Students Online: Their Engaged is Not Our Engaged

Location: Montclair State University Virtual Campus

Photo Courtesy of Olivia Hotshot

We faculty who teach with technology claim we can multitask. Yet there is a bigger question: can anyone really do that? And what does "engaged in learning" mean to the Millennials we now teach?

I went to the June 2 Second Life Education Roundtable with those questions in my head, after hearing our topic from organizer AJ Brooks. AJ pulled off a coup by bringing Harry Pence, (SL: John2 Kepler) to a voice-chat meeting where Harry discussed his ideas and took questions from the audience.

Points worth noting:

• Harry defines engagement as involving "being focused on the matter at hand"
• We tended, as a group, to dismiss the idea that our minds can really multitask. Harry noted reading in Howard Rheingold's blog about two types of attention, "multitasking" and "continuous partial attention" (Visit Rheingold's entry on attention, as well as higher-level links to his Video Blog and his Web site).
• Harry has never had a college student say "that's too much" when he presents using voice and screen, but older audiences often get lost.
• His college students agree with him when he says that their younger siblings are truly fluent with networked technologies and will replace them in the workforce.
• AJ Brooks made a salient point I have often found true with my students: they are adept at using but not understanding the technologies. Iggy's examples from his students: how few reallly can solve problems that require alpahnumeric fixes (such as tweaking source-code) or making proper back-ups or hardware hacks that come naturally to old geezers like me who can work on their own cars and build stuff with tools.
• KZero's diagram of Virtual Worlds by age of users, Q4 2008: http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?page_id=2563 shows SL with a smaller, and older, demographic than many of the virtual worlds younger Millennials are using now. The open question remains whether or not they'll take to SL or something like it, with user-generated content, when they get older.
• We noted how many of the worlds younger users encounter do not permit creation of new content. CathyWyo1 Haystack then asked, "do we want a generation of kids who are passively engaged or actively involved in the creation of their space?"
• We all grew concerned about a generation "taught to the tests" and not encouraged to do as much collaborative learning. Harry noted a class in high school he encountered, where "Principal put them at the end of the hall b/c they were making too much noise and having fun" and making noise.

I'm fond of Rheingold's maxim that "Mindfulness and norms, my students helped me see, are essential tools for those who would master the arts of attention."

Can one be mindful of two things at once? Yes. Do them equally well? That I don't know, but that too is where the norms for my class come in. In fall, if a student is online during class and it's not course related, the norms are this: first time = warning, second time = "skipped class" in gradebook.

You can read the entire transcript of Harry's talk here.

King Tut in Second Life: A Teaser

Location: Kings Rezzable Region

I began my educational review of Rezzable's Tut creations with Second Life, if only because it does give a preview to the much larger features to be found on the Heritage Key OpenSim grid. Teleport over to the starting point at Kings Rezzable and have a look. What I've seen so far is very impressive work.

Some initial observations:

• The Starting Point: nicely arranged. It was an excellent idea to have the survey in several places for visitors who do not return to this point. My students will, of course, hop into the balloon. Then they will stand and fall out and try to walk back to the starting point's platform, which means they’ll fall again, through the desert floor, and plummet thousands of meters, to my great amusement. The balloon should do something if it can be sat in.
  

• Howard Carter’s Camp: Here is an area where my students could have a lot of fun fleshing out the material culture of the world when Tut was discovered. I’d like to know more about the motivations of the archeologists of Carter's era, as well as those of a wilder earlier period briefly mentioned. Students know these larger-than-life figures through Indiana Jones, so why not give them a diary and some materials about the questionable legal arrangements made to secure some digs? Why not have a hunt for clues to discover Carter’s motivations? What about an assignment over the provenance of many antiquities?
• The Mummy's Curse: Since Carter knew about the legendary “curse,” and Rezzable notes it briefly in the audio here, why not play that up as a way to get students to think and write about the ethics of what the archaeologists were doing?

• The Tomb: The artifacts are drop-dead gorgeous, the best primwork I've seen in SL. I’d like to know more, however, about their use in ancient times. Could we have notecards that would appear when an object is touched? Again, some beta-testing students might really enjoy developing these for Rezzable. Finally, the step back into the first room will be difficult for a noob.
• Room with Wall Paintings: I can see my students playing here, in a writing exercise that asks them to study the images and guess at the meanings before they hear the audio. I like to have students do close image analysis anyhow, so this room would play along nicely with several earlier assignments. The North wall never rezzed for me and the doorway beyond was so short I could not get through it. Should the wall be a phantom texture? Given that the room beyond is empty, that may not be an issue.
  

My next dispatch will take me to the other parts of the Rezzable build, before I teleport off to OpenSim as "IggyO Heritage" and continue my dispatches. Speaking of...

Coda: Shades of Ozimandius. As I looked over Tut's tomb, I wondered about the hubris of the Egyptian monarchs--and the occasionally pharaonic ways of Second Life's makers. Huge costs would be incurred to host half a dozen regions in SL, which Rezzable can easily do on their own grid. My one peek so far into OpenSim confirms that the content there equals what I saw inside SL, and it certainly exceeds it in scope.

Signal Interrupted: Tuned Out Since 1979

Location: At Home, TV nowhere in Sight

Photo cribbed from Spyparika's Photbucket site.

The analog signal is gone. Hurrah! One manifestation of a technology gone awry has vanished. May the rest of television and its cable monopolists share the fate of record companies as content goes online.

Bottom line: I prefer virtual worlds and gaming to TV because I chose the time and place of engagement and, more importantly, it's interactive. When there's a show I really want to see, like The Sopranos, I get a DVD of the series.

My local alternative weekly has yet to run this essay of mine about why I hate television. Here it is. I just resent it to the editor, too!

