Image via Wikipedia

I was inspired, some months ago, when reading about a group of students at the Fletcher School of Tufts University who worked around the clock with ordinary laptop computers to save lives in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.  Calling it operation Thunderclap, the students combed through Twitter posts, email messages, news bulletins, and other internet communications (much of which had to be translated from the Haitian creole into English) to locate victims and assess their statuses.  The students were able, in many cases, to assist on-the-ground SAR teams by providing GPS coordinates and details of injuries.  In one case, a student was responsible for the rescue of several children in a collapsed building.  In all, new humanitarian computing technologies were used by non-experts from across geographic and cultural boundaries to lend a compassionate hand.

For those of us who dream big about helping our students see the connections between the work they do in communications classrooms and the big, wide world, this was big win.  We all sense that our work is important, of course–that it has application to things beyond the classroom, changes lives, enhances critical thinking, makes us better citizens, and so on–but when student writing has a direct, personal stake in the survival of another human being, it burns with a whole new vitality and urgency.

So I’ve been researching crowd-sourcing crisis response technologies because I hope that my own students might be able to use them in the writing classes I teach.  We don’t need (and I hope never to have to see) another mega-disaster like the Haiti earthquake.  Far less damaging and dramatic incidents may be equally good at helping us to promote the humanitarian flower at the end of the education vine.  The important thing is that new, free technologies are available that have the power to reinvigorate our raison d’être.  Tools like Ushahidi; various Humanitarian FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project tools like Sahana; Reuters AlertNet; and virtual “datascapes” available in Second Life’s Daden Prime sim to name just a few, are lenses through which our students may more immediately see their unquestionable connection to every other person on the planet.

Age and experience is more likely to understand why the bell tolls for all of us, but humanitarian computing technologies are obsoleting the familiar question But what does (insert the name of any “far away” country here) have to do with me? The question we might more likely ask now is What doesn’t it have to do with you and me? A Tufts student puts it more eloquently than I:

It’s because of that empathy, because we care about people we’ll never meet, that this effort [to rescue the Haiti earthquake victims] is taking place at all. It’s because that empathy, too, that I feel almost traumatized by proxy. I’m much less overwhelmed than I was at first, but as I told a friend on the phone the other day, I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. I want to use my life for helping people, but I swear I remember every message I’ve read. They’re imprinted on my brain. The Haiti earthquake is not a remote disaster anymore, not just another charity cause I’ll forget in six months or a year. It’s a stream of individual voices. I lie in bed at night wondering if the family that just had a new baby on Wednesday has found anything to eat.

These humanitarian technologies, excelling at data fusion and visualization, provide an immediate sense of connectedness that overrides geographic distance–and complacency.  If you think you are interested in assessing these technologies for yourself, please check out my Delicious bookmark feed. 

Related articles

• Haiti’s earthquake rubble remains (bbc.co.uk)
• Haiti rubble art (theworld.org)
• Editorial: Helping others important both at home and abroad (knoxnews.com)
• Analysis: Are humanitarians learning the lessons from Haiti? (yubanet.com)

I’m slated to deliver a presentation on the semantic web at the League for Innovation’s annual Conference on Information Technology. As a sneak peek at my focus, I’m sharing what I take to be the central questions that educators need to start considering if they expect to be able to adapt to semantic web advancements.  Some of these questions are very difficult to answer; answers swiftly come for others, but at the price of a certain discomfort.  My hope is that these questions force us to examine our assumptions and cherished opinions about how we educate and whether our roles as educators are as enduring as we like to think.

I would really appreciate comments on these questions, especially if you think there are other, or better questions for us to think about.   Of course, knowing something about the semantic web will help contextualize these questions which otherwise may seem a little obtuse.  If you’re an educator, you may want to join the Web 3 Learning Network to discover what you’re missing.

