So I went to a conference in Raleigh NC, virtually, of course, through Second Life - audio below is from New Media Consortium
&Opening Remarks [6:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Richard Van Eck Keynote [38:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Jim Thomas Presentation [14:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Sarah Robbins Second Life Parlor Session [14:13m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download
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I recently took a group of faculty from Brock University on a tour of some educational sites within Second Life. If you or your organization are thinking of exploring some of the educational possibilities in Second Life, why not contact me and I’ll arrange a bespoke tour to places that suit your interests? It’s a big world…
Second life, by all accounts, is inspired directly by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. So I sat down to read it the other day, and indeed, many parts of the novel do read like what I’ve experienced in Second Life. But what really interested me in the book was a part that not many people (to my knowledge) have commented on - that is, the connections Stephenson makes with Sumerian language and culture.
I am by no means an expert on Sumer. My period of interest is roughly 3000 years later. In his book, for the purposes of the narrative, Stephenson argues that the emergence of Sumer as the first civilization was a result of creating new mental pathways; that the beings celebrated as gods in Sumerian literature were actually people who by accidents of evolution, already had the new ways of thinking that made civilization possible hard-wired into their brains; that they invented literacy as a means of ‘infecting’ other humans non-quite-so-advanced-mentally with a ‘virus’ to become civilized (wonder if Stephenson has ever read Dawkins). Anyway, it’s an interesting part of Stephenson’s story, and it reflects some stuff I’ve been reading lately in educational literature.
This would be a much better posting if I could tell you where and what, but leave that aside for the time being (maybe it was Prensky and his ‘digital native’ stuff). In the edu-lit, the argument goes that using computers and immersive worlds constantly (as younger people are often wont to do) is actually re-wiring their brains to handle complex volumes of information in ways that the rest of us, who grew up with mere books, televions, radio and movies, cannot possibly comprehend. The central plot in Stephenson’s book then is a conspiracy to throw all of these digital natives back to pre-sumer days, the easier to control them, by re-wiring their brains with ‘Snow Crash’.
So what’s my point? I had doubted this ‘digital native’ stuff as being any more significant than merely ‘younger people know how to work with electronics’. That is, I didn’t think there was much to the idea that brains were actually being re-wired. I teach media studies at the high school level from time to time, and those students (bless ‘em) are more like ‘digital wood elfs’ - they’re surrounded by technology, they can use it, but they don’t really wonder how it works or what it means. They don’t reflect on their use of digital technologies. I thought of them as I read Julian Dibbell’s piece on a virtual rape that happened in a text-only world. His description of the event and its aftermath is particularly thought provoking…
“I have come to hear in them [his thoughts on the separation of VR from RW] an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.”
Which makes me wonder. If more and more people become like my digital wood elfs, are we reverting to a world of magical thinking, where to type or say the word is to actually do?
This post in Variety was recently brought to my attention (thanks!):
History builds Roman empire
Channel launches vidgame
By NICK VIVARELLI
History Channel
Tapping into the current epic battle craze, The History Channel is launching a “Great Battles of Rome” videogame, its first international console game, which will hit European outlets in May.
Comprising more than 100 battles — including the Punic and Samnite Wars, and Julius Caesar’s conquest of Britain — “Great Battles” is produced in collaboration with the U.K.’s Slitherine and Italy’s Black Bean.
Vidgame, which allows players to control massive armies of legionaries, archers and cavalry, while carving out the Roman Empire in a series of campaigns against Barbarian hordes, will be out Stateside in the fall.
“This is our first videogame to integrate programming into game play,” said A&E Television Networks licensing topper Carrie Trimmer, who unveiled “Great Battles” in Rome’s Richard Meier designed Ara Pacis museum, which houses a peace altar commissioned by Emperor Augustus.
Thirty clips from The History Channel archives have been spliced in with narration to give the Roman war game added educational gravitas.
