blogging about .edu stuff
July 22, 2007 at 11:07 am · Filed under Gender, gaming and narrative, second life
My starting point is the term Self only because right now it’s the word that comes to mind when I think about my avatars, Me-the person that’s writing this blog, and my experience of Me being in SL embodying my avatars. Using the concept of a Self helps me operationalize my thinking. It helps me analyze my experiences by constructing an artificial separation between mind and body. In practice, I don’t however experience or believe there’s a separation.
In “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds” (The Social Life of Avatars, edited by Ralph Schroeder), the authors point out the importance of seeing embodiment as relevant to both virtual (digital) and physical (biological) experiences, in that we interact with both worlds through our bodies.
No matter what, I and others experience some embodied representation of Me and my Self. But what does that mean? What does it look like and how does it feel? How do my thinking and actions change as a result?
Layered onto of the idea of embodiment, are ideas about identity, role, gender, race, and physical appearance.
The verbs to practice and perform are useful for talking about embodiment. For example, gender is an abstraction until we practice or perform it. This is true in both worlds, however in SL it takes on much more complexity because we can change our avatar’s gender instantly. Both of my avatars have androgynous names so that gender is not inscribed on them via their names. I can then experiment with performing gender. It’s very interesting how gender has been designed into SL standard avatars. You see it when you play with your avatar’s appearance. In SL yesterday I met a female resident who commented that her breasts were way too big; she quickly qualified that by adding that her [avatar] shape must have been designed by a man. I met another resident whose human-looking avatar looked entirely different from other residents. Her hair was short, her body proportions and clothing were subtle yet distinct. She had a kind of aesthetic sophistication you rarely see in SL. It reminded me of a Parisian. I complimented her on her look and she told me that she had designed the entire avatar. She called them “Me’s.” “Me’s” she said are all unique. She was very proud of her designs and being able to craft individuals. She’s a graphic designer in first life.
How do these experiences map onto to first life and vice versa? How are first life gendered practices performed in SL? What can we say about embodiment in first life given the bodies of celebrities and those of our friends, family and neighbors? When I look at bodies in first life, I see poverty written onto the bodies laborers. I see the bodies of single working mothers as distinct from childless women. Wealthy retired executive bodies are distinct from those of retired middle managers. At the SDSU gym, I see masculinity performed in the weights room; on campus I see femininity practiced with long hair. There’s no escaping the fact lived experiences in the digital and biological worlds are always embodied experiences.
July 22, 2007 at 9:43 am · Filed under Gender, higher education, informal learning, second life
As a newcomer to higher education, to teaching and learning in this environment, I’m still working out my “What’s it all about Alfie” stuff, the questions that make you stop and think. There’s always a why question buried in my thinking.
So … what are we supposed to be teaching college students? I ask myself that in my own doctoral studies: What am I supposed to learn here, that I can’t learn somewhere else or in some other context?
It’s an important question and immediately relevant because we are asked to provide evidence and be accountable for what we are doing.
If we say we’re teaching students how to think, is that too broad or is it in fact what we want? We want biology majors to be able to think like and do like biologists.
But what about SL? In the Fall, we’ll be teaching students about Virtualities: Mapping Virtual Worlds onto the Real World. There is no one thinking framework to do that.
The one I’m going to use is the Avatar/embodied experience one.
I spent almost the entire day in SL yesterday, in one or the other of my 2 Avatars. The bulk was spent in my non-professional self. I haven’t quite thought this through, but for now, my thinking about it is in terms of having ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves. In the private one, my first life identity is deliberately ambiguous and opaque.
With my public self comes transparency. My profile links to this blog and pICT’s website. I interact with in world residents who I also know as out-of-world professionals. My SL name (Aurili Oh) is part of my email signature
July 20, 2007 at 5:52 am · Filed under second life
At this point I’m getting my feet wet in SL–the world. One of my interests is in participants’ experiences living through their avatars. They take on identities through the persona of their avatar, through the places they go and the the people the afflilate with as a a result. I have two avatars. Does that mean I live at the most basic, a double life. Since each avatar can shape shift in seconds and become any number of identities, it’s a mute point, until you want to establish meaningful relationships.
In first world, leading double lives has been associated with deviance, having to hide something. I’m not sure if that’s still the case, in part because in our celebrity culture we know of the various identities of public figures live.
I’ve always had a need to know who someone “really” is before I decide I want to get to know them. In organizational theory, one component of effective teaming and collaboration is trust. We build trust over time; trust grows out of familiarity, what I come to expect from someone.
Consistent behavior is part of that.
I’m going to guess that for most Residents, SL is a game in which they can live out certain fantasies, taking on certain personas in a playful, imaginative way.
I think there’s much more to SL in terms of identities, roles and personas and how these can be used educationally. More thinking needed
July 14, 2007 at 1:06 pm · Filed under second life
The idea of building something significant in SL hasn’t occurred to me. I don’t mean creating objects; I can see the fun in that for a time being. I’m thinking more about the impulse to buy an island and build a structure on it so that I can have a place “to call home.” I don’t have that need at all and I just figured out why.
I ordered the “Official Guide to SL” based on the first customer review at Amazon. He described the book as a traveler’s guide book and talked about preparing for his numerous travels around the world.
SL is a foreign place…many places….a world. I think of my travels and time living abroad, which felt for many years like travel. This is my orientation to SL…it’s a place to explore and find out about, like a foreign country. My orientation to it educationally, is the same. A study abroad, or a field trip–that’s a far more interesting approach.