1) The industrial model of pedagogy seems fairly expedient. If it were manageable and assessable, however, would you prefer individualized, personally customized learning paths for your students? Whether you would prefer it or not, do you think your students would prefer it?
2) What do you think a person’s limitations are for self-learning?
3) Do you think that today’s college curricula are suited to prepare students for continuous and accelerating technological advancements? Are you prepared for continuous and accelerating technological advancements? Do you suffer from information overload?
4) Do you believe that, on the whole, college curricula (college programs, majors, courses) encourage the silo-ing of discipline-specific educational content? If so, how would you propose opening content to its fullest scope and power?
5) If content were “un-silo-ed” via personalized learning paths, what would be the basis for establishing an educator’s qualifications? What would be the basis for establishing the value of regional and national accreditation?
6) We normally assume that technology is “just a tool,” one means to our educational ends. If means and end became essentially one thing (i.e., inter-twined, but not causally related), what would your role as an educator be? What would a student’s role be?

semantic web

From my journal:

I don’t understand it really, but I seem always to think about fountain pens.  I just love that they work by “breathing” air and ink; that they have visual and tactile beauty (some are truly works of art); that they are symbols of an activity that makes us human and civilized; and, of course, that they allow each person a measure of power, the ability to simultaneously discover and express the self in words.

Fountain pens are better than ball point pens because they not wasteful–one does not throw away an Aurora or a Visconti or an Omas when it runs out of ink.  One tosses out a million Bics for every fountain pen that is lost to the non-negotiable demands of aging.

Also, there is no doubt that a variety of inks, which can only be enjoyed by fountain pen users, is a tremendous aestehtic advantage over the dulling realities of the sticky blue and black glop available in most cheap ballpoints.  Whoever heard of a ballpoint pen serving its master’s page “Ottoman Azure” or “Buttercup”?

There is also the virtue of commitment in a fountain pen’s ink, for, unlike ballpoints whose inks can be erased, fountain pens use dyes that are not easily removed.  Some inks, notably Noodler’s, are absolutely indelible because they chemcially bond with the cellulose in paper.  Thus, when writing with a fountain pen, we cannot squirm away from the words that embarrass us or which are politically incorrect or offend those we otherwise care about.  We commit to who we are at the moment the pen touches the paper.  The computer, which I love (truly, I do), seems to have taught us that we write to revise our writing.  But no. We write to revise the mind, and nothing but indelible ink makes that more clear.  There is no going back.  Every line is a one’s newest home.  We take up residence in our words, sometimes startled by the walls we have built.

Image via Wikipedia

People think I’m nuts to spend the kind of money I do on fountain pens, but, in my own defense, doing so subtly and postively affects me.  When I write with an expensive pen that I must take care of, that I must nurse, that I must look after as I would a child, I derive a certain spiritual benefit that in turn affects how I write.  I must respect the pen.  It pulls at me, demanding my constant effort, discipline, and faith, and above all, a willingness to live into the unknown, to go into my darknesses, just as paleolithic humans entered their black Lascauxs with ocher-damp sticks and revelled in the thick actuality of their lives.

If you want to write, do it with a fountain pen.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fountain Pens (Wikipedia)
• Loosen Up Your Writing Grip to Banish Pain (lifehacker.com)

technology spirituality

Someone recently repeated to me the old saw that “technology is just a tool, not an end in itself.”  I’ve been hearing this blanched adage for over a decade, and my response has always been the same: at first I feel a vague, nameless disappointment; a moment later I find it difficult to argue with its respectable sobriety.  In the third moment it washes out of my mind as a thing I just don’t believe, and I go on about my business until the next time it distracts me with its puritan charm.

But today I suppose I have something to say about it.  This little proverb, coined no doubt in the bowling alley in Pleasantville, has been parroted so often that we just nod in agreement without thinking about it.  This bothers me.  I think when we repeat the superficial logic of “technology is just a tool,” we’re missing the source of energy and inspiration, of creativity and innovation, that has begun to shape our world.  I have no room in my life for this thrill-killing poison.  I demand a new view.  It is not the need of the house that dreams up the hammer.  The hammer dreams of the house.

