I really, really want to denote progressive thinking, as in, continuing to progress with Web 2.0. But I cannot stop returning to “plus ca change…”. Web 2.0 has taught me new tricks and methodologies with the internet and now I am the guru in my life outside Swinburne with nearly everyone in my ken, even my two sisters who are both IT experts. One was in computers in 1965 when they were the size of a large room.
I am a genius almost, or at least really clever, because I am au fait with the “communication-with-the-world and outer space aspect of the web – blogs, flickr, you tube and you name it. To them I have defied their view of me as a sound interpreter of most things modern as new/repackaged versions of the old ways – but with bells on. However, I am becoming a bit of a pariah among my family and friends in dealing with blogs and facebook (the latter I just did the 23 things exercise as I had to).
Where is my well- and often- espoused scepticism?
As Kath would say …I have 3 things to say, or she says something like that:
1 I have forgotten or am now ignoring a lot of what I learnt about the 23 things I had no interest in – google docs, Facebook, LibraryThing, RSS feeds. I admire my colleagues’ testing of the tools we have learnt about - Library 2.0, or why I’m not running off to join the cult just yet; Wikis: Not all that wiki
2 I am feeling like I am about to jilt 23 things. Like many quick relationships, I got a tremendous, and I repeat, tremendous boost out of my new-found knowledge through 23 t and I loved participating with my colleagues in the first flushes of action. I also loved the aura I had, around my family, etc. when I dropped words like blog (for heavens sake) and flickr. Admittedly I sounded like a bit of a spruiker, just as friends and family hyperbolize like sales people/ keep pestering me to get Foxtel to open up a whole new world. I say I do not want or need Foxtel's World Movies or Ovation and to watch more Television. They say I would love it. They seem to ignore that I can watch TV on our old 25 year old model (2nd TV for a program not liked by one of us) and can watch old movies late at night or on the DVD player if desired and I like going to the cinema to watch new movies. We have never recorded TV programs, because we did not bother to find out how, but mainly because we would not find time to watch the recorded TV program which was considered a bit like yesterday's newspaper. While Foxtel is not new, I feel the same lack of interest in new phenomena such as 20/20 cricket or new AFL teams in Western Sydney, coffee chains or popular romantic movies – The Enchanted.
I did love Once and I am so proud to see the song from that movie won the Academy award. I felt like a winner with the actual winners.
3 I see that there are millions, if not billions of people who do not need Web 2.0 and millions of these come to Libraries and get what they want, as librarians have been assisting people do this forever, pre and post Web 2.0.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Kluster: People who do online networking get it.
http://kluster.com/
Can Swinburne streak ahead with a similar forum and radicalise the "suggestion box"?
We know that rewards concentrate the minds of our students and staff. Kaufman's program of rewards is based on using a tokens-voting system to determine the best idea worth "prototyping".
There is a plethora of items on the internet about Kluster. We would be wise to keep a very close watching brief on Kluster and Kaufman.
***********************************************************
Some excerpts from the launch of Kluster:
"We are going to allow all the people out there that have new ideas, or thoughts on how to improve something, or expertise on developing concepts to finally realize their potential."
"Every new idea will meet its skeptics. Radical concepts, however, often take a greater amount of time to justify and coax critics onto its side - and Kluster was no exception….. A normal response is, “But, that’s not how this kind of thing is usually done.” Of course this isn’t how it’s usually done! That’s why it’s effective, exciting, and worth while. If this were normal, we wouldn’t be here."
"Ultimately, Kluster is about connecting people and busting open the vacuum so often used in the idea development and evolution process. "We are going to allow all the people out there that have new ideas, or thoughts on how to improve something, or expertise on developing concepts to finally realize their potential. We are breaking down the usual barriers to consumer influence and entrepreneurship"
Ben Kaufman at the launch of Kluster.
**********************************************************************
From the "Without Thought" website: http://withoutthought.wordpress.com/
"Watt next?