TUNED OUT

“Are you in some kind of religion?”

That’s the funniest of all the reactions, over the last 30 years, to my admission that I do not watch television. Now that analog television signals are history, I could care less. Anything I want to watch, or better yet, experience, can be found online.

Despite the tiny stickers I leave about, showing a grinning picto-person smashing a TV set with a sledge hammer, I’m not really the “kill your television” sort. When I went to college in 1979, I just fell out of the habit. That was a time before every student’s dorm room or apartment had cable, let alone high-speed Internet.

I never got back into regular viewing again, except for a weekly ritual of dinner with my parents followed by Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. In fact, why should I have gone back to television? The 1974-5 season, to my bizarre tastes, had the perfect Friday line-up of shows: Planet of the Apes, Rockford Files, and Kolchak the Night Stalker. Then I got a driver’s license, which meant drinking bad beer, chasing girls, and drag-racing. To my credit, despite my obvious lack of a brain, I had more luck driving than did Jim “totals a Firebird every week” Rockford.

Considering my 90+ mph rampages down a then-lonely West Broad Street, I can conclude that television is not the most dangerous activity for teens, then or now. Yet when the habit left me, it became clear that I’d never again live my life by a schedule that a network and cable set for me. That urgency—stop your life! Don’t miss the all-new episode!—lies behind my disdain for the medium.

Today, however, the coming of television-on-demand, internet archives of old shows, and the end of the analog signal force me to consider: under what conditions would I start watching regularly again?

Though much programming—from Charlie’s Angels to The Simple Life—has been execrable, it was never the quality of content that kept me from surrendering free time to the screen. Good programming abounds, even in series deplored by morally indignant people who would never laugh at a poop joke. Case in point: Stone and Parker’s Southpark satire of World of Warcraft gamers is not to be missed. My wife and I, both devotees of all films Mob-related, are working our way dutifully through the DVDs of The Sopranos. We can watch Tony put “two in the hat” of some goombah at any time and pace we wish, and I plan to repeat that ritual for the critically acclaimed, dark-and-downbeat remake of Battlestar Galactica. Old series return to life in other ways too, as 1970s-era monsters chase Karl Kolchak across my screen whenever I slip a DVD into the player.

What a three-network nation gave us, until cable appeared, was a common popular culture: everyone got it when one of us grabbed his chest, rolled his eyes to heaven, and said in Fred Sanford’s voice, “Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you, honey!”

Since I began watching a few programs on DVDs and online, at least I have something to talk about with strangers. Over the years, I’ve noticed how many casually overheard conversations have focused on shows I’ve never seen. Yet TV is such an atmospheric phenomenon that one seems to breathe it. I can recite facts about series I’ve never watched or have only seen once. Yet TV conversations can get personal when someone says, “you mean to tell me that you haven’t seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” The look that follows can be withering. I would like to reply with “you mean to tell me you have not read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court?” But I don’t. Instead I see enough Buffy to say socially acceptable and conciliatory things like “that Willow sure is a hot hot hottie right out of hotville.”

The same one-episode history goes for Cheers, Survivor, and King of the Hill. They were all fun, except for Survivor—watching that parade of greed and betrayal, I felt my brains trickling out of my ears and was reminded why most of TV makes me gag. I hoped a bunch of cannibals would show up to kill everyone, especially the studio bosses who green-lighted the reality TV movement.

All in all, my limited experience with contemporary television has taught me one important lesson: I don’t think my life is less complete for not having watched all of these shows. For the very best series, I’ll get around to it.

Eventually.

At the same time, it excites me that TV may be getting more interactive, even as it loses eyeballs to games and on-demand content online. In 2007, CSI New York permitted viewers to create avatars for the virtual world Second Life. In a subplot for the show, a killer left bodies around New York dressed as avatars while concealing clues in the virtual world. CSI viewers actually became part of the show by looking for leads in Second Life, and the results of their investigations were supposed to feature in later episodes. This is not quite the same as deciding how an episode ends, but it may be a step toward fully interactive multimedia programming that will enter our homes through the same cables now carrying only passive entertainment.

In such a world, one could pick exactly the show one wanted to “be in” and the role in which one might “act” alongside actor-avatars. Friday night we might all become Jim Rockford, Jim Kirk (his Chris Pine version from the new film, for you youngbloods), Dr. Quinn, even Homer Simpson or Jethro Bodine. Even I might tune in, then, and stop having to tell people that no, I’m not in a cult dedicated to pulling the plug on TV. I would be part of a cult making TV a lot smarter.

June Road Trip: Good Driving, Surreal Content

Location: Whiskey Sim's Giant Noob Storage and Meditation area

Those Lindens are up to something, I thought, as I barreled along an empty road and this popped up in chat:

Speed Camera:
Dominus Shadow v.2.0.44g,
Owned by Ignatius Onomatopoeia
98.537415 KpH
Fine L$68

Catch me, Johnny Law Linden! I got a license to fly!

And fly I did, only outrunning the roadbed occasionally, though I had the graphics pumped up and was driving fast, even across Sim-boundaries. In the end, I came to a spot where the highway just stopped, and I plunged off the edge into water. Luckily, in SL that's no impediment. The car landed upright and I raced up and down the bottoms of SL's rivers.

I ran across the wonderfully bizarre on this trip: the giant tower of noobs with a meditation cushion at the top:

A punky griefer-girl in the middle of a snowy field, making chaos with a bunch of friends in a flurry of pyrotechnics:


Then I saw the horses, and I pulled over by the Wengen Ski-Runs. I liked the look of the build there a lot. I may have to go back for virtual skiing:


So for June, there's not much point to the road-trip except a few moody and pretty pictures. Even a Peak Oiler like me, convinced that the days of the real-life open road are limited, can enjoy some virtual motoring.