Image by traveler54 via Flickr

There are parallels to what I’m talking about in the world of the fine arts.  It is commonplace to say that art imitates life, for example, but it is very clear that it is life that imitates art, as Oscar Wilde once pointed out.  We follow the trail of our creativity into utilitarian discovery.  Sometimes we build just to build.  Sometimes we paint just to paint.  But when we’re done, we seem always to find a way to make our efforts perform some admirable duty in our lives.  A few hundred years ago, for example, a woman asked Ben Franklin what good hot-air balloons were.  He was at the time leading an experiment in their use as transportation devices.  He said (a close paraphrase)

“Madame, I will answer your question with another question: What good is a new-born baby?”

The point is just this: When we play with technology–and I mean “play” in the sense of having only a vague idea, or even no idea where it’s all going to end up but we’re captivated by the process–we are satisfying our humanity in a way that, without conscious effort, corresponds with a need that has not yet arisen in consciousness.  In the commercial world, we create things–and then we create their markets.  (Think Pet Rocks.)  Where technology and education are concerned, we tend to think that the former is the means and the latter is the end.  But that’s not how it is at all.  The hammer dreams the house.  The pet rock dreams of a compassionate owner.

Oh, these twining vines!
technology spirituality

I am continuing to find the exercises that I require of my students in Second Life to evoke real pangs of suffering and empathy.  (You’ll notice in that first sentence that I am not specifying whether it is I or my students who feel those pangs.)   This summer, one of my students wrote of SL, “I was rejected in that life just as I am rejected in this one.”  The statement came at the very end of the term when my relationship with my students should be coming to an end, but because I rarely see this kind of disclosure, I found myself wanting to somehow give reassurance.   There was no other detail offered, no explanation, no ameliorating anecdote, nothing.  Her statement floated like an immovable smog over the city of the heart.  It’s hard knowing that the power of writing to help us discover ourselves and to provide us with a foundation for exploring our potential had not rescued this person from her loneliness.  Had I known how she thought of herself at the beginning of the term, we might have been able to do something about it.  In any case, I had an urge to try to intervene, to help, but I fought that urge a bit too.  I can’t rescue everyone–a very hard lesson to learn.  She did mention that she is painfully shy, and I wonder now if Second Life could help people who find it hard to make friends in real life.  It might help them to get some anonymous practice in SL.  Put sunglasses on shyness and you slip into cool.

Another student, whom I have had in previous classes and knew to be a responsible adult dedicated to her education, dropped out of sight in the middle of the summer semester.  I emailed her and asked her what had happened to her.  She is a wife and mother.  She is also fairly traditional by her own estimation; her husband is even more so.  In the home, she is responsible for all the cooking, all the child-rearing, and all the house-work; and she holds a job–and somehow has managed to find time for online classes.  A mouse lifts the elephant of life.  But then her “husband’s family came . . . for the summer and [she] had to cater to them.”  The real kicker, however, came at the end of her distressed email.  Erroneously thinking that because the course was over she had to unplug from SL, she wrote, “I have a question: Do I have to get rid of my [Second Life] account? I sometimes feel my world is falling apart and being someone no one knows is sometimes good, if I get the time.”  If my experiences with students in SL tell me anything it’s that we are all people “no one knows.”  And yet we feel like we are knowable, structured around an enduring self-nature that must, at times, hide under the blanket of a digital world.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 5 Videos on the Pending Death of Education (ariwriter.com)
• Reconnecting with Connectivism (CCK09) (fleeep.net)
• Is Rejection Good? (cathystucker.com)
• Virtual Worlds and a Twisted View of US vs. China (cloudave.com)

technology education

I return, in this post, to the ongoing saga of my students’ Second Life exercise, which I called “Metamorphosis” (with apologies to Franz Kafka).  If you haven’t read the previous posts, read The Bad Girls Club and Adult Ed Vs. Adult Content.

This final part of the exercise required the students to re-adopt their good-looking avatars, but then to wear a specially prepared texture file on their faces that simulated oozing sores.   They were then assigned to return to their stomping grounds and meet up with old friends.

It’s one thing to know intellectually that people shun those who are not normal, the “lepers” in our collective colony of humanity; it’s another to live shunned.  One of the nice things about Second Life is that the rapid identification of person and avatar means that we can get connected with an experience that would be impossible (or unethical) to create in real life.