2008 looks set to be the year of the ‘WE’. Today, Tech Crunch announced the launch of a new online product called Kluster. Kluster is designed to help companies take advantage of a sea of on-line talent and may have a solution to one of the chief concerns bugging democratization; ‘What’s in it for me?’. Kluster appears to have an answer to that quandary with a currency system referred to as ‘Watts’. Tech Crunch quotes CEO Ben Kaufman
“Our Watt system is like a currency. You get a certain amount of Watts. As you do more things you get more Watts. Instead of voting on ideas, you invest your Watts in concepts you like.”
"You have the better brand, the brand built by the people," Kaufman said. "The power of community is the best protection of an idea."
Can Swinburne streak ahead with a similar forum and radicalise the "suggestion box"?
We know that rewards concentrate the minds of our students and staff. Kaufman's program of rewards is based on using a tokens-voting system to determine the best idea worth "prototyping".
There is a plethora of items on the internet about Kluster. We would be wise to keep a very close watching brief on Kluster and Kaufman.
***********************************************************
Some excerpts from the launch of Kluster:
"We are going to allow all the people out there that have new ideas, or thoughts on how to improve something, or expertise on developing concepts to finally realize their potential."
"Every new idea will meet its skeptics. Radical concepts, however, often take a greater amount of time to justify and coax critics onto its side - and Kluster was no exception….. A normal response is, “But, that’s not how this kind of thing is usually done.” Of course this isn’t how it’s usually done! That’s why it’s effective, exciting, and worth while. If this were normal, we wouldn’t be here."
"Ultimately, Kluster is about connecting people and busting open the vacuum so often used in the idea development and evolution process. "We are going to allow all the people out there that have new ideas, or thoughts on how to improve something, or expertise on developing concepts to finally realize their potential. We are breaking down the usual barriers to consumer influence and entrepreneurship"
Ben Kaufman at the launch of Kluster.
**********************************************************************
From the "Without Thought" website: http://withoutthought.wordpress.com/
"Watt next?
2008 looks set to be the year of the ‘WE’. Today, Tech Crunch announced the launch of a new online product called Kluster. Kluster is designed to help companies take advantage of a sea of on-line talent and may have a solution to one of the chief concerns bugging democratization; ‘What’s in it for me?’. Kluster appears to have an answer to that quandary with a currency system referred to as ‘Watts’. Tech Crunch quotes CEO Ben Kaufman
“Our Watt system is like a currency. You get a certain amount of Watts. As you do more things you get more Watts. Instead of voting on ideas, you invest your Watts in concepts you like.”
"You have the better brand, the brand built by the people," Kaufman said. "The power of community is the best protection of an idea."
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Beautiful physics and the magnificent internet
For those who are interested in on line university forums; physics; MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) approach to their iconic lecturers/professors, this is a piece from the New York Times, 19 December 2007.
I have a link to the paper and have put this on my blog as it is fascinating on a number of levels to all those who love the internet.
Education
University Lectures Are Going Global
By SARA RIMER
Published: December 19, 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
His videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail inbox with praise.
“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.
“I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes,” wrote Steve Boigon, 62, a old florist from San Diego.
Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the exuberant panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of You-Tube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.
In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet, nerd safari garb, he shoots a stuffed monkey wearing bulletproof vest with a cannon loaded with a golf ball, to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.
He rides a fire extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.
He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that line-up constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford. Last week, Yale put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.
M.I.T. recently expanded on the success of its on-line classes by opening a site aimed specifically at high school students and teachers.
Judging from his fan e-mail, Professor Lewin, who is among those featured on the new site, appeals to students of all ages. Some of his correspondents compare him to the late Richard Feynman, the free-spirited bongo-playing Nobel laureate who popularized physics through his books, lectures and television appearances.
With his halo of wiry grayish-brown hair, his tortoiseshell glasses and his intensity, Professor Lewin is the iconic brilliant scientist. But like Julia Child, he is at once larger than life and totally accessible.
“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he has created.
The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.
“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.
