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Group 8 Final Paper – Encouraging the Use of Virtual Environments by Librarians – Final

Here’s the Group 8 final paper.

I’m signing out! Thanks everyone for the great learning experience!

Second Life explorations with Tristan

Hi everyone,

It has been a pleasure learning with all of you. Please check out the attachment to this post. It describes my brief exploration of Second Life with Tristan.

Best of luck to everyone, and I hope to see you around in the virtual world someday.

A coworker recently asked me which route I take when driving home. I stumbled in my description. “I go out the garage, take the left side of the little street loop. Take a left, go past the library, in between the library and the hospital on the right, you know… Then past the hospital, I take a right; that curves up to 35…” Huh?

My primary profession at the moment, hopefully not much longer, is architecture. But I don’t know names. I don’t know names of streets or buildings or people usually. To me, names are arbitrary things that are attached to deeper essences. The names usually don’t have much at all to do with the actual things or their deeper meanings. So I don’t remember them.

I remember shapes and colors and people walking past a rusting metal wall. That was in Washington D.C. where I lived for a while. I remember a hotel lobby where someone was murdered a couple of weeks prior with MS13 scratched on the wall of a centuries old church in front of the hotel. I remember a huge wind blowing leaves around the narrow street in front of Diego Rivera’s house in Mexico City and thinking that this was his spirit welcoming me. I have no idea what the name of that street is. Tall windows, somber gardens, cantilevered stair up to a loft, that’s all. I remember a giant red neon OCHO peeking out between some palms at the end of that street outside the office tower where I now work; that street I can’t remember the name of that I take past the library, with the hospital on the right.

This is all very strange for someone in the architecture field. I should know things and stand up confidently and declare my place in the world. But I don’t. I’m fairly confident, but mostly about the fact that I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing most of the time. I experience my environment through the lens of existence. Hooking conversations and anecdotes to fragments of walls and textures and smells.

When I enter a virtual world, most of these clumps of event on which I build my structural framework of reality and memory are missing. But there’s another element involved here; another filter through which I perceive the world. When it’s dark and cold outside with the wind whipping the house, I think of the old pawnbroker from ‘Crime & Punishment’ tormenting the young murderer from beyond the grave in his tiny, bleak attic room. When I see a report about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the BBC, I think of the childish corporal in ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ living an actual war through the heroic war stories he will tell after the war is over; peeking at reality through a small slit between his scarf and hat. When I think of the tedious days of work in a monolithic glass office building, I think of the savage in his lighthouse in ‘Brave New World’ looking very much the caricature of a Native American in a 1950’s spaghetti western. When a helicopter lands on that hospital across from the library that I pass on the way home, the savage hangs himself in the lighthouse as the clones swarm in, landing like mosquitoes in their helicomics.

It’s not the morbidity that I’m focusing on in these stories. They just happen to be what I’ve read lately. They shape my current landscape as much as a conversation I’ll have with someone on the street today. They inform the conversation.

And that, in my long, roundabout way, is my point. Reading informs our lives and helps shape us into what we want to become. It puts us in conversation with other people and their wrestlings with existence across time and place. Whether people come to the conversation through a virtual world or through a physical artifact is irrelevant, just as long as they come. Our job is to coax and cajole if need be to get them there. If this can happen on a virtual island in a virtual place, so be it.

When thinking about aggregation, another definition of the term came to mind. In the construction industry, aggregate is a noun and refers to coarse material that serves as reinforcement to add strength to the overall composite material to which it is added.

In the information field, when we say aggregate, we are referring to the categorization and consolidation of disparate and dispersed information objects. If you take from the first definition and add to the second, you end up with the altered idea that the categorization and consolidation of information in the service of the creation of a learning environment can add strength to the overall composition of the material. One of my professor’s mantras is “the organization of information creates new information.” This is also at the heart of all of the 2.0 mindset that we’ve been talking about throughout this course. It is an interesting and valuable perspective.