Here is sample report from one of my students:

Image via Wikipedia

I found the third SL paper to be very funny due to the swine flu epidemic going on. I went into change my avatar, and was mortified to see her new appearance. The open sores on her face were enough to scare me. I was pretty sure I knew how others in SL were going to respond to the new Haley.
My assumptions were correct. Even though I was back to the good-looking Haley, many wanted

Image via Wikipedia

nothing to do with me.  I told my friend in SL that I was back to the old Haley and he was so excited. As I teleported to the area he was in, I thought to myself this should be good. Of course, he was making his comments about the re-transformation into hot Haley as I approached. As I got clearer and he could see my face all he could say was,

“What the hell happened to you?” I told him that I had been around a group of friends the night before in SL that were starting to get these sores also. He suggested that we part ways in case it was a computer virus.  [This exercise] just went to show that many friends are not true friends when it really comes down to the nitty-gritty.  A virtual world seems to be no different from the real world.

Later that evening, I hit the clubs to see how others would react to me. I must have heard about a million swine flu jokes and comments.  Most of what the SL individuals said were negative.  Many took the time to poke fun at me, or ask me to leave before they caught it, but never did any of them ask how I was feeling or if there was anything they could do to help eliminate the sores.

Whether it is in a virtual world or in the real world, we focus on the non-norms of an individual. When I was the original Haley, I had many so-called friends or many who wanted to socialize with me. [Earlier, when I had] become overweight, not-so-hot-Haley, fewer and fewer of those so called friends wanted to be part of my social group. And low and behold, very few (ok, none) of my so called acquaintances wanted to admit to knowing the Haley with sores on her face.
We do not live in a perfect world, nor are most of us perfect, so why do we as a society seem to accept only those who are? We tend to pick our friends based on social status rather than who we are on the inside.  I guess this is why I only have a very few true friends.

Thank you for doing this assignment. I took me awhile to understand it, but now I am very clear on what the purpose was. In a virtual world, we can build ourselves up to be who others want us to be rather than who we really are. I personally will stick to the real world and keep the true friends that love me for who I am. These few people will still love me fat or skinny, young or old, healthy, or sores on my face. Thank you again for the eye-opener on the world we live in.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lab To Cripple Furry, Tiny Avatars With Faux Bug Fix (foo.secondlifeherald.com)
• New SL Post 6 Grrrl Photographer Announced (foo.secondlifeherald.com)
• Don’t blog – Rez! (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• “Second Life”, a country in Plurkistan (vintfalken.com)
• Note To Self Before Bed (warrenellis.com)
• Exclusive: Internal Second Life Data Shows Returning Growth (gigaom.com)
• FTC investigating explicit content in virtual worlds (joystiq.com)

Commencement Address

Delivered May 8, 2009

West Shore Community College

Scottville, Michigan

Thank you, President Dillon.  And greetings graduates, parents, families, friends, faculty, staff, and members of the Board of Trustees.

It is an honor to speak to you tonight and share a few thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking, not only about your individual futures and occupations, but about the future of life-long learning for all of us. It is something we need to consider because, as educated men and women, we have a responsibility to sustain the tradition of inquiry that all of us have inherited.  Life-long learning today is not just something we do for the sake of our own development, but—we might be bold enough to say—is an aspect of the way we will connect in the future with everyone else on the planet.

Indeed, I think no one can doubt that we are entering an age of profound global interconnectedness.  It may have begun with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876—this was, in my view, the single most influential moment in the modern history of human interaction.  And today, few people in the world live without phones, and no one lives in ignorance of their existence. The ubiquity of cell phones in many places in the world has changed our daily behavior is significant ways.  Think about it: How many of us here have stopped a face-to-face conversation to take a cell phone call?  You know who you are.  How many of us talk on the cell phone while driving?  You know who you are.  Did you know that studies show that talking on the cell phone impairs your ability to drive to the same degree as would be the case if you were drunk?  And how has the popularity of text messaging changed our behavior and altered how we think about communication? How many students here tonight have sent or received a text message during a class lecture?  I know you know who you are. How many of you are texting right now?  What effect does this new behavior have on our relationships and manners?  What effect does it have on our ability to concentrate single-mindedly on a given problem or task?  I think it is appropriate, on the eve of your commencement, to take a little time to ensure that we do not go willy-nilly into our shared technologically-oriented future.  We need to stop, even if only for five minutes, to seriously reflect on the power of instantaneous mobile communications in—or should I say over—our lives?