“Battles,” being released for PlayStation2 and PC, will be marketed via Web sites tied in with the airing of The History Channel’s “Rome: Engineering an Empire,” and other Rome-themed programming.
“Battles” is the second History Channel branded console game after “Civil War: A Nation Divided,” which has sold more than 250,000 units since its 2006 release.
I wrote a while ago about how I’ve been working with a local grade school teacher to use text adventures to improve literacy with her class. The approach she took with this ‘interactive fiction’ was a bit different than what I expected - but perhaps is a model for others.
She first built a simple adventure using ADRIFT, to get the students used to how the story might work (see my earlier post, Interactive Fiction (Text Adventure!) in the Classroom). Over a series of sessions she had the students divide into groups to work on particular ‘rooms’ for their own adventures. What does the room look like? What will happen in this room? This collaborative work was all done with pencil and paper, followed by students’ swapping their work with each other for group edits. What was interesting about this stage was how - interactively, without a computer - an adventure took place situated in their own school grounds. In most cases, the editing process really improved the descriptions of each room - although there was one group, who upon receiving the edited version of their room, proceeded to erase others’ edits to return it to its original state. When the disparate parts were put together using ADRIFT, remarkably, a plot seemed to emerge. This allowed the teacher to discuss the mechanics of fiction with a group that has an extremely low level of literacy ability.
So… the computer was only used to bracket this project. ‘Interactive fiction’ usually refers to the playing or reading of these works, but in this case, it was actually the creation that demonstrated the interactivity.
Seems some folks at Drexel University have adapted the Unreal Tournament for teaching Chemistry, Physics and English. From the screen-shots, etc, seems like an intense flash-card type of exercise, but I’ll have to download their stuff and see what it’s like. Might be very appropriate for teaching/learning ancient languages… Anyway, you can see their stuff at http://edufrag.blogspot.com/ and at http://edufrag.wikispaces.com/
Came across this today - a fascinating discussion with Michael Shanks about representing the past. I especially like his comments regarding maps (and by extension, Second Life) as a prothesis for understanding the past. A snippet below:
“TW: Why do archaeologists need to think about media? How is visualization implicated?
MS: The easy answer is that archaeologists need to publish what they find, otherwise the past is lost. But there is more to it. There is a distinctive experience of immediacy in archaeology - a notion of discovering the past in its material remains. A conservation ethic drives the global heritage industry - that the past should to be looked after as a legacy of cultural property, with such a past often even considered a human right. But it is, of course, the case that archaeologists do not discover the past. They work on what remains. And such work involves the translation of materiality into proxy mediating forms - texts, catalogs, images. Now while this discursive character is widely accepted in many disciplines, the archaeological nature of the relationship between past and present is less often recognized. By this I mean the material relationship of decay/loss and rescue/restitution at the core of contemporary historicity. Such an archaeological sensibility refers to matters of presence and absence, of trust and authenticity. It reaches far beyond the discipline. I consistently argue that there is an archaeological sensibility at the heart of modernism and modernity.
In this I would subordinate inscription and visualization to mediation. I hope the reason why will become clear - it is to do with the idea of medium as mode of engagement.
[...]
TW: But in practice, maps only work, only allow navigation and wayfinding, via relating directly this abstracted information beyond the immediate perceptual and cognitive capacity of a map-reader to what is immediately perceived on-the-ground. The perceiving map-reader becomes a conduit for coordinating information offered directly through perception - of features, plazas or pyramids - and indirectly through the schemata of the map. One cannot operate effectively without the other. This is a cyborg ontology. In this sense, maps are better understood as prostheses of the individual. We might say that visualization is less what we do with information - to convey, condense or distribute - and more how we intimately function through visual media.
MS: Rather than a virtual world, we have treated Second Life as such a prosthesis. Not a substitute, not a re-presentation of a world, but as an extension. An instrument of augmentation. A mediation of certain source materials - re-sources for mapping pasts….”
