Kunstlerism of the Week: Health Care Summit

Location: Clusterfuck Nation Blog

Vintage JHK, this...and sadly, dead-on right from the experience of several friends without health insurance. One, who suffered a heart attack, is being actively chased by bill collectors now, though he's unemployed.

We are left, finally, with a so-called health care system so cruel and unjust that the Devil himself in consultation with the most demonic lobbyists, and perhaps a little input from historical politicians such as Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Heinrich Himmler, and Pol Pot could not construct a worse way of deploying the fruits of modern science.

My poor students, in their supposedly upwardly mobile world. I hope they never experience such things. Read the rest of "Winter Mind Games" here. Jim spares almost no one!

Jeff Young Meets the Educators: The Transcript

Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Photo courtesy of Sheila Webber

I promised our participants that I'd not edit out anything said by them.

So here is the complete transcript (it ran 29 pages of single-spaced type in Word).

The event grew heated, and at least one participant had enough and simply left. We had, at one point, at least 82 participants at Montclair's amphitheater.

Young's telling remark to this reader: that he was inspired to return to SL to have a look after coming across a widely maligned (and frankly, uninformed) piece about SL in The Guardian.

I'm pleased to say that Mr. Young ran a much humbler, and more informed, post in the Chronicle after our meeting. He focused on what the new SL 2.0 viewer may mean for educators.

CNN Provides Heritage Key with Good Press

Location: CNN Web Site

I'm really pleased, after the lackluster article in The Chronicle, to see CNN cover, from a "noob perspective," the promises of virtual-world technology. You can see a nicely done video, aimed at the general viewer.

Funny how the announcer notes that Second Life is a "game" but implies Heritage Key is not. That's some of the best backhanded marketing I've seen. Administrators resisting the perceived sex and griefing of SL--a view The Chronicle piece encourages--might say "well, maybe there is a use for this technology on campus."

Soon I plan to look at more strong developments in Heritage Key's Valley of the Kings.

Jeff Young in the Lion's Den

Location: Virtual Worlds Roundtable

Photo by Sheila Webber

Mr. Young is a brave man. His recent story in The Chronicle of Higher Education caused such a ruckus among educators that we expected griefing when he appeared at our weekly event. I was on security with several others for meeting Moderator AJ Brooks.

The only grief was verbal, and it was hot and heavy. Primarily, educators objected to these aspects of Young's coverage:

• He did not have enough in-world experience to adequately cover Second Life and OpenSim worlds
• He failed to visit some of the richest educational content
• He wrote a piece that seemed slanted to editorializing about SL, rather than probing some of the strongest problems--and promises--for early adopters
• He over-emphasized sex and griefing, aspects of SL that have not posed large problems for most of the VWER members.

I've probably missed a few of Young's and our group's main points, but I will post a link in a future post here to the entire conversation. Readers take note that the flames are plentiful in our talk. Kudos to Mr. Young; he says he'll return to SL again to visit classes and attend an upcoming conference. I'm glad he will do so.