Thoughts About Education & Second Life's Adult Zoning

Location: Linden Lab Blog

I'm interrupting my blissful exploration of Armada to consider the bombshell (not bad-girl Hojo Kilda, pictured above) that exploded yesterday, with the Linden Lab announcement that certain adult-themed content would be relegated to a new continent, and that other such content would have to be placed in regions that age-verify all entrants.

I posted some mustings to New World Notes as an overly long comment. Here they are, edited a bit:

Many European colleagues are laughing at Americans' puritanical hand-wringing over adult materials online. They should. We are a repressed and fretful people.

Meanwhile, lots of US academics are teaching in and with SL, and more of us--deliberately frumpy fashion criminals, mostly--are on the way in tweed jackets and would-be-hip "Foucault" eyewear. This pushes LL to do something, since they are courting the .edu market.

A few factoids from my perspective as an SL eduator:

1) Utopian educators among us resist any notion that the adult content of SL hurts them. Right now they may be correct. The new policies won't hurt these "Oh Brave New World!" sorts.

2) As more US colleges and universities come in world, the "in loco parentis" culture of some campuses will collide with SL's libertarianism.

3) Schools with savvy I.T. folks and hip admins will not fret. My own school is cool about the adult content; the new president, meeting me about our writing programs, recognized my wallpaper as a screen shot from SL. He recognizes its potential for education.

4) Students don't really care. They mostly chuckle about sex in cyberspace or find it mildly "creepy" (a bit of groupthink that has been drilled into them by "helicopter parents" and zealous counselors).

5) That "creepy" adjective indicates how some administrators and hovering parents will regard SL once it appears their already long worry-lists.

6) Cautious admins at many schools, responding to parents and state government (rather than spontaneous student interest in SL, which is light) will push LL to "protect our customers...I mean our children." I've been asked a few times from folks at such schools how the "X rated stuff" in SL leads to resistance by my administration. It doesn't--see point #3.

7) If LL wants to keep growing in the .edu market, they had to do this, if only to permit US first-years who are 17 years old into SL. I don't believe for a second that the Lindens won't lower the age-of-consent, I mean registration, in SL.

Courting higher ed could be a fatally flawed move. I can only see the small picture for my own teaching, which has gone very well in SL, if student evaluations and measures of improvement in their writing abilities are to be trusted.

Bringing China Mieville to Second Life

Location: Armada Floating City

I'm fanatical about China Mieville's fiction, so when I encountered a post in New World Notes about this region, based upon a city of ships in Mieville's The Scar, I had to zip over and begin exploring. The city, like that of the book, is an amalgam of pirated vessels rigged together into a Dickensian nightmare of multiple levels, dangerous alleys, and an acquatic underworld inhabited by merfolk and other water-dwelling races particular to Mieville's world of Bas-Lag.

Armada very much fits the Steampunk theme so popular in SL, and my initial exploration of Armada shows that the residents are already appropriating some of Mieville's puckish humor...

I will continuing looking at the residences and businesses of Armada, as my time allows. Perhaps I'll even rent a dwelling and get into the RP. I want to support something based upon the work of one of the finest writers of speculative fiction now living.

Rationality definitely takes a hit in Bas Lag, a place where fog can solidify into stone, giant Spiders move in and out of multiple dimensions while reciting free verse, and hideous monsters feed upon our fear, like a bat lapping flower-nectar. Perhaps my favorite moment from the novel that gave birth to Armada is an ancient race's playing with the laws of probability (well, to be honest, they mined probability, like ore) with disastrous results that ripple into the present.

Teleport link to begin exploring this world. Go now, and you can help residents shape the experience. And buy all of Mieville's books. They are worth the mind-bending and night-fears they induce.

Blog Spammers....grrrrrr

Location: Expression Engine Home Page

It's sad that the spammers of the world cannot be dragged through the streets and then beaten with chains.

At most blogs you can filter comments. Not at Expression Engine, where the Times Dispatch keeps the scrubbe-up version of this blog. Anyone can comment, and writers cannot delete commentary! Our only option has been to repost spammed posts without the stupid remarks. Here are some from the ever-more-desperate blog-spammers.

Anyway, here we are:

I certainly appreciate the write-up about this topic. This is something that weighs on my mind constantly, and I am looking for any alternative choices to product and touring. Thanks for the awesome post man, Posted by Bizz

Really a educative and informative post, the post is good in all regards,I am glad to read this post. Posted by Michel-Alaska Personal Injury Lawyer

Who on earth would consult a personal-injury lawyer to posts his services as spam to a blog about SL? He will need a personal-injury lawyer, if I ever get my way with his sort.

You can help me by contacting "Bizz," at http://www.drdraininc.com/, with your kind words about spamming blogs. They are plumbing contractor in Raleigh, NC.

Pappy Enoch has already left them some kind words. Use the contact form at their site to share with them what you think about blog-spammers.

Substantive Stories about Second Life: Turning Point for Mainstream Media?

Location: Ahern/Morris Welcome Area

There was a Linden Lab employee at the welcome area the other day. Doing his best in a Federation uniform, he was batting about quips with the sharp-tongued loungers who congregate there, even as he helped the occasional newcomer. It seemed odd to see a Linden in this place; I understand that at one time, company employees regularly mingled with residents.

Perhaps Linden Lab is getting ready for something new.

In the past two weeks, PBS, NPR and the New York Times have all run substantive pieces about business, art, and education in Second Life. The NY Times story of artist Jeff Lipsky’s rise to fame as SL artist Filthy Fluno shows clearly how virtual worlds have an astounding ability to alter how we live and work.

For those of us who endured a lot of misinformed worry-mongering and doomsaying about the virtual world, these stories come as pure vindication. Whatever happens to our particular world of choice, the media are starting to “get it” and do a better job of treating a story as a story. We are getting beyond the sort of knee-jerk, and ironic, responses of some students, who worry that we’ll all soon “live inside a computer” even as they frantically text each other, check their Facebook profiles, and tweet about the banal events of their day.

For a long time, stories about SL have resembled a naïve foreign correspondent’s story from, say, Kirgizstan. The audience would not get “ohhh…look at that unusual hat!” or “Those wild and crazy Kirgiz. They still have shamans there!”

For too long, that was the approach to SL, and I see the trend away from “gee whiz” or “what a bunch of goons” to “there is a real story here, something important to those of us without avatars.”

Slowly and surely, stories like Filthy Fluno’s success in the real-life art market are being told. And the Lindens are at the welcome areas again. When I messaged the fellow, wishing him luck with the unruly crowd, he said “I come here to have fun and a few laughs.”

If the media pay more serious attention to SL again, Linden Lab may have reason to laugh…all the way to the bank.