“Hi, Prof. Lewin!!” a fan who identified himself as a 17-year-old from China wrote. “I love your inspiring lectures and I love MIT!!!”
A fan who said he was a physics teacher from Iraq gushed: “You are now my Scientific Father. In spite of the bad occupation and war against my lovely IRAQ, you made me love USA because you are there and MIT is there.”
Professor Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. “Teaching is my life,” he said.
The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said teaching required introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”
He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.
“Clarity is the word,” he said.
Fun also matters. In another lecture on pendulums, he stands back against the wall, holding the steel ball at the end of the pendulum just beneath his chin. He has just demonstrated how potential energy turns into kinetic energy by sending the ball flying across the stage, shattering a pane of glass he had bolted to the wall.
Now he will demonstrate the conservation of energy.
“I am such a strong believer in the conservation of energy that I am willing to risk my life for it,” he says. “If I am wrong, then this will be my last lecture.”
He closes his eyes, and releases the ball. It flies back and forth, stopping just short of his chin.
“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts. “And I’m still alive!”
Chasing rainbows hooked Mr. Boigon, the San Diego florist. He was vacationing in Hawaii when he noticed the rainbow outside his hotel every afternoon. Why were the colors always in the same order?
When he returned home, Mr. Boigon said in a telephone interview, he Googled rainbows. Within moments, he was whisked to M.I.T. Lecture Hall No. 26-10. Professor Lewin was in front of a couple hundred students.
“All of you have looked at rainbows,” he begins. “But very few of you have ever seen one. Seeing is different than looking. Today we are going to see a rainbow.”
For 50 minutes, he bounds across the stage, writing equations on the blackboard and rhapsodizing about the “amazing” and “beautiful” physics of rainbows. He explains how the colors always appear in the same order because of how light refracts and reflects in the water droplets.
For the finale, he creates a rainbow by shining a bright light into a glass sphere containing a single drop of water.
“There it is!” Professor Lewin cries.
“Your life will never be the same,” he tells his students. “Because of your knowledge, you will be able to see way more than just the beauty of the bows that everyone else can see.”
“Professor Lewin was correct,” Mr. Boigon wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter. “He made me SEE.. and it has changed my life for the better!!”
“I had never taken a course in physics, or calculus, or differential equations,” he wrote to Professor Lewin. “ Now I have done all that in order to be able to follow your lectures. I knew the name Isaac Newton, but nothing about Newtonian Mechanics. I had heard of the likes of Einstein, Galileo, Keppler, Bohr but didn’t have a clue on earth as to what they were all about.
“I walk down the street analyzing the force of a boy on skateboard or the recoil of a carpenter using a nail gun. Thank you with all my heart.”
I have a link to the paper and have put this on my blog as it is fascinating on a number of levels to all those who love the internet.
Education
University Lectures Are Going Global
By SARA RIMER
Published: December 19, 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
His videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail inbox with praise.
“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.
“I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes,” wrote Steve Boigon, 62, a old florist from San Diego.
Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the exuberant panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of You-Tube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.
In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet, nerd safari garb, he shoots a stuffed monkey wearing bulletproof vest with a cannon loaded with a golf ball, to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.
He rides a fire extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.
He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that line-up constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford. Last week, Yale put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.
M.I.T. recently expanded on the success of its on-line classes by opening a site aimed specifically at high school students and teachers.
Judging from his fan e-mail, Professor Lewin, who is among those featured on the new site, appeals to students of all ages. Some of his correspondents compare him to the late Richard Feynman, the free-spirited bongo-playing Nobel laureate who popularized physics through his books, lectures and television appearances.
With his halo of wiry grayish-brown hair, his tortoiseshell glasses and his intensity, Professor Lewin is the iconic brilliant scientist. But like Julia Child, he is at once larger than life and totally accessible.
“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he has created.
The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.
“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.
“Hi, Prof. Lewin!!” a fan who identified himself as a 17-year-old from China wrote. “I love your inspiring lectures and I love MIT!!!”
