The next podcast from the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2006 features Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium. Her topic: “Gaming in Education.”

Rachel has inspired a number of changes in my life, including some recent investigations into Second Life. That exploration has had several effects: some impassioned conversation, sometimes a little less sleep than usual, and most interesting of all, a sudden rush of understanding (or at least partial understanding–mustn’t be presumptious) between me and my two children, ages 15 and 11. Sure, I IM, I blog, I Skype, I have an account on Facebook where my students poke me and write on my wall, and my online bona fides seem pretty, ah, bona around my dream team and most of my colleagues. I’ve done some twitch games, watched my son become enthralled by Guitar Hero (arena-rocking to the music I grew up with–what’s not to like about that?), paid some Continuous Partial Attention to my daughter’s Neopets activities, even hoofed it now and then with Dance Dance Revolution, where there’s a pretty good version of “Let’s Groove” that I really need to get back to. But it wasn’t until I started to get comfortable with a persistent online world and an avatar that I created, one who looks the way I’d like to look–buff, but winsomely so, and sans corrective lenses–that I began to understand something crucial of what my kids prize about their online interaction and creativity.

Listening again to Rachel’s thoughtful, funny, and sensible remarks on gaming, I realize that she prepared me to make a leap I needed to make, and that life after the leap is pretty much the way it was before, with the exception of a new, brilliant window I can suddenly see through. I won’t pretend I can recognize (or even focus on) everything I see through that window, nor will I conclude, prematurely, that everything beyond the pane is paradise. I’m pretty sure it isn’t. But for this habitual learner, the latest lesson has been fun, illuminating, intellectually stimulating, and a new avenue of contact with my children–and perhaps my students as well.

Thanks, Rachel.

Technical Note: This podcast was recorded with a Sound Projects C3 condenser microphone at the front of the room, set on a figure-8 pattern to grab audience response as well as speaker audio. The mic was powered by (and fed) a Mackie mixer, which in turn fed the line input of an Edirol R-1 digital audio recorder. Audio was captured in mp3 format at 320kbps. Post-production was done in Sound Forge 8 by converting the mp3 recording to a .wav 16 bit/44.1khz sampling rate format. If I had it all to do over again, I’d put a wireless mic on Rachel. I love the Sound Projects mic, but you’ll hear a number of level changes and a lot of off-axis miking that took a long time in post-production to get even to this condition, which I hope is listenable. The speaker really does need to be untethered, and the mic needs to follow her. Live and learn.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.0MB)

A big shout-out here to Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg, product manager at Webcast.Berkeley. Obadiah’s just recently joined the blogosphere, as I learned when his link to my blog appeared on my WordPress dashboard under “incoming links.” It’s delightful to be linked to, of course (more of what Brian Lamb calls “the power of positive narcissicism”), but it’s even more delightful to know that Obadiah is blogging. In addition to being a swell chap he’s also a vital resource for all of us, as I learned over a year ago when I consulted him for advice on setting up our own UMW Webcast series. In fact, the whole idea of a UMW Webcast series was inspired by Obadiah’s work. Doing research for a paper I was writing on Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War, I had discovered Berkeley’s webcast of a public forum featuring both Morris and Robert McNamara, the subject of the film. I was enthralled both by the forum and by the idea of putting all those resources onto the web. I immediately went back to my faculty and staff colleagues and said, “we must do this, especially for our Great Lives series.” When I got widespread agreement, I was then faced with the question of how to make it all happen–so I simply emailed the contact person at the Berkeley site, who directed me to Obadiah.

One charming phone call later, and I had all the information I needed to get the website up and running.

So here’s a public thank-you to Obadiah, and another installment in what could be (and I hope will be) the continuing saga of the growth of real school. When a mighty Research I university helps a small, public, primarily liberal-arts university get its start in webcasting, and when high-speed networked computing makes those contacts not only easy but likely, the sky gets a little bigger and blue-er. I am grateful.

Martha’s just written a wonderful blog post (“A Second Lifetime“) on Second Life. I was commenting on Martha’s blog when suddenly my comment morphed into a blog post of my own. Rather than leave the world’s longest comment, I decided to move my remarks here. They’re provisional, and I don’t have any pictures (they’re on my home desktop), but more will follow, I’m sure.

I’ll start by saying that Martha’s observations seem pretty fair to me. There’s a lot of SL that’s puzzling, a goodly amount that’s repellent, and it is discouraging to move back into a Garden of Eden only to find that we’re bringing the serpent in with us. I hadn’t looked at the user forums for anything more than technical help, so I’m interested to see that some SL folks are wondering why so much of SL culture is so impoverished or appeals to lowest-common-denominator desires.

