Blogging here from iDMAa in Philadelphia, sitting in a session entitled Art in a Virtual World: A River of Second Life. Yes, the speaker has leveraged the power of SL by having a panel, of potentially interesting people to comment on this topic. This is my first time hearing the new voice application, and it’s mostly contributed to giving me a phenomenal headache. It is 2:20, we are 20 minutes in, and I have learned nothing except that bandwidth is a HUGE issue with SL.

For anyone who has cared to listen to me babble about my dissertation, one of the biggest findings was that duh! technical problems redirect goals constantly. Where breakdowns occur, the task focus shifts from the original issue to the technology and troubleshooting a problem. Though it is obvious, unless I want my students to focus on this phenomenon, that seems to be what I learn about the most when dealing with Second Life. I know cool things go on in this virtual world, I just find the evangelism for the potential often outweighs any evident pedagogical gains.

At least we ditched the crapalicious sound reverb from the first speaker. Maybe my headache can subside.

“Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.” -From A Cyborg Manifesto

What are people learning when they engage in activity, interaction, and communication in Second Life? Beyond the question of whether there is a demand for learning English in SL, there is a larger question of how the tool, in this case a complex virtual world, and an understanding of a way of being within the context of the use of that tool, is an important question when we embark down this path.

What are our “historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies” when we start to engage with each other in virtual, increasingly multi-dimensional worlds? In the physical world, we have histories, individual and communal, that underlie our interactions. We have the ability to formulate abstract communications with each other, disembodied interactions, through written language. With the development of communications technologies we have been able to modify to more “bodied” exchanges, where the nuance of tone, pitch, and articulation in a voiced interaction convey more embodiment than words on a page, but less than an interaction with the whole person.

The development of information communication technology, the ability to digitize both written text and spoken information has fractured our sense of “distance” and “presence.” Whereas these were previously, at least colloquially, measures of space and time, we can be both distant and present with others across physical space and chronological time. But how is this new “enforced meaning” changing our communication? How does a shift from a visual online world (how I will loosely label our text/image-based internet) to a tactile online world (borrowing from McLuhan’s definition whereby “tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object“)?
One question in regards to teaching and learning in Second Life specifically is, how does the culture of that virtual world impacts the communicative process? Another question I would ask is how participation in a virtual world such as SL changes the participant, and is the way the participant is changed– the way they are forced to confront their identity and engage in communicative action– something that should be imposed on someone in the same manner we are all required to be participants in the physical world? What kind of disclaimer should be provided for learners who are required through coursework to join these burgeoning and wholly immersive tactile worlds?

I bring up this issue for several reasons:

1) Because much of the research and exploration of using virtual worlds such as SL for teaching and learning appears predicated on a wholly technologically deterministic approach whereby it has been created for us, so we must use it. Or from a technological utopianistic view that online we can explore these new identities in a wonderful way that doesn’t need to be critiqued. I haven’t seen a whole lot of critique of what ways of being are being introduced to students who engage in SL.

2) In the one class where the issue of SL has been brought up this semester, a student mentioned it as this “place online, where like, people live their lives and spend real money” with a tone as if to skeptically indicate that s/he had heard of this, but does such a thing really exist?

3) Capitalistic values (that whole spending real money aspect) are inherently and obviously perpetuated in the SL environment, and that may or may not be appropriate for language learning and/or other educational endeavors. Maybe, as English is the current lingua franca of business, that makes it the perfect learning environment for English.

And on that note, with #3 tying nicely back into more questions of how SL perpetuates or breaks previous historical patterns, I will break in search of lunch…

I know it’s Wednesday, and I should have been blogging the event as it happened. However, that didn’t happen. Instead of specific sessions, I am going to give my overall impressions of the conference. Several days ago, Henry Jenkins requested feedback on his blog, although he is several thoughts past that by now. I am slow and I am going to embrace my slowness and revive this blog at my own, several-days-past-relevant pace.
First, the plenary sessions were phenomenal. Great speakers, with their messages kept very short and long q & a sessions. The topics were provocative and apropos. The plenary session that tied it all together for me was late in the day on Saturday and had a message that we need to take Fair Use back in academic institutions. The Center for Social Media at American University, if I understood correctly, has been working with documentary film makers to create a set of accepted Fair Use practices that their insurers will also stand behind. They are starting a similar process with media literacy educators to craft discipline specific fair use practices. This was the message that my own presentation needed at the end–and I am glad to have found something I was looking for at this conference. Definitely check out the podcasts of the plenary sessions.
I really enjoyed the model of having panel speakers each give their presentation (which usually meant reading a paper) and then the audience could participate in discussion. Most of the sessions I went to really did leave enough time for a rich discussion. I was disappointed by the number of papers read verbatim (as opposed to actually presenting), but I know that is a reflection of discipline-specific practice. I understand that the reading of a paper reveals the richness of the text in question, but I can read–when I’m watching a presentation, I expect a different kind of explanation. What’s interesting is that this practice of reading papers was disconnected from the plenary sessions, where the speakers did not read from papers at all.
Another interesting aspect of the conference was that it was simulcast in Second Life. It was referred to in one of the first plenary session and I filed that information away. Some people in the overflow room were simultaneously watching the video feed of the conference and hanging out in SL. On Sunday morning, I did not have the opportunity to go back into Cambridge. On a whim, I decided to see if they were still broadcasting the last session in SL. It took me a bit of searching the blogosphere to figure out where to go (it wasn’t advertised on the MIT5 site), but once I got registered with the group I needed to, I zipped over the closing plenary session. There were a number of people watching with me, including colleagues from Australia and Greece who had been experiencing the entire conference from their geographically disparate locations. It caused me to step back from a minute and reflect that the conference that I had been attending was in fact experienced in a completely different way by a completely different community.

An appropriate medium for its intended audience of Digital Arts students, a university program developed in Second Life will be debutting at Simon Fraser University. I hope that the virtual university isn’t just a digital replica of the bricks and mortar one and that for $20,000 a year (in Canada, where education is usually a little less costly), students receive some complimentary linden dollars.