A fan who said he was a physics teacher from Iraq gushed: “You are now my Scientific Father. In spite of the bad occupation and war against my lovely IRAQ, you made me love USA because you are there and MIT is there.”
Professor Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. “Teaching is my life,” he said.
The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said teaching required introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”
He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.
“Clarity is the word,” he said.
Fun also matters. In another lecture on pendulums, he stands back against the wall, holding the steel ball at the end of the pendulum just beneath his chin. He has just demonstrated how potential energy turns into kinetic energy by sending the ball flying across the stage, shattering a pane of glass he had bolted to the wall.
Now he will demonstrate the conservation of energy.
“I am such a strong believer in the conservation of energy that I am willing to risk my life for it,” he says. “If I am wrong, then this will be my last lecture.”
He closes his eyes, and releases the ball. It flies back and forth, stopping just short of his chin.
“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts. “And I’m still alive!”
Chasing rainbows hooked Mr. Boigon, the San Diego florist. He was vacationing in Hawaii when he noticed the rainbow outside his hotel every afternoon. Why were the colors always in the same order?
When he returned home, Mr. Boigon said in a telephone interview, he Googled rainbows. Within moments, he was whisked to M.I.T. Lecture Hall No. 26-10. Professor Lewin was in front of a couple hundred students.
“All of you have looked at rainbows,” he begins. “But very few of you have ever seen one. Seeing is different than looking. Today we are going to see a rainbow.”
For 50 minutes, he bounds across the stage, writing equations on the blackboard and rhapsodizing about the “amazing” and “beautiful” physics of rainbows. He explains how the colors always appear in the same order because of how light refracts and reflects in the water droplets.
For the finale, he creates a rainbow by shining a bright light into a glass sphere containing a single drop of water.
“There it is!” Professor Lewin cries.
“Your life will never be the same,” he tells his students. “Because of your knowledge, you will be able to see way more than just the beauty of the bows that everyone else can see.”
“Professor Lewin was correct,” Mr. Boigon wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter. “He made me SEE.. and it has changed my life for the better!!”
“I had never taken a course in physics, or calculus, or differential equations,” he wrote to Professor Lewin. “ Now I have done all that in order to be able to follow your lectures. I knew the name Isaac Newton, but nothing about Newtonian Mechanics. I had heard of the likes of Einstein, Galileo, Keppler, Bohr but didn’t have a clue on earth as to what they were all about.
“I walk down the street analyzing the force of a boy on skateboard or the recoil of a carpenter using a nail gun. Thank you with all my heart.”
Monday, December 10, 2007
This is what I think
Help me in my work?
No
How can the Library use the technologies to improve services?
How much money can we spend? I think that services available through web 2.0 can be offered and our public will be impressed, but how many staff can be allocated, how many computers and how much space in an incredibly tight timetable of events?
How can 23 things program be improved for future use?
I am tossing up whether to recommend that the program be repackaged to leave out some of the esoteric technologies which have a limited audience, within many library staff and probably will not help with our public profile one iota. While we all “had” to look at items of no or limited interest, such as igoogle pages, del.ic.ious, social bookmarking, myspace/ facebook, at least we have been made aware that this is information we can live without. On the other hand, we still had to invest our time into looking at them. The “one stop shop” or one size fits all has limitations, even if only these are assessed as leading to cynicism and a “ticking the box” mentality.
Continued blogging?
I shall keep blogging as I use the program for thinking out aloud and putting thoughts on paper.
The absolute best thing about 23 things is that I have learnt not to prejudge and to give “new” technology a go.
I am so impressed with my new skills and new reputation for being a geek. I can talk (to the innocent) authoritatively about using flickr to sort photos – the limitations and the benefits. I do so like that look of admiration at my knowledge.
No
How can the Library use the technologies to improve services?
How much money can we spend? I think that services available through web 2.0 can be offered and our public will be impressed, but how many staff can be allocated, how many computers and how much space in an incredibly tight timetable of events?
How can 23 things program be improved for future use?