However….

I’ve been exploring in SL for an average of about 30 minutes a day over the last 10 days. If you look at the curve, though, that average would look like 10 minutes a day until the last four or five days, when it shoots up to about 45 minutes a day. (Don’t worry–this is all at home, and in place of my listening-to-the-stereo time, alas.) Why? Because of an unplanned meeting with a stranger. After that, my in-world experience went from intriguing to a much more satisfying aesthetic and cultural experience (in the non-mature areas–Martha’s right that the, ah, other stuff is all over the place, both virtually and metaphorically).

The reason for the change? Not only conversation, though that’s part of it (my extroversion has room to play in SL). Mostly it’s because the person I met shared some landmarks with me. Suddenly I grokked something important, something that makes SL very much like RL (real life) and means that Linden Labs should not be engineering development and it’s a good thing they haven’t. It may even be a good reason why you shouldn’t be able to add a friend unless both are in-world, as that process would likely short-circuit the process I describe below.

In Real Life, most of our awareness of surroundings and resources comes from word-of-mouth. That’s horribly inefficient if one wants to compile a good shopping list quickly, but it’s incredibly efficient at making information exist in a human context. That human context makes the information meaningful. SL has demonstrated, in a rather awesome way, just what makes a society a society. It’s not just the stuff you go to see, it’s the people who tell you about the stuff you should see. That makes the stuff, when you see it, the result of sharing, not of a Google search (which of course is a bad analogy because it too is built on sharing, not just on indexing–but I digress).

The three landmarks the stranger gave me in that one encounter led me to places that were very beautiful, intriguing, and (in their way) gentle. Not busy, clangorous, or mature (at least, not aggressively so). Now SL felt like being in a storybook, or a lovingly crafted movie.

Those discoveries meant I had even more to talk to the stranger about. I then learned the trick of looking at the “picks” when I met people, or when I met a FOAF. Those are the places people say “hey, you should check this out.” Yes, some of them have been abandoned, and some you may not want to see, but others are still there in all their glory. I’ve taken a ride on a train, visited a drumming room in a castle on a volcanic island (even played drums with some other visitors, streamed in real time audio), seen new art and listened to a player piano in a treehouse, etc. You can look at people’s picks even when they’re not in-world, just by looking at their profile. (That bit may contradict some of my earlier argument, but never mind.)

And why all the replication of RL in SL? Why all the houses and sofas and so forth? Because people want to craft a space that’s theirs, an environment that’s an extension of their identity, and we ‘re all hard-wired to recognize signals of embodiment as identity cues. That’s not a good or bad thing; it’s just a thing. And it does mean that there’s an interesting boundary layer between, say, the familiarity of a porch swing and the strange exhilaration of flying around everywhere. Call it a comfort zone for inspiring lucid dreaming.

There is indeed a depressing sameness to much of what’s on offer in SL. Sex and money, sex and money, sex and money: gee, didn’t I just leave all that behind in the RL? (People are people, wherever you go.) That said, where the different things happen, there’s something quite magical the place makes possible. I’m beginning to think that one has to build to get the full experience–and that’s a good thing. If one wants to learn to build, one’s spoiled for choice: many in-world building tutorials are held every day, for free, by citizens who want to help other citizens. That’s good for Linden, of course, since they’re selling land, but still: the community creates itself by passing along its skills and knowledge.

Also, last night, my avatar was dancing to 70’s music streamed live from the host’s RL turntable/record collection. It was a party full of people I’d never met before, a party I went to on a whim, one that looked safe and interesting. I could dance along by clicking on one of the hosts, which another dancer also did, so that suddenly the three of us were dancing in formation, together, to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” In the chat, we were all cracking jokes about more cowbell, letting out text-whoops at our favorite parts of the song, acting nutty, booing the “mandatory downtime in one minute” Linden warning (there were crashes, apparently, that they were trying to fix), and in general acting the way people do at parties. The host had huge bunny slippers on. The dancemaster gave us some cool John Travolta moves, including periodic flights up into the air as we continued dancing next to the disco ball (I had requested one, and it promptly appeared). Each time a new song came on, the crowd of 10-12 dancers cheered and cracked more jokes.

