Professor, Nuke My Second Life Please

Location: Real Life Desk

"A recruiter told me I'd better have you remove my wiki pages," a former student told me. The work about Second Life, like his old profiles in Facebook and (gasp!) LinkedIn, were not professional enough to reside under his real-life name. He's busily at work grooming his social-network sites to be boredom-friendly.

So I took down an entire portfolio of student work. It's vapor now. Gone.

Nothing in this student's work about SL was risque in the least, beyond his interest in wearing a Santa-Claus suit constantly.

What does this say about SL's reputation in the broader world?

And they ask me why I chose an academic career.

Kunstlerism of the Week: Mass Delusions

Location: Enjoying Spring!

Like Kunstler, however, I look over my shoulder from time to time. I've this feeling that our technotopian ideas for abundant alternative energy are as fallacious as Sarah Palin's fantasies of unlimited oil. As Kunstler puts it:

This far along in the tribulations of our time, most Americans still have not heard of peak oil, and the few who have regard it as some figment that Ralph Nader or Al Gore conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat lodge. The more sophisticated among the mentally unwashed are certain that the earth has a creamy nougat center of low-sulfer light crude oil, or they heard that the Bakken formation in Dakota holds more oil than Saudi Arabia, or that the whole US car and truck fleet will be electrified in a year or two, or that we can drill-baby-drill our way to permanent oil abundance, or just that the American can-do spirit will come up with something to keep Happy Motoring alive because we're the greatest!

Read the rest of "False Spring" here, but be wary of what it will do to your good mood.

Blogger Challenge: More Than a Game

Location: Virtual House of Usher

Can we build a virtual space that exploits an interest in gaming but with "winners" preventing, instead of causing, violence? I've been eager to respond to this challenge from Rezzable.

This could be one of the most fruitful uses of virtual-world technology where, unlike MMORPGs or stand-alone games like the Grand Theft Auto series, educators and students can create content. During my time researching virtual worlds, then teaching in or about them, I've often been asked this question by faculty colleagues:

"What's the educational use of this technology?"

There's a barb hidden in that question, of course. The faculty members are skeptical that anything that so resembles a game could be worthwhile in a "serious" classroom. Yet three years into using the virtual worlds Second Life, Heritage Key, Reaction Grid, and (now sadly defunct) Metaplace, the answer seems clear.

Simulation and Immersion

I've a strong sense that unless educators include these two aspects of virtual worlds in a pedagogically sustainable way, we will never hold the attention or respect of "Generation GTA." In American higher education, the first inklings of change are there, often at smaller schools "hungry" to engage students who want education to be interactive, faculty responsive, and tasks connected to each other. I'm not so sure that currently "elite" colleges and universities, comfortable with the pedagogical status quo and a traditional faculty reward/incentive structure based on juried publication, can ignore the move to "edutainment." My wife's K-5 students are learning through roleplaying archaeologists exploring Ancient China and podcasting interviews with famous African-Americans for for Black History Month. These students, with so many interactive educational experiences, will soon be enrolling in higher education.

Moreover, what about when they graduate? In an increasingly consumer-driven market, what do students really need beyond our gates? How many stapled and linear papers will they ever write after graduation?

What if, instead, we took what is best about that sort of learning--critical thinking and research--and employed them in genres students would forget were "for a class"? I'm not advocating the end of reading Shakespeare; I am advocating "living" Shakespeare while reading the plays.

First of all, immersion and simulation make possible options I cannot afford financially, or could not be possible at all in the traditional classroom. As a long-time designer of paper-and-dice roleplaying games, I thought that I could play a variation on an old theme: "players" are tasked to solve problems that avoid, rather than cause, bloodshed in a potentially violent setting.

Enter an unlikely hero known for his violent dreams: Richmond's home-town boy and the Godfather of Goth, Edgar Allan Poe.


About the House of Usher

We wanted both to honor Poe on his 200th birthday and also find a way to deepen students' engagement with his "The Fall of the House of Usher," a morbid, and endlessly enigmatic, short story of a family curse laced with hints incest, premature burial, and necrophilia. And that is just in the print version!

All those years of Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to turn that into something immersive, and we did just that.

My students come into my classroom door expecting that virtual world settings will resemble those of the games they play. It's refreshing to disabuse them of the notion that all online content needs violent action to engage participants. I'd argue that, conversely, the most intriguing elements of traditional games involve solving puzzles, because anyone with good manual dexterity and a command of a user interface can move an avatar and shoot fast enough to win. Even in games for hard-core gamers like the Left for Dead series, the players must work in teams and confront situations that demand critical-thinking skills.

So take away the zombies, well, all but one zombie, and you have Poe's Usher, a tale that I recently helped, as chief builder, put into Second Life as an immersive simulation.

We could have simply built a maze with Roderick and Madeline Usher inside, and led students by the nose through a 3D version of the story. Instead, we let participants know that they'd be looking for clues and playing the role of Poe's narrator, summoned to the House of Usher by a frantic letter from Roderick. Once there, they'd face the utter madness of their old friend, the palpable wasting illness of his sister, and the dark history of the Usher family. Unlike Poe's tale, however, the students had a mission: save the Ushers if they can, since unlike the deterministic story, the ending was in their hands.


What the Students Did

They took to this like the problem-solvers they are when gaming, and they reported that the hour they spent in the house seemed to pass in minutes. They thus became immersed in the action despite the lack of gore, other than in a realistic Victorian Kitchen, and absence of weaponry, other than a pepperbox pistol Roderick might use if the students became too blunt when trying to save his sister.

