sl again

People are generally afraid to say that Second Life is lame.  They think others think SL is really cool.  They think that if they think SL is lame, others may think of them as lame.  People should get over this fear.  There’re plenty cool things abt SL, but nothing in there is really all that cool.  SL is kind of lame.  We should treat the thing as a classroom (classrooms are too often lame spaces anyway) and quit blowing smoke about how cool we think it is.  It’s not cool.  It’s lame.  Being lame doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its uses and value.  Some people think I’m lame.  I have uses.  I have value.  No, no, I’m not saying that we should chuck it altogether.  But be honest.  Recognize.  It’s pretty lame.

Now let’s think about how we can make it cooler.

1. One… chuck the Lindens.  Just quit showing up in SL.

2. Open-source and non-profitize MMORPG environments, creating standards for worlds that let you come and go with one avatar in multiple worlds… like you can open a document in a notepad, in Word, or in .odt format…

3.  I dunno.  What else needs doing?

gaming culture, libraries

Open ‘note to self’,

read if you want to.

just thinking out loud

abt instruction, libraries, and “digital natives” (ha!)

Suddenly

The kids who were born in 1990 (BORN in 1990!) are in our library… many “grew up” online… and watching teevee that referenced “online life”… You’ve Got Mail… that Sandra bullock movie abt ‘the net’, Hackers in 94? many better examples. Et.c. These are webby people. And they’re still learning and growing…. Developing (RIGHT NOW) more advanced critical thinking faculties, we hope…

they’re on that myspace and that e-mail, using them world wide webs, on that zwinky and facebook, and trading mp3s and mp4s, and e-mailing Craig Ferguson and e-mailing tha RZA fan mail. They’re frustrated when the web isn’t easy to use, and they don’t understand that there’s a wider Internet of which ‘tha web’ is just a subset.

for them, sadly, books are dusty dead-ends. We’ve got to show them how the web opens books. How our webby tools behoove them… get them the grades.

so,

virtual environments even as CRUMMY as myspace are their turf.

Video or virtual games is how they learn to solve probs.

There must be ways to exploit their fascination with the virtual, to teach them information literacy skills, cyberliteracy skills, critical thinking, for their own benefit. There be many good ways, yah.

All learning is distance learning once they step out of the “2.5 hrs in desks” – profs using that time to push info to attentitve listners? Hopefully, hopefully, but real learning is independent learning. Real learning happens when you make the connection for yourself, you open the book for yrself, you seek that key bit of gov’ment statistics in the NIH database yrself.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. — Robert Anton Wilson

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat. – ibid.

How do we enable self-teaching and classroom teaching for these webby learners?

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_5/matei/index.html#m3

http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-06/branston.html

Take a digital game world, throw it in a blender, add some information and research skills, sift out the word educational and maybe, just maybe, we have a new and effective way to teach our students bibliographic instruction.

http://secondlife.com/businesseducation/education.php

Something to think on…

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Related – Second Life, mmporgs, learning-by-doing, strategy and critical thinking…

Fictional economies, economies of attention, social positioning via problem solving…

Bibliographic instruction formatted for participation, execution of searches…

Beyond the ‘scavenger hunt’… points for playing = real stakes. REAL STAKES.

From virtual to “real”. Physical to informational and back again. AR v. VR.

how do we use these media

as object lessons

for instruction in using these media

for real-world outcomes… i wonder.

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I do wonder that.