CPCC 3D Campus / SLC3A few current events - Around Turkey Day 2006
When i logged in to SL there was this link to the SL news: http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/22/continuing-our-support-for-in-world-education/
which evidently relates to Linden Labs (LL) compensating (or not) people to teach within SL. Evidently it's about those who act as mentors and teachers to all users, as opposed to folks like us working to develop courses.
Which, as my mind churns, highlights yet again the tremendous potential of this platform. If we talk about teaching and learning, what could be more like the real learning process than real life? What could be more like real life (in terms of simulation) than something like SL? So if we can create experiences, then we'll really be on to something.
In other news, Friday around 115pm there was an article on NPR - can't remember talk of the nation- or probably on the media...
While looking, i found SL's list of articles: http://secondlife.com/news/ which is awefully weak- there have to be hundreds of articles in the last few weeks alone... so there must be another page, or they just don't have anyone looking very hard...
So a search on NPR second life took me first to this article which is from earlier in november - what i noted immediately is that it said, "Second Life has built a booming virtual economy around some little animated characters called avatars."
This is interesting, because, whether intended or not, "little" in this case sounds derogatory, as if i were to say, you go have lunch with your little friend, or go watch football with your little wide-screen TV. They may have meant little in terms of small... but you wouldn't say, "I built a little webpage" even though all webpages should fit onto a 17" monitor..." So the battle we are going to have to continue to fight is getting our language not to belittle the environment - it's not a "game" but a "simulated virtual environment" - i wouldn't even say it's a virtual world just yet, though perhaps that's being overly limiting. Unfortunately, semantics are critical when we deal with things like funding, public opinion, etc... So for those on this project, please put on your PR hats so we are really presenting the benefits of what we are trying to do.
So where was I? Ok, the NPR article: This was from JANUARY, decades ago in SL time... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4488103 but still not the one i heard...
But i found this interesting bit about stats: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/17/more-second-life-stats/
And evidently On the Media covered this before: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/09/on_the_media_on.html
Still looking... OK, so it wasn't On the Media, it was Here and Now... progress... AHA! http://www.here-now.org/shows/2006/11/20061124_1.asp
Now i'm not sure that this article is all that much more than any of the others- but what's interesting is they started out by talking about Virtual worlds in general, not specifically SL. Then at another point, they introduced Pathfinder Linden, (http://zero.hastypastry.net/pathfinder/) who is John Lester in real life- but referred to him as Pathfinder when introducing him, and then the other name when finishing- so if you didn't know about name aliases, it would have been confused. She also made a major gaffe, by referring to Pathfinder as the creator of SL; John Lester is not the creator Philip Rosedale is - but hey, that's the media, huh?
Other notables? The host (Robin Young?) speaks with David Weinberger, the fellow who runs Games for Change in SL. She probes about why people would put so much of their life into a virtual environment, and he has a great comeback at one point.
Here's the dialogue:
Host: "What does that do to a community of people - a sense of community? Does it isolate people? "
David Weinberger: "You mean the vibrant US communities where we all go out every evening and we spend hours and hours on the sidewalks talking with our friends engaged in deep conversation? - That community? That doesn't exist? That's the fantasy" (while the others chuckle).
He finishes with some more interesting commentary: "This is an environment that we've made of ourselves that's intensely social... it's differently social.. [sic] this is not a video game dungeons and dragons video game where you slash and cut [sic] this is entirely populated by people projecting themselves and their interests and their passsions and their senses of humor and creativity into a terroritoy that we get to build"
He also mentioned that Leo Burnett has a world-wide distributed staff, and that they use SL for business meetings - worth looking into a bit more. More so since Farhad is pushing us to have some of our staff meetings in SL.
It was also puzzling that she mentioned over a million users, when it's actually a lot more than a million - 1.6 actually, this day after the story.
Anyway, good stuff out there.