It was a very strange and compelling experience. My children were watching this and were fascinated–they thought it was very cool, especially when they saw their dad’s av spinning on his head. (You’ll be sore tomorrow! the other folks told me in the chat.) Oddly, I could feel my muscles responding a little, almost as if I really were dancing.

The social aspects of play, the way communities are built and strengthened, the way in which everyone greeted me by name when I arrived (most events are public) and said farewell when I had to leave: there’s something very interesting here, with strong connections to much of what we think of when we consider telepresence and the residential college experience. I can see a fascinating horizon of possibilities here. I’m also aware that some of what I’ve described will sound silly or perhaps even dangerous to some people. I can’t see that it’s any more silly or dangerous than reading fiction or poetry–you know, stuff people just make up, out of words–or looking at paintings–what is that? just pigment on a canvas–or listening to music. It’s play, it’s culture, it’s society, it’s people. As Lear says, “Reason not the need.”

A modest recommendation to NMC from a SL newbie: don’t make all the campus structures institutional meeting places. Build some dorms, rooms where we can hang out in environments that reflect some idiosyncracy.

Our first Faculty Academy 2006 session after the general welcome was a plenary panel discussion/presentation on blogging at UMW. Session leader Steve Greenlaw enticed, coaxed, and otherwise motivated a whole raft of bloggers from many disciplines and both campuses into sharing how they’ve used (or in one case, refused to use) blogs in their teaching and learning.

The results, as you’ll hear, are quite varied. Taken together, they reveal for me a fascinating record of a particular moment in the life of what is still a new IT tool in many learning environments. My staff and I are finding that the idea of a blog is surprisingly resilient and capacious, and that a WordPress blog (for example) can be scaled from a personal journal to a full-blown content management system. That’s not just our discovery, of course; others in the blogosphere report that blogs can be the front end to a complete e-portfolio. I suppose my own fascination is that the notion at the heart of blogging–the narrative of a mind, linked to other narratives and cognitive encounters–turns out to be another way of thinking about thinking itself.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (35.3MB)

Funny how these changes creep up on you, and then one day: another world.

I’m teaching a summer school class on “Film, Text, and Culture,” and yesterday a little thing happened with big implications. We’re on the Little Women unit right now, reading the book and watching three film adaptations (1933, 1949, 1994). Yesterday was a group presentation day: one group presented on two critical/theoretical essays concerning adaptation, and the other presented on two critical/theoretical essays concerning feminism. One of the essays in the latter group argued that Rudolph Valentino’s subject position in film was unique in relation to female viewers. (That’s a crude summary, but it will do for my purposes here.)

On the preceding day, one student had asked me about an image of Valentino mentioned in the essay. I didn’t know or have a copy of that image, unfortunately, though I did find a large photograph in a film history book, which I duly brought in to class and handed around. That’s a perfectly fine and teacherly thing to do, but it clearly meant I didn’t understand something about the Internet in June of 2006, for the student’s presentation featured an actual clip from a Valentino movie, one she had found on YouTube.

Although I’ve used YouTube myself many times, once even in a professional presentation, I hadn’t even thought to direct her there.

Clearly this example says something about my own need to think more carefully and comprehensively about web-based resources. At the same time, it prompts me to reflect on the fact that YouTube was just starting up midway through last fall’s semester, when I was teaching my Intro to Film Studies class, and when I might have made the mental connection earlier. The larger point is that we’re witnessing not just the now-routine Internet phenomenon of major new resources, but also massively and unpredictably scaled repositories of public domain materials that are vital information resources for ourselves and our students. As the information abundance spreads, and if we are brave and curious enough to embrace it, we will find our own serendipity fields dramatically expanded. And we will find our students bringing archival gems into the classroom, casually and crucially. At that point, the professor’s role as advanced learner, one who models the “ah, what do we have here?” that’s the result and nursery of a good education, will be explicit and essential as never before.

Bring it on.

I don’t have a very elegant beginning crafted here. That’s a shame, but it would be an even bigger shame not to begin at all, so here’s the first podcast from the 2006 UMW Faculty Academy on Instructional Technologies. This lunchtime session on May 17 was entitled “A Fantastico Expedition: Massive Web Innovation on $6.95 a Month,” and it featured our five UMW Instructional Technology Specialists: Martha Burtis, Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn, Jim Groom, Andy Rush, and Jerry Slezak.

