digital shyness & teaching online

Yes, I'm still spending most of my time reading books and wandering through the woods by the James River - what can I say?
My body is drawn to the scents of blossoming milkweed, honeysuckle and wild rose...



What bugs me most about Second Life is that I feel *guilty* for not spending more time "in world" than I do...I guess that's not really SL's problem though is it? Though I'm generally gregarious, in SL I seem to develop some kind of shyness that has kept me from meeting new avatars. And what's up with that??? Can we be proximally gregarious, yet digitally shy?

I've got a little campsite 'classroom' on our island at UR, just behind Boatwright Tower. It's not much, just a tee-pee, a campfire and a few stumps...and most recently I've added some artwork.

I plan to use this space as a classroom for student-avatars next time I use SL in my teaching. The artwork can serve as a research prompt for students (artist, work, era, subject, technique, material) or it could serve as an exercise in visual literacy and considering the meaning inherent in the composition of individual paintings as well as the arrangement of multiple images in a single space.

I taught my first online course this summer, "Literature, Technology & Society" and it was challenging to get students engaged in the course & discussion without ever being in proximity. The original version of the course was going to involve a project in Second Life, but when I discovered the relative technical inexperience of my few students, I decided to save SL for another class.

Though I used Blackboard for most of the course interaction, I had to develop a 'companion website' to contain some of the digital materials for the class including brief audio podcasts about our readings of several novels. To give my students experience in using Web 2.0 tools for developing an 'e-portfolio', final student projects involved creating a blog with several significant entries discussing and connecting our various texts from the course, both typographic and visual.

Ironically, the best blog of the class was created by a student who called herself "the Luddite".

Techno-glitch & SL Conference Presentation

The Matrix within the Matrix?

A brief update on my project with the SL scholars...

During the pre-conference activities, several presentations were scheduled to be held at Louisiana State University in their new Communication Across the Curriculum (CXC) lab.
Iggy and I were presenting our work separately since we had different projects, but while I was demonstrating, my laptop shut down! (and I had recently remarked about readiness for such an event) Fortunately Dr. Lillian Birdwell-Bowels was there to rescue me with a quick SL setup on her laptop while my avatar nodded off, my students became confused and I articulated some what we've found in our research.

It was somewhat confusing for my students, they were at least able to join Iggy's students in some text-chat and see what an academic poster-presentation might look like in SL. In spite of the chaos, the students were able to hear one of Iggy's guest speakers Cecil Hirvi who was using voice-chat which they all could hear and respond to in text. Chaos aside, my SL Scholars were able to post some interesting blog entries about their explorations of this new realm and its pedagogical potentials.

CCCC Convention 2008 New Orleans

"The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances." - Emerson

This year's convention for the "Four C's" or the Conference on College Composition and Communication was billed "Writing Realities, Changing Realities", a title that simultaneously draws attention to the the social responsibility of scholars, the power of writing to help in the post-Katrina recovery and the changing reality of writing in the digital age.

This powerfully composed image is from the cover of the convention program which is 358 pages and almost an inch thick! Panel topics included:
use of digital media, virtual worlds, ESL, composition theory, race, high school writing, assessment, documentary, oral composition, propaganda assessment, socio-economics, visual literacy and many, many others.

Take a moment to examine the image above, notice its color and composition, text and images. How do we read this image? Which signs are familiar and which are obscure? According to the local residents I met, very little has been done by the Federal Government to help Louisiana recover from this preventable disaster, even three years after it occurred, and it is incumbent upon scholars of rhetoric to reflect on how this could be and how language can be used to address the problem.

In the three years since the Katrina disaster, some University of Richmond students have been returning to New Orleans during their spring and winter breaks after having encountered the great need on an initial service project. Before I left for the conference, a trainee in our WAC Program expressed her interest in returning to New Orleans to help, and we discussed the possibilities of collecting survivor stories as a way to promote literacy while getting the word out about the ongoing needs of Katrina victims. At the conference, I encountered a potential opportunity for her when Michael Moore, editor of The Community Literacy Journal, hosted a panel about similar literacy programs such as The Neighborhood Story Project.

The Journal of American History has a special issue devoted to the Katrina/New Orleans disaster in which UR's Dr. Juliette Landphair of Westhampton College has an excellent historical review "The Forgotten People of New Orleans" that will give readers some important background information for current consideration.

Along with the theme of social responsibility and progressive change, the keynote speaker for the CCCC convention was investigative reporter Seymour Hirsh who first gained fame for his coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Viet Nam war, and who more recently exposed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

His most current reporting revealed the Orwellian disinformation program of the White House about the Iranian nuclear program in its attempts to marshal support for another invasion and expanded war. For a more detailed report on what he found, corroborated by UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, view the Google video:
Target Iran: Scott Ritter & Seymour Hirsh (1 hr. 23 min.)