They key to all of this is that this is not a REPLACEMENT for real life- but it brings richness to interaction with those in other places, and incredible possibilities when it comes to creating things or environments that would be difficult or impossible to deal with in the physical world.
d.i.
which evidently relates to Linden Labs (LL) compensating (or not) people to teach within SL. Evidently it's about those who act as mentors and teachers to all users, as opposed to folks like us working to develop courses.
Which, as my mind churns, highlights yet again the tremendous potential of this platform. If we talk about teaching and learning, what could be more like the real learning process than real life? What could be more like real life (in terms of simulation) than something like SL? So if we can create experiences, then we'll really be on to something.
In other news, Friday around 115pm there was an article on NPR - can't remember talk of the nation- or probably on the media...
While looking, i found SL's list of articles: http://secondlife.com/news/ which is awefully weak- there have to be hundreds of articles in the last few weeks alone... so there must be another page, or they just don't have anyone looking very hard...
So a search on NPR second life took me first to this article which is from earlier in november - what i noted immediately is that it said, "Second Life has built a booming virtual economy around some little animated characters called avatars."
This is interesting, because, whether intended or not, "little" in this case sounds derogatory, as if i were to say, you go have lunch with your little friend, or go watch football with your little wide-screen TV. They may have meant little in terms of small... but you wouldn't say, "I built a little webpage" even though all webpages should fit onto a 17" monitor..." So the battle we are going to have to continue to fight is getting our language not to belittle the environment - it's not a "game" but a "simulated virtual environment" - i wouldn't even say it's a virtual world just yet, though perhaps that's being overly limiting. Unfortunately, semantics are critical when we deal with things like funding, public opinion, etc... So for those on this project, please put on your PR hats so we are really presenting the benefits of what we are trying to do.
So where was I? Ok, the NPR article: This was from JANUARY, decades ago in SL time... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4488103 but still not the one i heard...
But i found this interesting bit about stats: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/17/more-second-life-stats/
And evidently On the Media covered this before: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/09/on_the_media_on.html
Still looking... OK, so it wasn't On the Media, it was Here and Now... progress... AHA! http://www.here-now.org/shows/2006/11/20061124_1.asp
Now i'm not sure that this article is all that much more than any of the others- but what's interesting is they started out by talking about Virtual worlds in general, not specifically SL. Then at another point, they introduced Pathfinder Linden, (http://zero.hastypastry.net/pathfinder/) who is John Lester in real life- but referred to him as Pathfinder when introducing him, and then the other name when finishing- so if you didn't know about name aliases, it would have been confused. She also made a major gaffe, by referring to Pathfinder as the creator of SL; John Lester is not the creator Philip Rosedale is - but hey, that's the media, huh?
Other notables? The host (Robin Young?) speaks with David Weinberger, the fellow who runs Games for Change in SL. She probes about why people would put so much of their life into a virtual environment, and he has a great comeback at one point.
Here's the dialogue:
Host: "What does that do to a community of people - a sense of community? Does it isolate people? "
David Weinberger: "You mean the vibrant US communities where we all go out every evening and we spend hours and hours on the sidewalks talking with our friends engaged in deep conversation? - That community? That doesn't exist? That's the fantasy" (while the others chuckle).
He finishes with some more interesting commentary: "This is an environment that we've made of ourselves that's intensely social... it's differently social.. [sic] this is not a video game dungeons and dragons video game where you slash and cut [sic] this is entirely populated by people projecting themselves and their interests and their passsions and their senses of humor and creativity into a terroritoy that we get to build"
He also mentioned that Leo Burnett has a world-wide distributed staff, and that they use SL for business meetings - worth looking into a bit more. More so since Farhad is pushing us to have some of our staff meetings in SL.
It was also puzzling that she mentioned over a million users, when it's actually a lot more than a million - 1.6 actually, this day after the story.
Anyway, good stuff out there.
They key to all of this is that this is not a REPLACEMENT for real life- but it brings richness to interaction with those in other places, and incredible possibilities when it comes to creating things or environments that would be difficult or impossible to deal with in the physical world.
d.i.
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