Higher emotional bandwith

Attended the Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference in Second Life last weekend and went to some excellent sessions. I have decided that I really like virtual conferences as you can participate from the comfort of your sofa/ laptop and the backchat facilities are great. This is especially the case as a presenter - I really liked seeing what other people had to say about what I was talking about, as other audience members had a great deal of expertise in the topic, which added richly to what was discussed. Not that I was particularly adept at dealing with all the threads at once in the backchannel at my talk...I was a bit distracted as my notecard box disappeared and it took me 20 minutes to find it in my inventory as I continued with the talk! I am still a relative newbie when it comes to presenting in SL so thank goodness that the cool and collected (and impeccably dressed) Sheila Yoshikawa was the chair for my session. In the meantime, back to the online MA New Literacies - more virtual learning, but with a lower 'emotional bandwith' than you get with the use of avatars (something I learned at VWBPE!).

Virtual literacy ethnography

Students on the fabulous online MA in New Literacies course have completed their virtual ethnographies of literacy in Second Life and in their presentations detailed a range of interesting findings. The most interesting findings related to the way in which literacy practices in-world were informed by RL understandings of literacy; those who took a rather functional approach to literacy in RL appeared to do so in SL. Others wished to transport RL literacy practices into SL e.g. their poetry. Given the cross-over across domains that is inevitable, but the data regarding this were fascinating. In addition, many literacy practices in SL are related to a traditional model i.e. focusing on words and letters - multimodal practices are, apart from navigation and streaming audio and video, related to building in-world, or the creation of machinima, which not all residents feel confident about undertaking. I am encouraging the students to write a paper on their study and if they do, I will post it here. In the meantime, Steinkueler's work on literacy in the MMOG World of Warcraft is a fascinating read for those of you interested in this area.

Virtual furnishing

I have neglected my blog lately due to life becoming very hectic - too many things happening to list here. Amongst other things, we now have a new building for the School of Education in Second Life, pictured here - it is shared with the Department of Information Studies. I gave my first in-world seminar this week on my research on children's use of Club Penguin and I really enjoyed it. I have found that I like managing multiple threads of conversation at once! Furnishing the Education building is more problematic, as shopping in SL is not my favourite activity. I will therefore not be one of the users flocking to the Digital Dollhouse, a site which enables users to furnish virtual doll's houses. KZero report that in due course, 'real-life' corporate brands will be selling furniture and designer items on the site. Oh dear...will soon even MFI and IKEA be muscling in on the children's virtual world market?

Swarms

This photograph was taken at a staff induction to Second Life today, on a skychair tour of Infolit ischool led by the marvellous Sheila Yoshikawa (literally in the driving seat here). I didn't dare take the tour because of my propensity for travel sickness, but a great time was had by all, no matter how much of a 'newbie' we felt. In-world, we helped each other to become more familiar with the landscape of SL. Once again I was reminded of the power of social networking, which was reinforced when I became aware that this project, A Swarm of Angels, is open to re-registration again , having first started in 2006. It is an open source film project which aims to raise £1million to make a film that will then be free to access on the web. If you subscribe to the project, you can vote on creative decisions and collaborate in the production process if you wish to. I think the title of the project is interesting, as it draws on the notion of 'swarming' as an activity made possible by Web 2.0. Zygmunt Bauman used the concept of swarming in his work on liquid modernity and this has informed its use in thinking around technology and social/ mobile networking, but I think his notion was quite different from what is actually happening. He suggested that:

In a swarm, there are no specialists - no holders of separate (and scarce) skills and resources whose task would be to enable/assist other units to complete their jobs, or to compensate for their individual shortcomings or incapacities. Each unit is a ‘Jack of all trades’, and needs the complete set of tools and skills necessary for the entire job to be fulfilled. In a swarm, there is no exchange, no cooperation, no complementarity – just the physical proximity and roughly coordinated direction of the current moves. In case of the human, feeling/thinking units, the comfort of flying-in-swarm derives from the trust in numbers: a belief that the direction of flight has been properly chosen since an impressively large swarm follows it, the supposition that so many feeling/thinking humans wouldn’t be simultaneously fooled. As the self-assurance and the sentiment of security go, the swarm is the next best, and no less effective, substitute for the authority of group leaders.

This seems to me to be pessimistic in its estimation of why people join collective groups and in people's ability to determine the nature of the joint action. In addition, in socially-networked 'swarms' there are indeed specialists - the success of projects such as 'A swarm of angels' is dependent upon different people contributing their different expertise in specific ways - and surely the bees flying at the edge of swarms have to use their navigational expertise in a different way than the bees in the middle of the swarm? I don't know, I am no bee expert, but projects that embed collective action and collaborative decision-making at their heart seem to me to be good things to foster. Anyhow, I look forward to seeing the final outcome of 'A Swarm of Angels' - maybe it will be shown in Second Life? Hope so, my avatar needs a sit down after all that flying about today...

Second Department

Here is my avatar in Second Life, Jackie Darkstone, pictured outside our new Departmental building, which has been kindly given to us by our University of Sheffield colleague Sheila Yoshikawa. She runs the Infolit iSchool in Second Life and this building is on the Infolit Island. I am a relative newbie to SL and am, along with my colleague Jason Sparks, exploring ways to embed it in our teaching programmes. I haven't had much time to spend on this before now but then realised I couldn't delay any longer and am amazed by what people are achieving in SL. Sheila, for example, manages to run Infolit Island and has her own virtual shop. A group called 'Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative' is doing some great stuff with teenagers and of course Angela Thomas has been showing us for some years what educationalists can do in SL. My own explorations will be rather more modest in nature but I am keen nonetheless - and if you are not yet convinced by the idea, then visit the SLED blog for more inspiration.

Travel Notes

I haven’t blogged for a while because first of all I was on holiday here (fab!) and then went to New York for the AERA conference. I attended some excellent sessions, including a brilliant symposium organised by Jabari Mahiri. Some great work on digital media production and youth is being undertaken by Jabari and his team. Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell talked about a project titled ‘Fractal Village’. In the project, students were presented with ‘Barren Island’ in Second Life which was, as its name suggests, completely barren, and they were then supported in using programming tools to create objects, buildings and avatars. It was pedagogically very exciting as the project was open-ended and student-led in nature and you can read more about it here. Will not blog again until I get back to England as I now want to fit a bit of shopping in this weekend before I get home. Apparently the Apple store on 5th Avenue is open 24 hours a day - could be dangerous...