Some of my students, from whom I learn a great deal, claim to be sending 1,000 text messages per month; some even send 3,000; and a few even send 5,000 text messages per month.

You know who you are!  What’s worse is that your parents know who you are.  Anyway, if you do the math, you’ll discover that 5,000 texts a month is, on average, 167 text messages per day.  When I asked my students what prompted them to text so much, several responded that they get into heated arguments in which having the last word is so easy, so instantaneous, and so conveniently cloaked in digital facelessness that it is truly irresistible.  And what are they arguing about?  Often it is the result of misunderstandings borne of—you guessed it—text messages.  Who knew that the little, unassuming acronym LOL could, in certain contexts, be so thoroughly misunderstood?  Did she mean “laughing out loud”?  Or did she mean “Lots of luck”?

What is most interesting to me about all this is that while my students readily recognize the superficiality of most text message conversations, they nevertheless remain emotionally and economically invested in a state of near continuous communication.  If they are not on their cell phones, they are on MySpace and Facebook, web-based tools that emphasize networks of “friends.”  It is a vastly different world from that of email communication, the mode preferred by most people in my age bracket.  On social network sites, one can share music, pictures, and videos; and a message to one friend can be observed by other friends, thus keeping everyone in the loop.  And if cell phones and social networks are not enough, there is Twitter.  Now people my age are often afraid to ask what Twitter is.  For one thing, asking about it signifies one’s total “outdatedness.”  Plus, questions like Do you Twitter? sound suspiciously inappropriate, a kind of blue slang we can only imagine the meaning of.  And it’s hard to talk about twittering and take one’s self seriously at the same time.  For those of you who feel like technological backwaters left languishing on the outskirts of the digital jungle—you know who you are—I’ll  just tell you: Twitter is micro-blogging.  On Twitter, you have a 140 characters in which to say something.  Some people “tweet” all day long in 140-character bursts, and have hundreds of followers listening to their twitterings.

If we have decided that communication not only can be, but ought to be, done with such dramatic brevity, then we must admit that the “now” is becoming smaller at an ever-increasing pace.  As educated people this has to arouse our curiosity, if not our concern.  And not only is the “now” of communication being foreshortened, but so is technological dependability.  It used to be that a personal computer became obsolete in about four years.  Today computers become obsolete in, at the outside, two years.  And what is true for communication and technology is true for information at large.  It is presently estimated that what students learn in the first year of college is outdated by the time they are juniors.  It is has also been suggested that, paradoxically, we educators are today preparing you for jobs that do not yet exist.  It used to be that the daily newspaper had captured the “now” better than anything else.  Radio and television did some serious damage to that, but they are nothing compared to online news sources that are updated not just every day, not even every hour, but every minute, and, yes, even every second—and they are crushing the life out of the traditional paper news source.  To speak of the “now” is becoming meaningless.  The “now” is shrinking to the vanishing point.  Nova Spivac, the brains and energy behind the cutting edge web technology known as Twine, said yesterday—in a Twitter post, by the way—that  we need to stop referring to the “now” and start referring to the “stream.”

Though we may have concerns about how these technologies might “dumb down” our powers of communication, we have a responsibility as educated people to consider all sides of an issue.  In this case, we need to think about the possible advantages to the “stream”  My guess—and it is only a guess—is that the trend toward continuous communication is the result of two inexorable social pressures: information overload resulting from the “stream” of continuous obsolescence; and a resulting pandemic of knowledge indeterminacy.  Whether we realize it or not, we are evolving out of a reality in which information was once manageable and characterized by fairly enduring sets of values and attitudes into a world in which relativism, indeterminacy, and educational uncertainty threaten our animal craving for that which is stable and known.

