If you only read one book about virtual worlds, read Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life. If you are only going to read two, read Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life.Overall, Coming of Age in Second Life (CASL) represents cutting edge anthropology at its best — hip, smart, theoretically sophisticated, and with its head screwed on straight. As far as I am concerned it establishes a new standard for students of virtual worlds in all disciplines, and clears a path for anyone wanting to understand how anthropologists can study virtual worlds. Of course, the book has its shortcomings — mostly, I feel, because cutting edge anthropology has its shortcomings — but there is no doubt that CASL (as I’ll call it) is a seminal work that deserves to be widely read.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
I’m not sure yet what the possible uses of this visualization tool are beyond creating a whiz-bang slide in a presentation… I suspect that the limit in potential lies within me at the moment… the sample output shown on the Wordle site is fascinating. A stunning visual version of a tag cloud can really help focus where attention is directed…. the tool also allows you to cut and paste a random set of text and apply the same visualisation techniques.
I came across this quote from Jello Biafra during my reading today and it seemed to resonate with so many other aspects of my working life that I wanted to give it a bit of currency while I think about all the implications…
I think also that it could be a catch cry for the Web 2.0 generation and particularly in relation to education.
The rhetoric of edupunk seems encapsulated in this simple statement of intent.
MemeStreamscombines the power of weblogs and social networking. The members of our community work together to find interesting content on the web. As you use the site, it learns your interests, and provides new links it thinks you will like.
The program asked students to produce and send us three- to seven-minute original videos based on the theme “How Technology Helps Me Learn,” illustrating how their schools are employing technology to advance learning. We received scores of entries from schools across the United States–and even one from Japan.We’ve pared down these responses to the three most creative and original videos in each category: elementary, middle, and high school. The finalists’ entries are posted to our web site, and we’d like you to help us choose the winners. (To participate, go to http://www.eschoolnews.com/empowered, watch the student videos, and rate each of the nine finalists; winners will be announced in September.)
This project undertaken by eSchool News strikes me as an especially proactive way of demonstrating how important technology has become in teaching and learning. Of course, we also need to remember that sound pedagogical principles must still be evident - but this type of project engenders many such principles… ideally it is a student-centred exercise, ideally it emerges from constructivist enquiry, it should be generative and productive - and it seems to me that some of the video entries are all that and more.
We have an interesting emerging space for collaboration of those working in SL and with teens at http://secondclassroom.ning.com and Dean Groom brings a whole new twist to learning initiatives in SL - and is possibly the first school in Australia to fully blend SL learning into the mainstream curriculum. http://deangroom.wordpress.com/ These take place in TL in Skoolaborate (at the moment) but are a significant extension of the initiatives being explored in Skoolaborate. Dean is exploring Open Sim, which is well worth hearing about for schools that are struggling with network blocks etc.
This video with Cory Doctorow is one of the lead awareness raising tools about a proposed (although it may already have passed) new legislation in Canada. Bill 61-C proposes quite a few significant change in Canadian Copyright law in response to changing social trends in the way people deal with such material. Rather than acknowledging that culture and business are changing and that new models of acceptability are emerging, it seems (from most accounts I’ve read) that Bill 61-C seems to be quite retrograde in the way it hopes to handle things.
Here’s some stuff to love about the new bill, C-61::
-$500 per downloaded song
-No Fair Use rights for remix culture
-$20,000 for uploading content (youtube anyone?)
There is a campaign afoot to use one of these posters to create a mugshot of yourself to be used in a video to protest the proposed legislation.
There are some concerns by some remixers and culture co-opters that by tagging themselves as criminal they are accepting the legitimacy of the laws. And while the exercise is satirical I can see the advertising agency that the Canadian government uses choosing to use the Creative Commons attributions to represent the people as criminals by repositioning their images inside a government anti-piracy/anti-copying campaign ad.
The Copyright Criminals video sample is currently available at http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/
Technology analyst Gartner have come up with a list of the 10 technologies it believes are most likely to change the way business is done between 2008 and 2012.
Gartner’s top 10 disruptive technologies 2008-2012:
1. Multicore and hybrid processors.
2. Virtualisation and fabric computing.
3. Social networks and social software.
4. Cloud computing and cloud/web platforms.
5. Web mashups.
6. User interface.
7. Ubiquitous computing.
8. Contextual computing.
9. Augmented reality.
10. Semantics.
A great little demo of the Vollee browser for SL on your mobile phone…
It seems Second Life (and presumable soon there will be similar tools for other virtual worlds) is becoming very accessible. I suggest it will be a while before it takes off in Australia - our mobile phone internet systems are still pretty demanding on the wallet at the moment. But hopefully it won’t be too long.
Squeezing a relatively high-end game like Second Life onto your mobile phone without slowing the experience to a crawl is an impressive technical achievement. And this isn’t just some pared-down “check your status” feature, but a real mobile version of the game, one that lets you wander, fly or teleport through the world and chat with your friends. Vollee says it takes advantage of compression and 3G mobile networks to minimize bandwidth requirements. http://tinyurl.com/53vh39
The blogosphere seems to have embraced this term with a passion. It seems to have gained some currency towards the end of last week and is now a fully fledged meme on the loose.
My conceptualisation is something like this:
Teachers and learners busting out of the Access Control systems that schools and universities insist on labelling “Learning Tools” and “Virtual Classrooms” - the real learning is OPEN access…. creative, expansive, generative, social… subversive, transgressive and problematic…
That sits quite comfortably with me as I’ve had to find workarounds for many technology projects I’ve wanted to initiate over the past 15 years. The locked down systems of academia and schools are often very counterproductive and anathema to rich learning.
The EDUPUNK is the person who acknowledges this but is reluctant to accept it. DIY is the order of the day. Find solutions using whatever tools you can utilise or construct yourself. Share your resources widely and freely.
Some of my favourite comments on EDUPUNK are:
I’ve been thinking about mosh pits as metaphors for learning/teaching spaces for years, as places where people are both competitive and collaborative, both violent and communal, both individual and nameless/faceless, self-affirming and self-destructive, etc. Most important, for moshes to work, all participants have to trust each other. (Seth Kahn) http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=20836682362&topic=4391
June 18, 2008 
Posted in Communities, Second Life, SecondLife, Technology and Virtual Worlds 
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The Copyright Criminals video sample is currently available at http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/
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