Peer pressure strikes again

Jennifer W Hanson's Dewey Decimal Section:

901 Philosophy & theory

Jennifer W Hanson = 054496583814954 = 054+496+583+814+954 = 2901


Class:
900 History & Geography


Contains:
Travel, biographies, ancient history, and histories of continents.



What it says about you:
You're connected to your past and value the things that have happened to you. You've had some conflicted times in your life, but they've brought you to where you are today and you don't ignore it.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

A tourist in Second Life

I know that as soon as you have an account in Second Life, you're a Resident, but as far as I'm concerned, The Residents are a bizarre conceptual rock band. So I'm still a tourist in SL, and will be until I change my avatar to look like an eyeball in formal attire.

The screen shot that illustrates this post is of my avatar, Isobel Jinx, posing in front of Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring and wearing a free t-shirt she picked up at the genetic genealogy section of Info Island's genealogy presence. How like a tourist (though I have to say that none of the free t-shirts I've picked up in Real Life fit like that^). It was pretty ironic that one of the first buildings I would stumble into in SL would be the genealogy center (yes, I am heavily into genealogy but grad school cuts into my research time).

After reading the tweets of my classmates who got to SL before I did, I was worried about basic concerns like learning to walk and so forth, but the initial signup and avatar creation process went pretty well for me (though it was very odd to see people falling out of the sky at Help Island). I didn't have much trouble figuring out how to move around, and in short order had teleported to Info Island. I spent a lot of my time wandering around the December holidays exhibit and the Peace Park, devoted to various religions. It seemed like a tranquil place, plus it had singing birds, so there I was birding in SL (four species on my SL list so far, plus a couple more unidentified; none actually seen). I liked the Buddhist shrine and meditation space; it seemed so cool. It wasn't until I was driving home from RU and its high-speed connection that night that I realized the wonderfully exotic opportunity to meditate in SL was really a mundane mental discipline I've done in Real Life off and on over the years (mostly off, because meditation isn't exotic at all, really).

So far in SL, when I see another Resident, I run the other way. As a result, I haven't had any of the "Naked Life" experiences some of my classmates have had (whew). I guess it's possible to be shy in a virtual world, too. The look of the world reminds me a lot of the game Myst; otherworldly yet a little too tidy, at the same time. The SL version of Old Queens campus WAS pretty neat though.

I discovered that you can do SL on dial-up (yes, it's wrong, but still possible). I'm very intrigued by the various organizations that have staked out a presence there, plus the option of having an avatar that can try out things you might not want to (yet) in Real Life. Sort of a test universe, as it were. I will probably keep playing around with it in the future. On the other hand, as someone who often prefers dealing with information rather than people, I hope that this is not going to be the new model of surfing the web. I would rather just find the data I want, rather than having to go through some avatar to do the same thing. But perhaps others would feel differently.

Feedback for Steve

I have to say that I've really enjoyed this class. I came in with lots of experience on some social software (blogging, Flickr) and none on others (pod- and vodcasting). There wasn't a week I didn't learn something new, even about services I was used to using. Working on all of these things over the course of the semester also showed how they interact with each other. I'm not an expert on everything, by any means, but I think I know enough about what we covered to help me keep up in the future. I've become a convert to Delicious, and look forward to playing around more with podcasting, vodcasting, and Second Life (among others). This class has also given me a greater appreciation for the various strengths and weaknesses of these applications when they are compared with each other.

There was a lot of homework, but I found that the structure was extremely helpful in terms of keeping up with the work. I didn't spend as much time as I would have liked checking out the library examples, but other than that, I think I got pretty much everything done (so far, that is; one blog post and the final project yet to complete after this). Holding this class as an online one is the right choice (and this on-campus commuter found it a relief to not have to drive to New Brunswick and back twice a week for a change).

The readings were good and often thought-provoking. Johnson, in particular, has really challenged my thinking on a number of fronts; I love that in a book. In the future, you might want to include a reading from Clay Shirky's terrific Here Comes Everybody. I know not everybody in class went for Brown and Duguid, but I enjoyed that book when I first read it on my own, and I think their point about what happens when human nature and technological hype collide with each other is very important to remember.

I'll conclude with what may (or may not be) an ironic note; I ended up "hanging out with" with my classmates in this virtual class more often than I did in my on-campus class this semester. I'm a shy person who often has troubles putting myself forward in person, but interacting with others online is often easier for me. I think being online with my classmates (whether working on a project, trying to troubleshoot a problem, or just chatting) was another really positive part of the class.

In a nutshell, thanks! :)

Johnson reading part 2

I thought I was goofing off with a couple of friends on Friday, but I ended up with a pile of evidence in favor of Johnson's Sleeper Curve. I'll spare you the back story, since it will never be available on DVD, but suffice it to say that we found ourselves (after pizza for dinner) at an apartment chockablock with tapes, DVDs, and techno gadgets. We, in this case, equals me and two friends, all OCD (more or less), geeky, and...oh, never mind. Like I said, the back story isn't available on DVD (and you should be grateful it isn't, but I'm starting to wonder what the ratings would be if it were). Two guys, one girl, all birders, all addicted to snappy wordplay, all with issues, two into Flickr and sf, the other one a self-described "online Luddite"...I guess it's like Seinfeld with binoculars and Flickr.

We watched a few episodes of The Middleman and Land of the Lost. The Middleman is based on a comic series and came out last year (I think, I'm not the greatest scholar of tv series) and Land of the Lost was the classic version from the 70s (which I watched when a kid, but that's another story).