This was a great session for many reasons, and on many levels. Rather than try to describe them, I’ll let you listen and hear for yourself. I do want to say a special thank-you to Jon Udell, our Faculty Academy keynote speaker, who has very generously made this session the subject of both an InfoWorld column and a blog. These pieces are extraordinary in themselves and would be in my “save forever” category even if they didn’t feature the work we’re doing here.

I found nearly all of Faculty Academy deeply inspiring this year. And there were many moments that were truly magical. You’ll hear some of them here. There are more on the way.

I also need to say that these Instructional Technology Specialists are remarkable folks to work with. Their intelligence, wit, and imagination inspire me on a daily basis. I want to say something very intense and profound at this point, but if I do I’m likely to short out my computer (they’ll understand why), so I’ll simply say that I am humbled and grateful to be among them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (31.0MB)

Oook writes admiringly of this post from Stephen Downes, so I immediately went to read it. I agree wholeheartedly with 50% of what Stephen has written, and disagree violently with the other half.

In terms of the way people live their lives, it may be true that there’s no point to argumentation. But that’s regrettable, and it’s the fault of people, not of argumentation. That’s another way of saying that argumentation should *not* be pointless.

Polemic may be pointless, in that it merely solidifies convictions on both sides of the debate, and perhaps bullies a few others into taking the speaker’s/writer’s side. But polemic is not the same thing as argumentation.

I fully agree that cognitive apprenticeship is at the heart of real school. But reason, rigorous argumentation, must be there as well. As should hilarity, passion, dogged commitment, and a richly integrative vision.

If all we can do is explain our beliefs to each other, how are we to learn? Or perhaps Stephen has brought the notion of argumentation in through the back door, so to speak, in his notion of a true, honest, and forthright explanation. Does not the very act of communication imply a request that we consider his statement and, if we judge it sound (not just agreeable), agree with it or learn from it? Picking up on Ron’s comment on Stephen’s post, I too hope that my students will not simply say “that’s what Dr. C. believes” but will actually engage with it, argue their own position, and teach me something in response. There have been several occasions in which my students’ arguments about topics of class discussion have caused me to change my mind in some fundamental ways. And of course I seek to change their minds as well, when that’s appropriate, always holding in our class meta-mind the larger principles of openness, fairness, and rigorous analysis.

I understand that by responding to Stephen’s post I have in some respects failed the test, though in writing that I’m being harsher than I feel. I do think, however, that the mind and meta-mind I’m trying to articulate form the paradoxical, vital reality of human interaction.

That’s the punch line to a joke my dear mother-in-law told me many years ago. “Why do broadcasters have such small hands? Because you have to have wee paws for station identification.” Of course that joke, like jokes about typewriters and broken records, will need footnoting as the baby-boomers die out, but I’ll laugh even if it dates me. So there.

That said, I feel compelled to put a placeholder here to say that I have many things I want to explore about the recent Faculty Academy, about what I’m reading, about where my thoughts are taking me these days, about my new citizenship in Second Life, about last night’s episode of House and the ethics at the heart of epistemology (and vice-versa), but I can’t yet. Too many loose ends at this moment, too many projects I need to push a little farther along. And then there’s my job, too. All of which leads me to ask my five (or is it six? I lose count) loyal readers to bear with me for a while as I get some clear space to resume my natterings here.

I really want to push hard at some of the ideas and questions emerging for me out of the last few months, perhaps even the last year.

Stay tuned.

The event is over, yes, in terms of strict chronology. In other respects, I think we may have just matriculated into a vital, “real school” course of study. More on this idea soon. For now, I want to thank Jon Udell, Rachel Smith, Cyprien Lomas, and my astonishing staff of Instructional Technology Specialists for helping to shape and deliver this experience. You take my breath away.

Tonight I picked Cyprien Lomas up at National Airport in D.C. and ferried him to the motel near the University. Jerry did the same for Rachel Smith. Tomorrow we get started with the first of two days of Faculty Academy 2006.

We’ve been working toward this event for months, and to our great delight, we have about 110 folks already registered to attend and nearly forty presentations scheduled, including sessions by our special guests and by us in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. We’re going to do our best to record and podcast all the sessions, and there’s a conference blog and a conference wiki so you can all follow along.

I’ll be blogging here, on the conference blog, and on The Smooth Elephant, and tracking my comments with CoComment. At least, that’s what I hope to do. Given the way these conferences often take on a ferocious life of their own, you may not hear from me again until Thursday, as I come down from what I’m sure will be an utterly exhilarating two days. But perhaps I’ll have the presence of mind to sneak in a few words here and there.

Viva Faculty Academy!