Because we can no longer manage information, we are having to merge with it.

We . . . are . . . information.  If you doubt this, check your thinking with your friendly neighborhood identity thief.  He knows who you are.

When you start to wonder about knowledge as something that you are rather than something that you acquire, something important has happened.  You are beginning to change the definitions of teaching and learning.  You are beginning to suggest that the long-standing dualism of identities known as “student” and “teacher” might melt away.  It means that we are moving from the post-Industrial Information age to the age of the Learning Intensive Society.  It is a planetary society premised on the semantic web or  “Web 3.0.”  If you haven’t heard of the semantic web, it is a global initiative that seeks to change the world of knowledge acquisition forever, one that employs machine intelligences to instantly discover and retrieve information—and even then to modify it.  The web’s trillions of pages of information become, not just a global resource, not just a trillion haystacks in which we seek the proverbial needle, but an ever-evolving galaxy of awareness that actually is who we are at any given moment in time.

I want to emphasize, graduates, that such technology is not merely at the pipe-dream stage of development.  These things are becoming a reality today.  In fact, I used one semantic web application to help me with this speech.  While I wrote, a machine intelligence understood what I was writing, and without any help from me, began to assemble images, web sources, and tags that were directly relevant to my work.

I am telling you all this because I really believe that we are on the brink of another technology-based paradigm shift that will affect everyone, from poets to accountants, from nurses to historians, from welders to philosophers.  To be sure, I am speaking of a disruptive technology, one in which our values will be challenged.  Yet learned bodies are already suggesting that we bring an end to compulsory schooling as we know it and embrace the self-discovering identity of the future.

Graduates, your faculty is proud of you.  We know that if you have succeeded so far in learning, that you will continue to do so, even through the torrents of technological change.  Great power and promise reside there for the perpetuation of our shared value of a good education.  Having an education will mean that you can adapt to whatever comes.  You will be able to consider new-found behaviors and attitudes with a critically balanced eye.  You will be able to do this because, as educated people, you are in possession, not just of skills for application in the work place, but of thinking skills.  You are in possession of core abilities that will allow you to adapt to any new environment.  Foster critical thinking.  Examine everything.  Withhold judgment as long as is reasonable.  Know who you are.

Graduates, I congratulate you all on a job well done!

Thank you very much for listening.

Related articles by Zemanta

• OMG! Americans luv 2 txt, sent over 1 Trillion msgs in 2008 (mobilecrunch.com)
• The Chemistry of Texting English in High School (chris.pirillo.com)
• Mobile technology even makes 20-somethings shudder… sometimes (engadget.com)
• Attention Parents: Teens Want You To Text (debaird.net)
• Snow Britain: Weather causes surge in text messaging (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Twitter Guys – Years from now, when historians reflect … (Ashton Kutcher/Time) (techmeme.com)
• ‘Paradigm shifting’ Twitter adds search (guardian.co.uk)
• A semantic web future – Intelligent internet (digital-constructions.com)
• Google’s Next Move: Semantic Search? (reflexionsdata.com)
• Sad Web 2.0 Losers Ready for Web 3.0 (As Soon As They Figure Out What It Is) (gawker.com)
• Is Web 3.0 here? (winemad.wordpress.com)

Second chances at life do not come very often. People make wrong choices and then end up living the rest of their lives regretting these choices.These people usually live in an environment where these choices are just below the surface and are ready to bring back haunting memories. Glimpses of certain people bring back bad memories, too. Second Life gives people the chance to create an avatar that would be the person they only wish they could be. Unfortunately, this avatar is not a real person. The controlling force is still the person that is living with the memories.

This is how one of my students began a short report on her first experience in the virtual reality sim, Second Life. What I love about it is that she so quickly noticed the cognative dissonance which we all encounter in Second Life (SL).

The thought pattern runs something like Am I the avatar? No. Do my relationships in SL make me feel the way they do in Real life (RL)? Well, yes. I guess I am not my avatar, but I am not different from my avatar either.

