Our Research Team

Though I took a summer hiatus, SL exploration this fall promises to be more expansive and interesting with the addition of some new researchers from UR's Summer Scholars Program who have agreed to explore Teen SL and post their dispatches to our research blog.

Intrepid SL blogger, networker and digital guide Ignatius Onomatopoeia will be checking in from time to time to see our progress. If you haven't seen it already, be sure to check out his "In a Strange Land" blog: to get a survey of some of the creative activity going on in Second Life.

Second Life for teaching?

I continue to explore the pedagogical possibilities of SL, and though I've just begun, I have found several interesting and useful sites. I'll give a brief overview in this entry and return to focus in greater detail on specific sites in following entries.

My colleague Ignatius Onomatopoea has been exploring SL educational possibilities as well, from movie making to SL libraries specifically designed for teachers, and he discusses some of this in his Richmond Times Dispatch blog "In a Strange Land." Educators interested in how these technologies can be used would do well to keep up with Iggy's blog. The wide variety of the postings on Iggy's blog also demonstrate possible uses for teaching, from interviews to character design & development to learning how to script objects.

I've accompanied Iggy on interviews of SL educators like Milosun Czervik, a professor at Virginia Tech University who raised money in Second Life for the victims of their recent shooting. Czervik has also generously populated the ICT Library in Second Life with lots of free materials for teachers who want to use SL for teaching.

One of my first interviews was with Tonny Halderman, an SL designer who also teaches at 'The Business Centre - Horsens Business School' in Denmark. One of his islands "Danish Visions" includes a windfarm and what he calls a "learning object" meant to help train those who assemble the precision-made Nissen gearbox cooling mechanisms for wind turbines in real life.


On his other island "Media Learning" as he discussed creating appropriate "learning spaces" for specific needs, he took me to a promontory overlooking an ocean complete with relaxing rhythmic waves whose calming litany was woven with the sounds of birds and breeze.

Of course, olfactory cues are absent, but even if the Linden's found a way to digitally duplicate scent, would it be the same as a smell naturally emitted from a biological object?
(yesterday on the James River, I noticed the slightly sweet smell of the rocks I had noticed in the mountains)

Even so, though only two senses were engaged, the sense of relaxation was surprising.

Tonny noted that this particular spot might be an effective space to balance high-intensity discussions or as inspiration for more meditative and reflective work.

Who knows? Maybe SL has the potential to become a new space for the mediation of conflict without the enhanced emotion that accompanies the experience of your opponent's embodied presence.

the challenges of disembodiment

i was recently interviewed by my UR colleague Ignatius Onomatopoea for his Second Life Blog "In A Strange Land" for the Richmond Times Dispatch, and though half the interview involved me falling into the ocean, stumbling around and sitting in Iggy's lap we exchanged some good conversation. i was experiencing all the accidental bumblings of someone just getting used to digital disembodiment. In RL, i practically never stumble around, fall into the ocean or sit in Iggy's lap!
(and i have to confess that i've been *so* engaged with my RL and my bio-embodiment, i haven't been spending the SL time necessary to evolve beyond my avatar's awkward adolesence)

So, once I settled on a spot that was at least within typing/talking distance, Iggy and I had an enjoyable conversation - my longest in SL so far, and certainly the most coherent. Iggy set me at ease by removing his head to reveal the blinding white putty-man head beneath. Fortunately for me, he softened the glare and the contrast by putting his shades back on.

Here's what he looked like before he removed his head:













The characteristic "air-typing" motions of SL avatars is an interesting aspect of communication here and I am wondering what changes will come when the Lindens offer voice capability. During the interview, our cadence of synchronously typed & read conversation was an odd one, often resulting in Iggy asking a question while I was typing an unrelated comment, making me appear inattentive. Because we have no established protocol (or maybe SL does? have to check...) for effective SL keyboarded conversation we haven't learned how to work out this awkard cadence.

Of course, all my considerations of conversational cadence evaporated when, to set me at ease, Iggy removed his head revealing the bright white generic 'putty-head' beneath. i had accidentally discovered earlier during my encounter with the trick party hat - Iggy was like a bleached-out member of the Blue Man Group!
Fortunately, he donned some shades that lessened the glare a bit, and this made him a more appealing interviewer.
(note the ocean into which i fell behind us)


During our conversation, Iggy asks about the potential future of SL...what is it becoming, what can it become?
I was reminded of UCLA English professor N. Katharine Hayles whose August 2006 Critical Inquiry essay "Traumas of Code" suggests that computer code is quickly becoming analogous to the human unconscious:
"code is the unconscious of language...
Since large programs - say, Microsoft Word- are written by many programmers, and portions of the code are recycled from one version to the next, no living person understands the programs in their totality. (italics mine)." (137)

The words we see on a computer screen, or in a digital document, are the result of a dense web of sub-codes that is beyond the comprehension of most capable computer users. And now that machines are writing the code, it is not only beyond our ken, it is no longer fully human expression. What might be the vast density of the SL unconscious?

I think what I appreciate most about Hayles' work is that she evokes a vision of the 'cyborg' that does not automatically denigrate, dismiss or replace the body but rather celebrates its primacy as a self-augmenting biological entity. Citing Nigel Thrift's perspective that "cognition as something that, far from being limited to the neo-cortex, occurs throughout the body and stretches beyond body boundaries into the environment." Hayles develops this idea by noting that this embodied cognition can be extended or 'augmented' (Englebart) by humans "enrolling objects into their extended cognitive systems"(139), something we've been doing this ever since the inventions of fire and language. This view situates our bodies at the center of importance as our primary tools for knowledge - not our machines.

This is the more theoretical aspect of my choice of the animal avatar - guess you can tell i'm the "T-head" in this collaboration.
(that's "Theory head" wise guy!)

But, Iggy's chief concern about SL is in regard to our students who are increasingly interacting in digital spaces rather than face to face on Facebook, cell phones, email or other medium. Where will this lead us as a social species? Our observations are preliminary, but we both agree that students seem to lose some of their face-to-face (f2f) social skills and as a result find digital interaction more comfortable.

Of course, that could just be our mutually apocalyptic perspective - the fact remains that, outside of academics, the big draws of the college experience still involve altering brain chemistry and pursuing intimate physical contact with appealing partners - and many of our students haven't even heard of Second Life.

Yet.

life and death in digital space

I've been learning about SL with my pal Ignatius Onomatopoea who now has his own 'real world' blog called "In A Strange Land" where his avatar goes by the name "Joe Essid". Wait a minute...which is the avatar and which is the original?
Hmmm.

I visited Ignatius' blog and posted a question about whether Baudrillard's death had been simulated...or if he had created an avatar in SL before he died, could/would it live on in cyberspace?

This reminds me of the 1998 Dennis Danvers novel Circuit of Heaven where the invention of a vast silicon storage location called "the bin" began a trend of people 'downloading' themselves (memories, personality) into the bin and then sending their bodies...by the trainload to the crematorium. And this digital mania is not far from some of the hopes & claims of the digital hypesters so ready to disparage and dump the body.

In the bin, life is clean, smooth, safe, sanitary and eternal....the bin replicates itself, so there are multiple copies of you out there...but eventually people begin to miss having a body, they long for the chaos of biology, the joys and pains of embodiment. Eventually the limits of the program become evident and the inhabitants of the bin miss the unlimited potentialities of the bodies they cremated.

Some miss embodiment so much that they choose to download into other people's bodies who are just coming into the bin! What would you call that?!
It wouldn't be exactly trans-gender...but I guess it could be! Trans...organism?