The other point I would like to make is that it seems like when we aggregate information from a crowdsource, that we are actually aggregating the people who create the information in the first place. We cannot separate the information from the people even if the people are anonymized in the process.

http://slidesha.re/ro5J97

http://lgregfergl.glogster.com/Virtual-Library-Presence/

Here’s the video that’s supposed to play in the glog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuYWLYjOa_0

2.0 is about creativity and collaboration. The concept of property is transformed in an environment of non-physical objects.

Copying and mash-up remind me of Dada techniques and impulses. Dadaists used collage “to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life”. They used photomontage “to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media”. They used assemblage which was a type of 3d collage constructed of everyday objects “to produce meaningful or meaningless pieces of work including war objects and trash”. And they created the concept of the readymade which was a manufactured object situated so as to be considered as art. (all quotes are from Wikipedia… I stole them…)

I have had conversations with several friends who bemoan the death of all originality in the current time frame. They lament the endless copying and remixing and they think that this is the beginning of the end of the human creative spirit. I think that this is a little too one-sided and misses a larger point. Much of what is “stolen” or copied or sampled is actually, in my brief analysis of the work, taken from the surrounding environment. The constituent parts of the mash-ups are images of surroundings or samples of media output.

So, in this way, 2.0 media is more of a commentary than a theft. It’s much more like Dada art which challenged the accepted reference frames by using media output to comment on itself. Turning the camera lens back on itself to create an array of infinite regression.

I was looking into Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism recently for a paper that I’m working on and was interested in a quote by Marx about the idea of a commodity: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

When something is interacted with as a commodity, it is assigned an abstract value that shares a common denominator with other commodities. Two things may have nothing at all in common until an exchange value is assigned to them. What do an eggplant and your labor have in common? They can both be bought and sold. Now that everything seems to be a commodity, I find it interesting that people are deliberately producing value items that are not commodities. They are creating them and distributing them for free. This undermines their exchange rate. I suppose someone is getting paid somewhere along the line, though I’m not really sure how or at what point along the creation-consumption pipeline. Is this all really so free and loose, or is there some underlying commodity market hiding under the cyber-surface?

One thing I think is true is that neither Marx nor any capitalist ever imagined that people would create valuable stuff for free. This is a new type of revolution that seems to undermine, or at least significantly challenge, the current economic system. Thoreau said “Enjoy the land but own it not.” (Walden) This can be said of intellectual property, too. On the other hand, I realize that I’m a total hypocrite. I own many little bits of property that make me feel secure. I would be uncomfortable if my ownership of them were challenged. Maybe the whole 2.0 property paradigm will have to settle on me over time.

I think that the main difference between physical property and 2.0 property is that much of the information that goes into making virtual objects comes from the environment. It’s a commentary on the state of the world. Human capital is put into it in the form of labor in different ways than with physical objects, and the end result is a different type of thing. Maybe that’s why it should be interacted with in a different way; as a different type of commodity. And maybe the new capital is your personal relevance and collaboration ability. You don’t want to squander it by being disagreeable, so you have to cultivate it through social interaction.

Anyway, here’s an interesting web site that I found and want to share: It’s a place that you can go to find open source equivalents to name brand products. http://www.osalt.com/

m3 Introduced us to the concept of collaboration. We’ve all collaborated on projects with different groups of people in different settings, but I think that few of us have had the opportunity to collaborate the way we did in this class, using the variety of social media tools available to us.

I will give you my interpretation of the experience from this past week. I began the week with excitement because I was envisioning Dick Tracy watches connecting group members on the fly, wherever we were, providing quick check-ins and updates. I envisioned myself in a flying car with 3d images projected in space with a disembodied voice saying “Mr. Ferguson, your group would like to meet for a quick mash-up.” as my car flew itself in a laser-guided queue. This is the future, after all. Shouldn’t this communication stuff be all worked out by now?