The assignment, written out as Volume 1 of a book I wrote that guides students through a semester-long SL exercise, was to spend a considerable bit of time developing a great avatar. I didn’t specify that it had to be beautiful, but none of my students (all female in this case) chose to make an “ugly” avatar. I knew they wouldn’t. They were also required to make as many friends as possible, talking, dancing at clubs, going to art galleries together, and so on. I will write about what happened after the students completed Volume 2 of the exercise in another post, but the spiritual riches that developed out of the first one really pleased me.

What I noticed among all my students reports was that more attention was paid to appearance and behavior than to the technology.  I think, that if properly managed, a SL exercise can really help students become more self-aware.  To that end, I want to quote from several of the reports I received.

On grooming and RL spouses:

Comparing my grooming habits to my avatar’s brought an interesting thought. As people progress through life, there is a tendency to focus more of their attention on family and less on self. I am reminded of many Oprah

Image via Wikipedia

shows that feature housewives that desperately need makeovers. They have spent the majority of the last fifteen to twenty years taking care of their families. An eye opening experience or a husband seeking a sexy playmate has grabbed their attention. They look in the mirror and realize they need help. This brings me back to myself:  Do I spend enough time and energy keeping my husband’s attention?

One student started out her report with the claim that, as in RL, so in SL:

Feelings in Second Life are very much like how you feel in real life because that is how you act. You are controlling your avatar and your natural instincts take over, and you behave like you normally would. Even though many things are fake and visibly fake, the way you take to people and the actions you do are very similar. In real life if you are normally a shy person, you will probably be a shy person on Second Life.

And yet, by the time she ended her report she had this to say about the difference between realities:

I don’t see myself walking into a place and just talking to random strangers. I do see myself talking to them, but not starting conversations with lost of random strangers. I also danced a lot more in Second Life. I do not really like to dance at events, but in Second Life I danced very often. I think I did dance because in real life I do like to dance, but don’t like having to dance in public places with a lot of people. I think the whole artificiality of Second Life did not result in me feeling scared about dancing and as a result I danced more than I would normally in real life.

This writer wanted to be proactive about her “performance” in SL.

There are different qualities about myself that I really appreciate, and then there are others that I wish I would change. I love that I have a friendly, outgoing personality, but I dislike that I can be very shy at first. In second life, I am trying to give Izzy my good qualities and there are qualities of myself that I do not want Izzy to portray. Of all the characteristics that define me, the one that I really want to show is my bright personality.I made a goal for myself for the remainder of SL. I want to truly change and become more outgoing and less shy. I think that doing this in SL will be an easy transition to do between SL and real life.

To me, the statements above were the most encouraging because the student saw an opportunity to explore herself without having to risk too much.  I like that she took the initiative.  the student below, however, remained afraid the entire time that others in SL might discover her RL identity.  She just could never commit herself to the experience and suffered from a disjuncture from her avatar.

I don’t want people to see me as me, I want to be [thought of as only] my avatar, just an anonymous person, working on a class assignment.

And this student, probably the best writer, described taking

Well , it took me some time to change the look of my avatar. At first I had trouble taking off the flowery skirt that I thought she was doomed to wear forever. When I began, I thought I would make my avatar resemble me, I mean who doesn’t think it’s cool to have mini computerized version of themselves? But then I started thinking…this avatar could me the inner me, the one that is dying to emerge, but never will.

Once I put her in some sexy clothes, a midriff shirt, some tight pants, (hey, I’m going clubbing here, I have to look hot) I was quite pleased with my creation.
It really gives you a sense of freedom when creating this avatar. You can look however you want, you can be whatever you want. This is the great thing about anonymity. There are no constraints to always be inside the box that you have somehow put yourself in over the years.

I also went to the Bad Girls Club which states right up front that it is “mature”, but I went in anyways. I always find it interesting that when I am talking to people they sometimes ask “you are a girl, right?” to which I then find I have to respond in kind, because the appearance of the avatar could be misleading as it is with any online site.
I realized that at first I found it freeing to be someone else, that my old ideas or ways like being shy or not knowing what to say still come back into play. They haunt me if you will. But I think that I need to free myself from that way of thinking and become more my avatar and less me [emphasis mine] when I am in there.

