The Silence of the Blogs

Location: Blogroll

It's not just this blog that has become quieter. I've noted that Lalo Telling, Tateru Nino, and several other writers who focused primarily on virtual worlds have dropped off my radar. Tateru tweets, and some others post far less frequently than even a year ago.

Is that merely the drift of writers' interest away from virtual worlds? Or has blogging about this topic, generally, ebbed as interest and land-mass in Second Life have ebbed?

Did some in education who were grad students stop blogging as their career needs became a necessary priority?

There are clearly more blogs I should follow. After posting a first draft of this post, I did a quick Google Search and found that Daniel Voyager noted, in December last year, that Lalo's real-life typist passed away. Pity. He was a gifted writer.

One thing for certain: it's gotten a lot quieter around here.
 

Google? Huh?

I've had a drop a blog from my blogroll because, according to Google, it hosts malware or is associated with sites that do host such. Ridiculous!

Time for a self-hosted WordPress blog, or what? Any of you readers run into that problem at your blogs? Right now, Chrome seems to access my blog fine. Firefox too. Pity. I really like that blog.

2013 Prediction: Sticking Around

 
Location: VWER meeting

Photo credit: Wrenaria

Today, the VWER meets to discuss its future under our new leader, SL's Kali Pizzaro. I hope that the group branches out to discuss more than virtual worlds, since there is a lot of action in education regarding technologies, both established and emerging. There is also a lot of progress to be made because many faculty are still struggling with technologies that seem second nature to me, such as Google Drive and similar cloud-based applications.

I hope to make a plea for appropriate technology. Too much of the educational community is still driven first by technology. No where was this more apparent to me than in educators trying to bolt educational uses onto World of Warcraft and Second Life, instead of starting with pedagogy. On campus, with more traditional technologies, I am seeing that healthy change.

And as for this blog, despite Tenchi's wise advice on focus, I will broaden "In a Strange Land" to talk more about other aspects of educational technology. I think readers will find less about the social and economic aspects of virtual worlds here, though coverage of the technology will continue as events merit it. I doubt this will become a prognostication-free zone.

So before I stop, here are some 2013 predictions about virtual worlds:

• Continued evolution, albeit slow evolution, of non-SL alternatives. Focus will be on Unity 3D and Cloud Party. Most of the growth will be non-educational.
• Continued slide, perhaps plateau, for Second Life's loss of private regions.
• More attention to violence in gaming and, perhaps, SL. The latter will be held up in the US Congress for a place where immorality, even sexual slavery, is present. A right-wing ignoramus will wave around a battered copy of Slave Girl of Gor and show a Powerpoint with slides from SL in 2008 to make his belabored point.

So see you all around in this space, once in a while. My new blog Tractorpunk, on rural life and sustainability, with my usual punkish edge, will launch soon. That and my forthcoming anthology about online communities will keep me more than busy in 2013.

Shift of Emphasis at Blog...or the End?

Location: Looking at shockingly bad 2007 avatar photos

Now it can be told: little is happening that interests me professionally in virtual worlds. So what to do?

The exodus of educators seems ongoing and inevitable. I no longer recognize the promising world online that, in the picture above, had me thinking that we were on the cusp of a revolution. While our VWER meetings used to pull in 30 or more in a week, we now log about 13, that luckiest of numbers.

And the topics are recycled too often. And so would mere whining on this blog.

Iggy is not in Second Life at all, save for a weekly meeting of our Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable and a single use of Usher in the Spring semester.

Choice One: this blog changes with the times. Tech on campus has raced past the era of CPU-intensive virtual worlds to what students hold in their palms.  I would hate to just write about mobile technology so I'd expand to technoculture with an academic focus. Virtual worlds would crop up from time to time, as the situation merits.

Choice Two: End this blog to focus on the campus ones that look at writing. I'm working on an anthology about online communities, too, and most of them are not related to virtual worlds.

So by January I'm going to face a tough call about "In a Strange Land," the blog I began in 2007, when our local daily paper tried to shift with the times and ride the brief and fleeting hyperbole about Second Life. They failed. So did Second Life, in terms of changing the culture of how we work online.

Stay tuned for that decision (if you are still reading this). If the current crop of Doomsday predictors are right, on Dec. 22 I won't have to make a decision.

Communications Self-Analysis: A Blogger's Day

Location: Doing That Blog Thing

My students in the first-year seminar are spending one day tracking how they use a form of collaborative communications technology: something like Facebook, texting, telephony, or even...blogs. I told that that "fair is fair, so I'll track one of my days, too." The interesting aspect of this post is that I don't know what I'll find. How much time do I spend reading and writing blogs?


This is not me by any stretch. I'm reminded of the American version of The Office, where boss Michael Scott tries his best to be relevant. And he fails.

Yes, sometimes blogging does seem like a massive waste of time, doesn't it? Yet the technology also offers students an easy-to-master way to create multimedia projects.  It's a shift I'd argue that faculty must make in higher education, in order to remain relevant (or merely employed) in a time when state employees, including faculty, will increasingly be called to task to justify their work. I doubt that those of us working for private institutions will fare better, if we get a reputation for not using the literacy tools that are common beyond the gates of our cloistered campuses.

So how does someone who blogs spend the day? Here's my timeline for a day when I have some free time.

• 8 am: checked the following virtual-world blogs: New World Notes, Dwell on It, and (non-guilty lowbrow pleasure) The Alphaville Herald.  No comments made.
• 815 am: Checked my blog list here at Blogspot's dashboard. Read Dio's new post at The Ephemeral Frontier. I noted that she uses the term "meatspace" to describe the real-life profession of a boat-builder in virtual worlds. More echoes of Gibson.  Left two short comments for her. Read a much-deserved pan for the awful "Spider Man" musical at the NY Times. Left a sneer of my own about how stupid popular entertainment has gotten. It seems that many stories at the Times are merging with their blogs. Will there even be a difference in a few years? Blog-review done by 8:30 and I began this post. Time for my daily writing for me (not on a blog) and then, off to work!
• 11:00 am: While riding the bus, I finish reading an article in Cees Nooteboom's wonderful anthology about travel, Nomad's Hotel. How on earth could Nooteboom do that in a blog? I decide he could not. He is such a talented and subtle writer. I hope he wins a Nobel Prize before he leaves this world.
• 1:30 pm: After checking e-mail (and answering some blog-related questions from class!) I return to student blogs after a couple of days' absence. The rewrites of the first semi-formal project look promising, and I find myself reading all the other posts, since the students expect an estimate of participation grades.
• 2:00 pm: I avoid the temptation of posting a comment to New World Notes, since I don't think I have the facts straight on a copyright issue from the early 1980s and don't want to look misinformed. Back to student blogs!
• 5:30 pm: Getting ready for a night class, I could not resist leaving another remark at New World Notes.

What have I learned from tracking a day of blogging? The technology has kept me in a web of contacts, be they students, writers of other blogs, or readers who comment here. That was not easily possible for a writer before this technology blossomed.

I'm mindful now of Hannah Arendt's quotation, “For excellence, the presence of others is always required.” My work as a blogger or teacher is not necessarily excellent, but working with and in response to others has sharpened my skills and blunted any delusions--deserved or not--of excellence.

These technologies should put the lie to anyone who claims that writers work in garrets these days.