Sigh, no. Briefly, I’ll say that the ooVoo video chat wasn’t compatible with some devices, Google+ Hangouts doesn’t work on the iPhone and I don’t have a webcam at work, and Skype mobile got garbled quickly the first meeting we used it on, and completely dumped me on the second meeting. We had to go to Vista group chat, and when the other three members of the group were in there, I wasn’t allowed in. I was only able to chat on the Skype mobile app with the other members in the Vista chat.

Now, it would be tempting to say that the technology is not up to snuff, it was a bad experience, etc., but it was really the opposite, and I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna. One of the most interesting and exciting experiences for me is dealing with problems as they arise. Once, when I was giving a presentation to about a hundred people consisting of faculty, students and their friends and families, one of my guest speaker’s slide presentation wouldn’t project on the screen behind us. This was the central part of the presentation. I felt strangely calm. All the nerves and fear had presented itself when I was anticipating the event before it began. Once the event started and the fiasco occurred, I was fine. I went into the room behind the panel of faculty on the elevated stage, messed with the projector, and stayed back there manually changing the slides as the speaker presented. When he referred to something on a slide, I pointed it out with my finger which showed up as a giant shadow appendage to the audience. They burst into laughter, and the tension was relieved. It was a big hit.

Mistakes happen, technical problems are always lurking. But these are just opportunities to create something new out of a situation. You have to be flexible. I apologize for waxing poetic, but there it is. Collaboration is about creating something together that you could never have created alone. In architecture design classes we always looked for the happy accidents. Sometimes we even created opportunities for them. You head down one road, and then you take your artifact from that exploration and literally turn it upside down and break chunks of it off and reassemble it. A large part of what we do as information professionals is learn how to navigate the ever-shifting landscape and dodge the grenades as they explode before us. Beauty comes out of the destruction and resurrection.

I’m just glad that the people that I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with in this class are up to the challenge and willing to negotiate the terrain with a spirit of cooperation.

In Vermont and Maine, people pass laws in assemblies called “floor meetings”. They make binding decisions in face-to-face deliberations. Cornell biologist Tom Seeley (http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/seeley.shtml) says that people in these floor meetings display behavior similar to the “animal democracy” behavior displayed by honeybees.

Similarities between town meetings and honey bee behavior:

• Scout bees report on the surrounding countryside; Townspeople report on their community.

• Bees recruit others to support their opinions; Townspeople try to sway opinion with spirited debate.

• A swarm chooses a nest site by establishing a quorum of supporters; Townspeople shout ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ or cast ballots to vote on community actions.

The main character of the interactions are that they establish a decision making process that is characterized by:

• Seeking a diversity of knowledge.

• Encouraging a friendly competition of ideas.

• Using an effective mechanism to narrow the choices.

Hallmarks of Swarm intelligence include (Seeley):

• Diversity of knowledge about the available options.

• Open and honest sharing of information about the options.

• Independence in the members’ evaluations of the options.

• Unbiased aggregation of the members’ opinions on the options.

• Leadership that fosters but does not dominate the discussion.

Twitter has a Digital Townsquare, but it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with people coming together to make decisions or with swarm intelligence:

Digital Townsquare

@digitaltownsqua

http://www.digitaltownsquare.coms

The Twitter space gives you the opportunity to “Find information about movie times, parks, things to do & events including nightlife, outdoor recreation, sports in your city in USA.”

After a little thought, I’m wondering if it is even possible to make group decisions in a digital environment. How could you tell who’s voting, how many times they’ve voted, which groups have been excluded because of the digital divide and other socio-economic issues?

