Summer camp on the internet
So today was an extra day off, and I spent it catching up with "the web."Â Since "the web" is such a close, personal friend. Regardless, making this blog happen (bear with me IE users, while I fix that bugginess, or better yet, just pull the content to an aggregator). I have twittered from time to time, and the recent publicity from Dave Parry caused me to give it a second chance. I can definitely see the potential of twitter, though from an academic standpoint, I could understand where there might be skepticism since there is no room for flowery description.
What I had not been aware of, in regards to twitter, is the gaming taking place. I had noticed that quite a few users have references to "red team" and "plaid team." When I had only noticed red teamers, I assumed it was a linux thing. (Maybe it is a linux thing?). Thank goodness someone else had already been sleuthing, and this explanation should have been enough. However, there is an official call for participation for Color Wars 2008. It reminds me a little bit of summer camp, but on a much bigger scale. It also speaks to the motivation that people have to participate in community, competition, creativity, and interactivity.
Creating a new mythology
"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...
Speechless
This sounds like a joke. A substitute teacher facing sentencing for not shutting down a computer fast enough? I found a discussion of this on Intellagirl's blog, and the original link back to the PC World article. The analysis at PC World is enough for you to get a full sense of what unfolded. The author, Steve Bass, correctly pinpoints the blame back to the school not having antivirus software installed and firewalls enabled. But let's take it a step farther. Isn't the real blame the creators of malware who willingly and forcefully subject us to advertising porn as well as real porn through their malevolent tactics? I'm also wondering why the state of Connecticut is wasting taxpayers money to try a substitute teacher. Further, the comment from a juror on Intellagirl's posting-- “If a 40 year old school teacher does not have the sense to turn off or is not smart enough to figure it out, would you or any other person wanting her teaching your child or grandchild?â€-- doesn't even make sense!!! It's mind boggling. This isn't a contract renewal meeting, it's criminal court!
I hope this turns out to be some internet hoax.
Confusing a lecture with instruction
The Attack of the Pod People addresses student enthusiasm for downloadable lectures in lieu of, it would appear from the context, attending class. I neither fully agree or disagree with the author, but he is getting a fundamental point in terms of the student in question's reaction to being able to podcast class materials--just because students like it doesn't mean it's necessarily good for them. That being said, in the context of this opinion piece, there is a fundamental blurring of distinction between lecturing and instruction that would be nice for a lot of faculty to pay attention to. In fact, I would say if your argument for not providing podcasts is that students would have no need to go to your class anymore (a concern I have heard more than once), then you are doing something wrong. Why? Because if all your students do when they come to class is sit and listen to you, then WHY NOT just let them download your comments and listen to them through osmosis while they sleep off last night's hang over.
Schneider asks: "At 8 in the morning I may not be beautiful — hell, I may not even be fully awake — but I'm there, and I'm dressed. Any questions?"
Yes, I have a question. What else --besides being there and wearing clothes-- are you requiring of your students during this class time that makes the class relevant for them, which allows them to build on their knowledge of the content and receive feedback, and which allows them to interact with their peers in developing their expertise? I'm not picking on Scheider. I'm just suggesting that going even deeper into what is offensive about the lecture-podcast besides a sense that because he, as the professor has to be there to show s/he cares, students should too. That's not enough of an argument because it leaves the opposite argument open--if a professor feels that creating podcasts is how they show commitment to their students, isn't that caring enough? Production, after all, can be very time consuming. In fact, it's the treatment of content as something that only need be transmitted to the student for learning to occur that is offensive.
In this debate, I'm struck by the contrast between research on learning which lauds the importance of social interaction in learning and the importance of understanding how to communicate with others in a target community of practice versus the advancement of the technological machine, which many seem to interpret as permission to distance themselves (students and faculty alike) from (other) learners. It is a curious contradiction.
Blog integration in instruction
I haven't posted in a while, which is simply indicative of being caught up in other work. Currently, I am conducting a workshop on blogs, podcasts, and wikis, the content of which I organized on a site using drupal (to take advantage of the aggregation feature). I set up my course site for Digital Media for Art Educators (links dead 
) in the same manner. I like it, but I don't love it as a CMS. I do love the aggregation feature, and it saves having to get everyone acclimated to using an aggregator.
Has anyone else used drupal in this manner? The only problem I keep running into is setting up the cron jobs. I set it up on the cultivating.us server without TOO much trouble, but now on the school server, it doesn't seem to be working exactly right.