I know, I know, this is going to drive the face-to-facers nuts.  But they should not despair:

The heart of my avatar is the avatar’s creator.

The vision of Web 3.0, better known as the Semantic Web, is one in which humanity’s search for meaning (not just information) is governed by machine intelligences—and these machines—intelligent agents—not only locate relevant information, but coordinate and unify it according to our individual needs.

At the time of this writing, a number of preliminary technologies have already appeared, harbingers of the third decade of the web to come. (See the Web3 Learning Network for examples.) Educators had better pay attention to this. If technologists succeed in reframing the utility of the web so that “search” is resolved to near-instantaneous “answer,” the roles of the teacher and student in our planetary educational culture will undergo the most dramatic shift since the extinction of the Neanderthals. This shift will be both disruptive and liberating. It will be a shift that we can, and should, prepare for.

One way we can prepare ourselves is by deeply reflecting on the meaning of words like “student” and “teacher.” Understanding the psychological and cultural underpinnings of this essential dualism will help us accept the eventual obsolescence of these terms in the face of a fully functioning semantic web. This is easier to see if we relinquish our sense of the web as a resource and instead view it simply as an infinite extension of our own body-minds. As Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly explains,

we are the web.

In the future, cluster analytics, already in use by some higher ed institutions, will show us immediately where we need to develop ourselves and the best way of going about it—and the web will be there, instantly, to fill our gaps and enhance our individual gifts. In that world, there really will truly be neither any students nor any teachers, but instead only a steady process of self-generating self-fulfillment that is identical to universal fulfillment.

This may sound like it is coming from the extreme, paranoia-driven spectrum of science fiction, a dark Borg-ian fantasy of assimilation in which “resistance is futile.”

But I don’t look at it that way. The nightmare scenarios of sci-fi depend on computer-antagonists that are somehow controlled by a singular, calculating malevolence; the semantic web, on the other hand, is as diverse, as uncontrollable, as vigorously voluble as humanity itself.

Our learning in the future will be based on who we are, not curricula, not the agendas of faculty, however well meaning.  And who we are at any given moment will suggest who we will become in the next. The amazing thing about this vision of the semantic web, however, is the notion that we will become what we already know—or somehow knew–from the beginning. It will be as though learning were the process of simply remembering that, from the beginning, each of us is perfect, whole, and complete just the way we are. Fulfillment, in this view of the semantic web, will mean the unfolding of our individual personalities into an infinite, ever-changing consciousness.  I can’t wait.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Web 3.0 and Knowability — Diagram (joshdilworth.com)

I bring it up here on Twining Vines, not so much because it is a great tool (and it is indeed very promising), but because of the idea of “noise,” which it is intended to filter out. There is no doubt that some websites, especially those that behave as portals, with everything on the front page within a single click’s reach, are indeed incredibly “noisy” places. They are like the McDonald’s playgrounds of the internet, replete with irrelevant mayhem and adorable distractions everywhere you look.

A moderately noisy web page.

Noise, in this sense, anyway, is the direct result of trying to make the web easily navigable. It’s a bit like the American “no man’s lands” that ribbon out from city centers into adjacent suburbs. They are cluttered, certainly, but for a reason: all those fast food joints, car lots, home building supply stores, traffic signs, signals, guard rails, lane paint, arrows, railroad crossings, pedestrian crosswalks, fences, concrete barriers, and all the rest of it give us what we want (or what we think we want). The problem is that driving through one of these without prior experience can be bewildering and dangerous to both mind and body.

In the age of the semantic web, however, we will be able to travel web roads of our own building. No longer keyword jockeys subject to every web node that vies for our attention, we will travel noiseless, frictionless avenues.

The same page "quieted" by Readability

Our boulevards will be where we may “merge” with our students and travel along together for as long as seems worthwhile. These will be quiet journeys, ones in which it will be easier to reflect, to remain concentrated. They will be journeys in which a seamless interoperability of personal robotics and desire carry us to the one destination that we can never find without sufficient periods of quiet: ourselves.