Recently, I was thinking that it would be very nice if politicians could actually get accurate opinions from their constituents to back up their assurances that they know what the people want. Instead of a poll with a sample group, you ask everyone, and everyone instantly answers. Impossible!? I’m not so sure. I think the idea has to at least first be articulated before it can be refined or shot down. The more people who have phones because the price keeps going down; the more everyone has instant mobile access, the closer we can get to such a thing. All we need is some mechanism to easily register people (one tap technology), and some way to make sure that each person only gets one vote, and a way to aggregate and display the data in real time. Oh, and a boat load of band width. Then the president/prime minister/queen/king, etc. announces an important topic with a simple question in unambiguous terms, and BANG! Instant reliable opinions from the real “people”. I know, the formation of the questions would always be attacked, and all of the typical problems with surveys would still be there. But a conversation could be established where unclear items get ironed out.

As far as the back-and-forth communication necessary for swarm intelligence? Not sure, maybe follow-up debates for mobile devices with proxy debaters representing each side of the issues as they get fleshed out by the votes and ranked by number of people who hold that opinion. Or a combination of multiple push questions administered in a responsible manner.

The biggest threat to this kind of thing working is the problem of participation. Maybe people just don’t give a damn! Also, I wonder if politicians would actually want to know what people think. If the system was widely seen to be successful and representative of peoples’ opinions, then politicians might have to abandon their ideologies when they are seen to actually not be representative of those whom they claim to represent.

This discussion seems very apropos given the goofy squabbling in the U.S. over whether or not we will give a hearty stomp to the world economy this week.

So, that’s what’s on my mind this evening. Collaboration starts tomorrow!

Have a good week everyone!

Well, we made it to the end of module 2, and I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some of the thoughts that have been swimming around in my head.

Affinity Spaces:Inevitable / Not Sufficient

Regarding “affinity spaces” as described in one of our readings: Children in a participatory culture are described as gung-ho little multi-taskers, adept at transmedia navigation, expanding their consciousness by leveraging collective intelligence and distributed cognition.

When reading this, I kept wondering when the first toddler CEO would hit the world stage. All of the examples were of very young kids out there acting like little corporate celebrities. The message seems to be “you’re very special, you’re too smart for traditional education, drop out and get rich”.

I won’t bore everyone with my dissection of the paper, but I will just say that these affinity spaces seem to be necessary (or at least inevitable), but not sufficient for the cognitive development of children.

What about critical analysis? What about critical literacy? I don’t feel that the participatory culture satisfies these developmental needs.

The Fourth and Fifth Walls: Spatial Metaphors and Performance

When reading about the glass-walled bedroom where people come in and out, watch and creep around as a metaphor for these online interactive environments, I started thinking about a spatial metaphor from traditional theater.

I copied this from Wikipedia: The fourth wall is the imaginary “wall” at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The term “fifth wall” has been used as an extension of the fourth wall concept to refer to the “invisible wall between critics or readers and theatre practitioners. The acceptance of the transparency of the fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events. Speaking directly to, or otherwise acknowledging, the audience through the camera, in a film, play or television program, is referred to as “breaking the fourth wall.”

Violating the boundary: With social media boundaries, there’s no wall to violate because there’s no widely accepted social norm defining behavior at the boundary. And the boundary itself is fragmented, nondescript, difficult to locate and define. The glass-walled bedroom metaphor is effective in describing participation, but I think it needs to be developed a little more to include the ways that information is communicated. The boundary of social media is more like a membrane.

I think it would be helpful to spend a lot of time developing new metaphors. We live our lives and shape our perceptions through our mental maps, and these are formed by metaphors.

Participation: Death of the Transmissionist

What I came to realize this past week was that participation in online environments kills the transmissionist teaching model. The idea that a teacher has to prepare a regimented lesson and deliver it to students who sit in chairs and take notes is a little outdated and in need of reconsideration.

I have heard this sentiment in several classes by teachers who stood before a class of students sitting in chairs taking notes. This is the first class that I’ve had where we practice what we preach.

Also, I very much enjoyed thinking about and interacting with different levels of understanding of participation such as lurking, snooping and furtively gumshoeing. What I came to realize is that I change roles and behaviors in online environments about as often as I do in physical environments given the context of the situation and the role that I embody at the moment.