibrant proof of this example in its most popular and copious form, and the fact that Asian languages, to which the concept of rhyme is not native to their ideas of the poetic, are in contemporary music now encorporating it as a stylistic feature is not mere Westernisation, but an acknowledgement of the power of such a device in spoken language.
Ive recently been conducting some basic research in the field of the
educational potential of Second Life, and in the process have come
across quite a large number of often comprehensive blogs written by
everyone from educators to NGO professionals who discuss at various
levels all kinds of interesting current phenomena in technology.
I discovered that Second Life is quite a hot topic on blogs - which brings me to ponder, is the role of the blog changing? How should a blog be concieved of as a modern medium of information?
I ask chiefly because two years ago (I can hardly believe it was that long ago) I conducted a simple Information Evaluation report for one of my communications subjects, in which I basically concluded that when it comes to academic search engines versus commercial ones, the good and the bad exist in both, so in either case caution is required when using information from either source.. But, and I dont know if this is simply because I have been conditioned by the amount of first year information that was poured into us about what is and what isnt a valid source of information, I fairly automatically, at that time, and up until now, dismissed blogs as invalid information sources, largely because the barriers that exist in relation to publishing actual papers dont exist, nor even the markers that might indicate authority and legitimacy on peices of digital information, some of the time.
But blogs, in the end, are not just digital diaries upon which countless hundreds of thousands detail their lives. They serve that purpose, but they have also become a new sort of 'bottom up' news network, with the positive side being that what you end up having is an easily accessable, highly diverse medium that is also very fast in being able to detail information about a current event. The negtive side is mainly that there are no structures in place to assure the validity of the information, or to guard against bias.. but does that make them untouchables within the scheme of digital information sources? I might have said yes before, but now I tend to see them as being just another means to acquiring information, though of course you have to be cautious as always.
The relationship between society and technology is mutually affectual. Technology changes how we interact, and we, using the technology, shape it to better accomodate our interactions. Blogs have allowed ordinary people to instantly publish information to a potentiallly vast audience, but as they were adopted it seems society viewed them in a more dynamic way, as a means not just of publication and recording information, but as a means of communication among members of particular circles. For that reason perhaps, we see variants on the blog system becoming ever more complex and interlinked, making use of a wide range of media and placing emphasis upon networks. People are tending to awaken to the broader potential of blogs, as multifunctional, at once personal diaries, public ponderings or announcements and rescource libraries, and I think as this evolution progresses we can only expect that the humble blog shall, albiet evolved from its earlier forms, come to constitute a significant and valid section of the web, even if that future is simply the blending of the "web page" with the blog, in a similar way that text messaging come to be a more and more significant part of mobile phone technology, to the point where now of course, the two technologies are inseperable.
Firstly, Why is Second Life potentially useful as a tool for educators?
Perhaps because it is a Virtual Reality Mediated Enviornment in the way that earlier versions were, but its also something else, because as much as it is owned by Linden Lab, it is vested in by a lot of different companies and organisations, which in effect makes it a sort of digital ecosystem in which we can see businesses utilizing a new market and competing, and, since after all this is a capitalist age, the fact that organisations are utilising SecondLife as part of their overall market effectively makes it part of the global market, and thus, a part of the world market. Competition and profit will generally ensure the continuation of this interest by businesses, which means, basically, that what we have in Second Life is the beginnings of a new way to interact with and conceive of digital information, not just another virtual world such as those that exist in a multitude of online games (world of warcraft, runescape, anarchy online) limited and prescribed, but a site for the expansion of the web. What we are seeing perhaps is another link in the evolution of information, if we can see it in terms of the invention of writing, the invention of books, the birth of the print press, the invention of the computer and the birth of digital information, the invention of the Web, the rise of Web 2 (which is more or less just a maturation of our social interpretation of the Web over time) and the next step is at this stage, the evolution of the Web from 2 dimensions and linear, to 2 dimensions and networked/blending of media), to three dimensional with blending of media.
Because Second Life is making use of competition, hence diversity, and because it constitues a market, and chiefly because it is primarily user generated content, which allows for change and innovation, and for a sense of ownership in the constituency, I do not believe that second life is transient... the hype may eventually fade, but the hype fades for all things, including that which is so well known and frequently used as it becomes commonplace. I think we are seeing an example of the future of digital information in Linden Lab, not to say that it will be the sole provider of this future, but that we are seeing the first attempts at conceptualising digital space as actual space.
The paper by Nicolas Johnson, The Educational Potential of Second Life (http://digitalunion.osu.edu/Research/CurrentProjects/EducationalGaming/Second_Life.pdf.) details a rather simplistic initial investigation of the educational potential of this medium.. of interest within his argument is the following statement (top page 8):
In the past ten years, as online multi-player games have become more
advanced, academics have begun to take notice. Applying preexisting
methodologies borrowed from sociology, psychology, and communications
to study the spaces and the interactions in them have provided a solid
starting point for serious game studies. However, as others have noted
(Dutton and Consalvo, Squire, and Manninen) these methods are limited
to studying the communication itself and not the mechanics of the
environments that give rise to the communication patterns that emerge."
The fact that businesses are tapping into the second life market tells us one very important thing.. SL really isn't a game. Its a market, a society, and as such is a place ... for an increasing number of people a workplace. Hence, students thus benefit from experience in Second Life in two ways, firstly to extend their educational environment beyond the classroom, to give them an awareness of the fact that education should not exist seperately from their lives, confined to the schoolgrounds. Sarah Robbins details this well in a Learning Times Green Room podcast interview when she states:
"What Ive noticed is that students see the class room as a designated learning area...they see learning as a very seperate thing from the rest of their lives. What second life does for me is that it gives me a persistent classroom, so middletown, our island is always there, and students who want to get to know other people in the class, of they want to talk to someone about assignment, they know [...] there's a chance [...] there'll be another student there hanging out, so allowing them that space where they can go, get to know eachother, hang out on a social basis and also talk about class seems to expand the time that they spend thinking about the work that they're doing on class."
Secondly to provide them with skills and awareness relevant to these new online environments that they may well have to deal with in their future careers.
While Robbins is perhaps the most recognised active educator on second life there are many others who have begun unpacking Second Life in according to its educational potential. One example is Rick Panganiban, an NGO professional who's blog discusses at one point the value of SL as a program through which to coordinate distance education:
and the following is much the same sort of thing:
heheheh of course, we'll go to the hairdresser.... every three week ;). and of course, who else can be the... read more
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