The Middleman has a silly faux science fiction premise, but a gaggle of interesting characters, smart dialogue delivered at warp speed, and so many pop culture references that the creator's blog has entries listing all of said references for each episode. Plus, since the dialogue happens so fast, I wanted to watch each episode again just to get it the first time (but what I got, I liked a lot).

Land of the Lost had dinosaurs (you can't go wrong with dinosaurs), no outside references, illogical plots (despite the writership of such sf luminaries as Larry Niven and David Gerrold, in at least one case) (not that The Middleman's plots are that much more coherent), 70s hair and fashion (ok, that's probably unfair), bad special effects...

The Middleman makes you work for your satisfaction so much that when an episode is done, you immediately want to watch it again. Any reference you catch the first time around is all the sweeter (hey, the female protagonist and a neighbor swap song lyrics with each other instead of conversing). Meanwhile, what you see is what you get with Land of the Lost; since you're not distracted by anything else, you can home right in on the plot holes and bad special effects.

So, the question I'm supposed to be answering is what all this means for the library and/or educational worlds. Johnson provides more evidence for the directed learning discussed by Brown and Duguid (you can learn extremely complicated things if you're motivated to do so to fill a perceived need). He also makes a case that you can learn almost without trying, if you're viewing media that encourages you to learn how to keep up with it. Certainly, the fact that libraries now are getting into gaming and stocking DVDs of movies and tv series would seem to be a step in the right direction. After watching a couple of episodes of The Middleman, I could almost see a festival showing DVDs of the series; library staff could hand out scorecards to the audience so they could play along at catching the references. You could even call it the Pop Culture Literacy Festival or something. Ok, maybe not. But that was the kind of fun I was having with my friends on Friday night, and it was quite a bit of fun.

But there are still all those books on the library shelves and as Johnson notes, "Networked text has its own intellectual riches, of course: riffs, annotations, conversations--they all flourish in that ecosystem, and they all can be dazzlingly intelligent. But they nonetheless possess a different kind of intelligence from the intelligence delivered by reading a sustained argument for two hundred pages" (Johnson, p. 186). My question is how libraries can unpackage the intellectual riches in the books on their shelves for those who have grown up in a networked world. The knowledge encoded in our books is every bit as challenging as any game; one could argue that it just suffers from a non-networked delivery mechanism.

I would suggest that it all comes down to ensuring that learning and intellectual challenge are fun, fun like a game you play with your friends. New media seem to be better at capturing that balance than "old media" at the moment, but old media shouldn't be jettisoned. We need to find ways to show that intensive attention to a prolonged logical argument, or looking through an author's eyes for 300 pages, can be as fun as playing World of Warcraft, just fun in a different way.

Gaming research

If I had to choose a gaming console setup for a standard public library, I'd start by asking the library patrons about the kinds of games they enjoy playing or are interested in. I'd make an effort to reach a wide spectrum of users. I'd also look at what similar libraries are doing with their gaming programs; it would be helpful to find other libraries with gaming programs in my local area, because we might be able to work out some kind of consortium-type arrangement (or at least be likely to be dealing with some similar situations). It would also be very useful to hear about others' experience with gaming in other libraries.

I'd also research on gaming review sites and tech sites like CNET in order to find out more general types of information such as what games are available on console gaming setups and whether there are any usability quirks; the sorts of things that wouldn't be library-specific but would be good to know.

Personally, I would be inclined to go with Wii because it gives physical exercise along with the mental challenge of gaming. It also seems to appeal to a wide range of demographic groups.

Screencasting best practices

I'm not going to claim I have anything like the gospel in terms of screencasting best practices, since I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I've only used Jing, which is not always reliable (you get what you pay for?), so I would first say, know your software and its quirks. Comparing more than one screencasting application might not be a bad thing.

Know what you're going to say ahead of time. You don't need to have a script, but do know what you need to convey, so that if you're talking without a script you can still get your message across without a lot of dithering. Beyond this, have an idea of the ideal flow for your screencast in your head. Know how what you're saying in the moment fits not only into that moment but into the larger picture.

Know your window sizes for recording and don't move your mouse around too much or too fast.

Be relaxed and don't get stage fright. You don't have to be perfect, a conversational tone is enough. Your voice is probably also enough. You may not like how it sounds but as far as everyone around you is concerned, that's how you sound, so get used to it.

Tetris screencast

Inspired by some of my classmates, I did a screencast about playing Tetris in Facebook and trying to beat a friend's score (which, ultimately, I didn't do).

One thing I've learned from Gaming Week 1 (and this exercise):

I'm not a social gamer in online media (yet), though I am more social in other online and offline contexts. Maybe it's because I'm an only child and ended up playing board games, computer games and D&D solo (trust me, it is possible to play D&D alone). The real social aspect of gaming for me had to wait till I got to college and started playing arcade games in the student center with the other reprobates who were (and still are) my friends. They got me into playing card games like hearts (and our favorite house variation, double-cancellation hearts). So social gaming, for me, is still something that usually happens offline.

But as an old arcade hand, if Facebook can bring back the fun of trying to beat your best friend's score, maybe it's not such a bad thing. Now they just need to bring back Star Wars, Joust and Tempest (among others)!

Re: Tetris. I was a total Tetris addict for a while until the aches in my hands told me I needed to give it up. Tetris Friends shows me that not only do I still have the chops, ready to be reawakened at any moment, I can also whine about how this version of Tetris is dumbed-down from the bare-bones version I used to play.