While the learning curve for virtual worlds is currently steep, it was also once steep for using film in a classroom, for writing and distributing one's own course materials, for designing Web content. For House of Usher, the students did not even need to master more than the basics of the interface we used; instead, I wanted them to focus on reliving Poe's story with the option--in fact, the assigned goal--of changing his ending. Then I wanted them, in writing, to reflect on what an interactive "lab" accompanying a printed text might mean for how we read and preserve classic works of fiction.

Students took to it eagerly, roleplaying the concerned friends of mad Roderick and his ill sister, and they generally fared well at saving Madeline from premature death. For instance, they figured out ways to distract one actor while appealing to the other actor's reason, searching for clues, or located the hidden crypt where so much of the action occurs. In fact, they recommended making things even more difficult for future participants.

As actors interacted with students, everyone also felt part of a process that continues in 3D as well as at a wiki with clues, advice, and backstory. For the first group, we gave them roleplaying as well as beta-test tasks. Based upon the students' critques, we have changed the architecture of the Usher crypt (our confusing maze was actually too easy to navigate, the students said). We added more clues and a hidden room, and we learned how to use sound and lighting effects to enhance the mood to fit Poe's oppressive and disturbing vision. I've added a section to my Koinup profile with images tagged from our work with the simulation.

The project continues to evolve, and more classes will experience Poe's fiction in an entirely new way, a fitting tribute to Richmond's favorite dark dreamer.

Virtual Conferences: A Sense of Place?

Location: Back Home From CCCC

One thing a virtual conference lacks, when the event ends, is a sense of place. I don't get up from my laptop to find a new city outside my window. But universities don't pay conferees to enjoy a new town.

At the end of VWBPE, Linden Labs reclaimed the sims where we had met. It would be like Louisville rolling up the convention district as soon as we all left town. Fat chance of that: one conference after another rolls into town. There are even bars that remember writers like to drink (and Louisville has many bars). I really enjoyed seeing "Welcome National Council of Teachers of English!" in front of drinking-holes. I sampled a few very fine small-batch and single-barrel Bourbons that I cannot find in Virginia.

The weirdness of a typical convention-center district, however, never fails to strike me: it seems as artificial as any region of Second Life. I have to escape and find the "real town" after about a day of prowling a convention-center's habitrails and ficus jungles.

When I go to conventions alone, I drink less, however, and I tend to see more sessions. That still leaves a day or two with free time to explore. So seeking to avoid the drunken part of schmoozapalooza, I skipped the big publishers' parties to drive, with a Steve Earle / Del McCoury soundtrack blaring in my rented Pontiac, to Owensboro, KY, to the legendary Moonlite Barbecue Inn to once again taste the late Pappy Bosley's finest recipes: Burgoo, hickory-smoked mutton, pulled pork, and the "very hot sauce."

I won't digress any more about barbeque, but if someone named "Pappy" is involved, I tend to show up. Driving back, with XTC keeping me company, I got lost in the "hill-hopping" territory of Southern Indiana. Get a powerful car, drive fast, and you'll see what I mean.

It's lovely and un-ruined land, far different from the hideous suburban nowhere that has devoured everything around the Moonlite. Back in that part of the Hoosier State for the first time since 1991, I found myself making wrong turns, and not really worrying. I was near some old-stomping (and hunting and fishing) grounds of mine near the towns of Jasper, Paoli, and--my favorite--Santa Claus.

The small farms and woodlots were lovely, the little hamlets looking trim and sedate, just as I remembered them from 20 years ago. I took extra time to soak up a place that I've lost, albeit for some bittersweet reasons.



I also got time to see downtown Louisville beyond the bland convention district and its surreal mix of (this week) of writing faculty, National Guard Field Artillerymen, math teachers, and indoor-archery competitors carrying bows and arrows. Heading south on Fourth Street, I came to that human-scale, older Louisville that got bulldozed closer to the river, all to make room for the office blocks and crappy 1980s monoliths that will soon be unlivable as easy oil and convention travel dwindle. The image, "clear-cutting Louisville," is from the Old Louisville Web site. An ugly Hyatt hotel sits there now, with the sort of circular top-floor restaurant that looks like a disco-era flying saucer had landed and stayed past the decline of spandex pants.

In the surviving part of Old Louisville I found D. Nalley's, a 1950s type of diner that only takes cash and serves groaners of breakfasts for under $4. On the way back, I admired the sporadically gentrifying area of urban lofts, local shops, and more: the walkable, bikeable, infrastructure we'll use when the suburbs begin their terminal decline in a few years. Louisville, like downtown Richmond, has too many surface parking lots, but we can rip them up for urban farms to feed ourselves soon, as I suspect we'll need to do under the economic effects of global oil depletion.

I learned a great deal about the urban planning of a city very much like my own. But we call that a vacation, not work. I stopped to oggle the hideous new library, a 1970s stack of slabs that looks very much like the one that crash-landed in Richmond. At the same time, Louisville had the good sense not to tear down the marvelous Beaux-Arts building that was there before someone let "progress" loose on the area.

Sadly for my explorations, I had to get back to go to a morning session, so I trudged past the gutted Moorish-styled Falls City Theater Supply Company and the Modernist Kentucky Typewriter building. I was in paradise...and not just because I'd found a Lebanese deli. I was seeing a past that points the way to a humbler, locally made, and sustainable future. Louisville was clearly a raucous river city with lots of booze and theaters once. It will be a nexus for trade again on this big river, and without as much technological spectacle, future Kentuckians may be typing hand-bills for live shows to entertain those folks who "come to the big town."

Mixed-Reality Endnote:

This is the first CCCC where a participant looked at my name tag and said "you are Iggy."

Where's my adoring mob?