July 13, 2007 at 9:31 am · Filed under second life
Last night at the FL SDSU gym I saw two women who looked like SL Residents. Later on when I got home, I thought I was hearing SL wind in my FL apartment.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the experience of SL dancing or flying is a cognitive and sensory experience. Cognitive experiences include the affective domain; our emotions, beliefs and thoughts are inseparable.
July 12, 2007 at 7:30 am · Filed under research, second life
I have been chewing on ideas of how to make my dissertation a meaningful one and a practical one. Since I’m not at the beginning of my career life, yet somewhat at the beginning of a new career, I’m not in the position to do a dissertation only relevant to a tenure-track position. I thoroughly enjoy the job I have at pict.sdsu.edu, working with faculty, administrators, policy and research. I’m very good at getting things done.
It’s been my unrelenting interest in postmodernism that gets my attention in the midst of getting things done. In one sense it’s about the pursuit of questioning the pursuit of a truth. In another it’s about deeper understanding of what’s going on in our world. I’m throughly convinced that technologies, like web 2.0, 3.0 in particular, are the tools of postmodernism; they go hand in hand. I think critical and social theorist’s, feminists, constructivists, educational psychologists, to name a few fields, have laid important theoretical groundwork over the course of the 20th century. Cumulatively, it has created postmodern thinking and lived experience.
Second Life is a notable example. So what is postmodernism really? It’s got such a bad rap. Here’s one way to look at it, through the lens of discourse. T
Postmodernism contends that the situatedness of human thought renders impossible notions of neutral, objective reason or an autonomous self-regulating self. Knowledge, knowing and its discourse(s) constitute one another. Our experience of a self and necessarily “the other,” are far from being empirical, knowable or perceived objects; they are rather subjects of the discourse(s) in which they find and position themselves. This subjectivity continuously adjusts and repositions itself in terms of gender, class, race and social milieu. It always interacts with and reacts to changing discourse(s) (Foucault, 1972, 1980; Griffiths, April, 1995).
The idea of discourse is rather abstract for the average person and has different meanings depending on who’s using the term. Social and critical theorists, philosophers interested in the social world understand discourses to mean ideas that become words, ways of thinking that become behaving, which then become lived experiences of individuals then groups within a society. I’m still getting accustomed to the various discourses I’ve encountered in SL. It’s a complete “world” with a variety of lived experiences. I’m comparing it to first life only to ground it in something we all already know about.
Anyway, an example of a discourse would be women in the US. The way we think, feel and behave is not separate from something called sexism, a term that’s part of the discourse.
Another would be a familial discourse–the stories we tell each other and about each other, the way we behave and the way we perpetuate behaviors with our children.
I think most people experience discourses in terms of a society’s explicit and implicit rules or “facts of life.” It’s when you question them, that things get sticky
Here are a few of the myths and discourses I think postmodernism “demystifies.”
We’re individuals with our own minds. We’re free agents. We act on life; we create our lives. As an aside, I think these are characteristic of an individualistic society and its discourses.
SL is ALL about questioning, making up a society, doing life. It’s got its discourses, and it shakes first life discourses up. What about the fact that I change my gender with a few clicks or be talking to an Avatar with an identity(s), who is also a first life person with identities?
July 12, 2007 at 6:27 am · Filed under second life
I just realized that I’ve been a resident of SL for 2 years now. I just started getting busy in it again in preparation of an honors class I’m going to team teach with Brock. I’ll SL will also be the the basis for an independent study/qualifying exam and my dissertation.
This is fantastic news, having this opportunity open up. I think the timing is right and we’re going to make it the theme of Lunches on Learning and some faculty development initiatives.
What’s different about SL in terms of teaching and learning? Besides the obvious? From a Gibsonian affordances angle, I’d say there are a host of sociocultural and material affordances in SL that have the potential to help us re-event education. According to Linden Labs, as of last year, there were 80 islands dedicated to education.
July 6, 2007 at 2:04 pm · Filed under schools, trends
Stephen Downs and other edubloggers noted this tidbit in the UK:
“Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which – for years – has languished near or at the bottom of exam league tables, has abolished the use of the word to describe secondary education in the borough.
It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft – which has already developed links with one school in the borough, Bowring.
Read the article in the Independent.
Like those blogging about this, I welcome the departure. The rationale makes sense: students aren’t learning.
July 6, 2007 at 1:48 pm · Filed under coolstuff, gaming and narrative
Modders are people who go into video games and do their own fiddling, with the characters, textures etc. Like Machinima, where people create their own comic or movies that have in-game graphics, the learning the happens here is remarkable. First teachers can mod games to match learning outcomes, then students too can mod games and make predictions of what’s going to happen in new scenarios. Both of these get at narrative structures and the ability for a learner to manipulate and participate in complex narratives.
Read more
June 18, 2007 at 9:32 am · Filed under SoTL, education
This article and comments in NYT got me to thinking about the scholarship of teaching and learning. Some of the comments addressed the idea that teaching and learning can be evaluated, not through standardized test scores, but through systematic collection of various kinds of evidence that teaching and learning is happening. I’m not yet convinced that there is a direct cause and effect relationship between teaching and learning that can be measured at the classroom level. Perhaps that’s what I need to explore.
There are some interesting and well thought through comments here. It’s worth a peek.
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