Hirsh's talk reminded us of the tremendous power of rhetoric and the terrible consequences of uncritical acceptance of the words of the powerful - and of the power of language to confront power, expose its manipulations, and hold it accountable. Perhaps most appropriately, Hirsh began his talk by discussing the raising of children. He asks, most reasonably: why do we hold our children and ourselves more accountable than we do our leaders? Why is it that we are so willing to allow power a different standard, especially when the stakes are so high?

He left us with an important question worth serious reflection.

horsing around in SL

Here I am at Danish Visions, an educational island I've discussed before, designed by Tonny Halderman for his business school. I liked the horse so much that Tonny told me where I could buy one of my own - but now I can't find the horse I bought!
(it's a bit harder to misplace a real horse)

Since the surrender of my vocal virginity, I've made only a few other forays into SL since then and I am surprised at how few avatars seem to be using voice chat. It may be that the technology needs a bit of development or it may be our bandwidth limits, but voice has not been as popular as I had expected it would be.

I am preparing to attend the CCCC Convention with Iggy in New Orleans, LA where we will be presenting some of our research about/in Second Life. During our presentation, we will have our avatars meet on the University of Richmond island along with some of the avatars of students who have done some of this exploration with us.

While Iggy has used SL in his "Literature, Technology & Society" course, I've been using it mostly separate from my courses, instead relying on two groups of independent student researchers: high school seniors who attended University of Richmond's Summer Scholars program and university freshmen and sophomores, My Summer Scholars agreed to interview other avatars about their experiences in SL and their thoughts about its educational potential. My university students are exploring educational sites, testing the offerings, interviewing local avatars and taking a few snapshots.

Students then posts their avatar-findings in our research blog and some join us at the convention on April 2 as avatars in Second Life, on the University of Richmond's island.

the symposium of the future?....

voice virgin no more!

Risking digital life & limb with my proximity to the cleaver weilding demonic turkey (back left) that patrols Calletta's Hobo Camp,I finally got myself set up for voice chat in SL with an inexpensive $20 headset with microphone. Here you see me engaged in a voice-chat conversation. The reception was reasonably clear, and it was interesting hearing the voices of the other avatars in my head.

As I've noted in past entries, a key element of spoken word is the unique autograph of embodiment that shapes the soundwaves according to the specific anatomy of the speaker. So, using voice-chat in SL gives avatars a stronger connection to their creators and the specific vocal qualities of each gives greater depth to the character of the avatar. This is but one effect of the resonance of sound.

The only problem with voice-chat is that there is yet no record of the conversation like there is with typed text, no way of recording all the voices in SL dialog.

Thought I thought that voice-chat would make it easier for me to communicate in SL, I still seem to retain a kind of shyness, perhaps more so because my voice is so personal. An unexpected experience!

Another interesting aspect of voice-chat is that avatar voices often carry further than their immediate proximity making it easy to eavesdrop on conversations...
so even loose digital lips might sink digital ships!

A few postings ago, I visited the USC Annenberg conference where "chat" was the main topic of discussion.
During this event major speakers used voice chat while volunteers like Iggy helped to moderate discussion and questions from attendees via type-chat.

In this web page about the discussion,"Chat History from Virtual Worlds" we can see that no voice-chat recording was made, but it makes sense to get voice set up and working smoothly with clear sound before we start recording it. I have tried to record my voice-chat sessions via Mac's GarageBand, but it only picked up my voice. Though I could still hear other avatars, their voices did not record.

Turkey Turns the Tables!

I just thought it fair warning, in these days before Thanksgiving, to let y'all know that there is a demonic turkey in SL at the Hobo Camp and he's fixin' to turn the tables on us and serve up some tasty human avatar for dinner. Check out the glowing demon eyes.
And be sure to note that cleaver he's swinging in his left wing?
(hmmm...why the left wing? must be a right wing conspiracy!)

The bird floats creepily about a foot above the ground, moving randomly and suddenly turning without warning to head off in another direction.

Maybe this bird is a victim of Pappy's moonshine...no telling what's in that ol' still he has!
I think that the mad turkey is a "bot" - an automatic avatar. I'm not sure what the rules are for creating and unleashing these in SL, but the bird makes me want to learn how to script my own SL robots!

Stay tuned!

USC Conference: SL in Education

Recently Beeble briefly attended an 'in-world' SL conference sponsored by Educause and led by the Lindens at the Annenburg Arena at USC: "Hot Topics Discussion on Virtual Worlds". Iggy was helping out at the conference as over 100 professional educators met to discuss ways to use SL in education and to question the Lindens about upcoming possibilities. Since the moderators were going to be the only ones using voice, Iggy's job was to coach attendees how to engage without voice to prevent acoustic overload.

Though the invitations that were sent out suggested professional dress for avatars, there were many strange creatures in the arena, not the least of which was Pathfinder Linden complete with spiky black wings and a tall green hat.

To grab for my few seconds of celebrity, I bumbled up on stage to stand behind Iggy for a snapshot, and not long after he heard someone asking about the unauthorized avatar on the stage - good thing I wasn't in my original 'fuzzy' outfit!




(the tan man is super-suave digi-celebrity Ignatius Onomatopoea - I'm the pale dork behind him)