I am tossing up whether to recommend that the program be repackaged to leave out some of the esoteric technologies which have a limited audience, within many library staff and probably will not help with our public profile one iota. While we all “had” to look at items of no or limited interest, such as igoogle pages, del.ic.ious, social bookmarking, myspace/ facebook, at least we have been made aware that this is information we can live without. On the other hand, we still had to invest our time into looking at them. The “one stop shop” or one size fits all has limitations, even if only these are assessed as leading to cynicism and a “ticking the box” mentality.
Continued blogging?
I shall keep blogging as I use the program for thinking out aloud and putting thoughts on paper.
The absolute best thing about 23 things is that I have learnt not to prejudge and to give “new” technology a go.
I am so impressed with my new skills and new reputation for being a geek. I can talk (to the innocent) authoritatively about using flickr to sort photos – the limitations and the benefits. I do so like that look of admiration at my knowledge.
Second Life where you do not go to "get a life"
I confess I have been cynical before I undertook a few of the 23 things tasks. I have since posted some items about how I have been surprised at the excellence of many of the programs. My willingness to overcome suspicion has led me to be more open, but not to atavars…
I read the wiki entries and scoffed at several items:
"• Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another.
• The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.[6] Second Life's virtual currency is the Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for real world currencies in a marketplace consisting of residents, Linden Lab and real life companies.
• Second Life also offers the opportunity for artists to go beyond verisimilitude, to create spaces and explore ideas that don't exist or are actually unknowable and unverifiable in the real life, such the depiction of Purgatory as a train station in which souls await reincarnation in Thursday's Fictions in Second Life
• The modeling tools from Second Life allow the artists also to create new forms of art, that in many ways are not possible in real life due to physical constraints or high associated costs.. [29]"
*********************************************
This is make believe and it is NOT REAL and it has to be done over the internet, sitting at a computer. What about real exercise or interaction with people, the ones who you see everyday? I watched the Murdoch University SL introduction. It reminded me of an introduction to activities at kindergarten for new parents and the children get to wear wings.
I understand the possibilities for learning as distinct from mere escaping. I accept that for all time, people have removed themselves to other places to escape dealing with humans, as in hermits. To escape for my generation, we went to the movies then came home and read. The rest of the time we played hopscotch, travelled the lanes looking for fruit trees overhanging, to pick/pinch apricots or almonds. We even went to imaginary land via Monopoly. Some of the above descriptions in Wiki reminded me of playing Monopoly - buying real estate with fake money, which we fought over and even stole from our successful competitor’s pile, sister usually.
The real difference for me is the interaction on SL is without a human face, though the human mind is very obvious.
Then I watched the introduction to Ohio University’s SL: .video
I am impressed with Ohio University’s use of SL as another platform for learning. I tried to look at the gallery of artworks, but could not locate the exhibits. I think they are real ones. Some of Ohio’ s games are designed by MIT and are used to encourage group learning and the study of difficult science concepts:
"• The VITAL Lab at Ohio University is working on enabling tools and technologies to help instructors and students be more effective in 3-D online learning environments. Our initial successes include the now publicly accessible Ohio University Second Life campus and a number of learning aids for college, high school, and middle school students. We look forward to expanding our portfolio of learning tools to cover more classes for more students.
• Ohio University educators are holding classes in the virtual world. Katherine Milton, director of the College of Fine Arts' Aesthetic Technologies Lab, teaches an experimental media class that meets once a week in the real world and once a week in Second Life. Mostly new to this virtual world, the seniors and graduate students are examining it as a both a venue for performance and art, and as a platform for creative expression.
• Milton says the goal is not to recreate our "offline" environment, but to find ways to create dynamic content and experiences that reach beyond it. "Second Life has elements of the physical world as reference points, but the real opportunity is in creating viscerally evocative and emotionally immersive works, experiences and environments specific to this platform," Milton said.
• OUWB created its island to give users of its online graduate degree programs and certificate programs another way to access learning content. The group is also researching how virtual worlds can be more effectively used to create engaging learning experiences.
As part of a $1.7 million National Science Foundation grant, Russ College graduate students are working with area middle school science teachers to design interactive video games that will help children grasp hard-to-learn science concepts. "
************************************************************
So Ohio University has showed me the glories of SL and I did not see a wing, though I did see people flying
I read the wiki entries and scoffed at several items:
"• Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another.
• The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.[6] Second Life's virtual currency is the Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for real world currencies in a marketplace consisting of residents, Linden Lab and real life companies.
• Second Life also offers the opportunity for artists to go beyond verisimilitude, to create spaces and explore ideas that don't exist or are actually unknowable and unverifiable in the real life, such the depiction of Purgatory as a train station in which souls await reincarnation in Thursday's Fictions in Second Life
• The modeling tools from Second Life allow the artists also to create new forms of art, that in many ways are not possible in real life due to physical constraints or high associated costs.. [29]"
*********************************************
This is make believe and it is NOT REAL and it has to be done over the internet, sitting at a computer. What about real exercise or interaction with people, the ones who you see everyday? I watched the Murdoch University SL introduction. It reminded me of an introduction to activities at kindergarten for new parents and the children get to wear wings.
I understand the possibilities for learning as distinct from mere escaping. I accept that for all time, people have removed themselves to other places to escape dealing with humans, as in hermits. To escape for my generation, we went to the movies then came home and read. The rest of the time we played hopscotch, travelled the lanes looking for fruit trees overhanging, to pick/pinch apricots or almonds. We even went to imaginary land via Monopoly. Some of the above descriptions in Wiki reminded me of playing Monopoly - buying real estate with fake money, which we fought over and even stole from our successful competitor’s pile, sister usually.
The real difference for me is the interaction on SL is without a human face, though the human mind is very obvious.
Then I watched the introduction to Ohio University’s SL: .video
I am impressed with Ohio University’s use of SL as another platform for learning. I tried to look at the gallery of artworks, but could not locate the exhibits. I think they are real ones. Some of Ohio’ s games are designed by MIT and are used to encourage group learning and the study of difficult science concepts:
"• The VITAL Lab at Ohio University is working on enabling tools and technologies to help instructors and students be more effective in 3-D online learning environments. Our initial successes include the now publicly accessible Ohio University Second Life campus and a number of learning aids for college, high school, and middle school students. We look forward to expanding our portfolio of learning tools to cover more classes for more students.
• Ohio University educators are holding classes in the virtual world. Katherine Milton, director of the College of Fine Arts' Aesthetic Technologies Lab, teaches an experimental media class that meets once a week in the real world and once a week in Second Life. Mostly new to this virtual world, the seniors and graduate students are examining it as a both a venue for performance and art, and as a platform for creative expression.
• Milton says the goal is not to recreate our "offline" environment, but to find ways to create dynamic content and experiences that reach beyond it. "Second Life has elements of the physical world as reference points, but the real opportunity is in creating viscerally evocative and emotionally immersive works, experiences and environments specific to this platform," Milton said.
• OUWB created its island to give users of its online graduate degree programs and certificate programs another way to access learning content. The group is also researching how virtual worlds can be more effectively used to create engaging learning experiences.
As part of a $1.7 million National Science Foundation grant, Russ College graduate students are working with area middle school science teachers to design interactive video games that will help children grasp hard-to-learn science concepts. "
************************************************************
So Ohio University has showed me the glories of SL and I did not see a wing, though I did see people flying
Sunday, December 9, 2007
I tried cheezburger, following Tom's prompt
walk?
I practised links - learnt from Shaun.
I shall try again without the peripheral bit to post the cheezburgered photo
I practised links - learnt from Shaun.
I shall try again without the peripheral bit to post the cheezburgered photo
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Shaun showed me how
reading
I thought only the real cognoscente/dab hand/master knew how to put in live links. But Sean showed me how and now I can do it.
Yes
I thought only the real cognoscente/dab hand/master knew how to put in live links. But Sean showed me how and now I can do it.
Yes
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