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It’s the final week of LIBR559M, and I have spent most of the day working on the presentation for Group 6. For our final project, we looked at the works of art and the archives of Emily Carr, one of Canada–and especially the West Coast’s–most widely recognized painters. The pieces of her life are dispersed at multiple art museums, galleries, and her house is a historic museum. We proposed creating a Drupal site to aggregate the digital surrogates of her archives and works of art in one location for the benefit of students, educators, researchers, the general public, and the institutions themselves. Drupal is awesome because it’s open source, its free, and it is highly customizable through widgets and add-ons. User participation will be encouraged in many ways–from wikis to discussion forums to social tagging.

Anyway! That’s not what I meant to write about. I wanted to write a blog post on immersion in the 2.0 environment, which is LIBR559M’s sixth and final module. For our project, my task was to make the presentation, and I used a 2.0 online program called Prezi. Prezi is free up to 100 mb, and is like a much less linear version of Powerpoint on psychedelics in a subatomic string theorized universe. Text lies both flat on the surface, and receeds into space.  It’s trippy. I was pleased to note that the editing process is wholly collaborative–other group members even have little flat avatars on the prezi, so I can see what parts they are editing. Presentations in 2.0! I was showing my partner, Andrew, the prezi, and I ended up showing him all sorts of new 2.0 platforms I’ve started using in the past month and a half. I just downloaded Jing, which I will use shortly to screencast my part of the presentation, since I will not be present during our slot tomorrow. The I showed him Pearltrees, and finally, we watched the video demo of Open Cobalt before exploring Second Life for a few minutes. I’ll admit, I was feeling pretty immersed in 2.0 technologies until I saw Second Life and Open Cobalt, especially. I found Open Cobalt fascinating in concept, but the dramatic music in the video was a bit much, to put it lightly.

I “walked” around in SL for a few minutes, and was struck by the true implications of this game, simulated world, whatever you want to call it. I used to play The Sims when I was in highschool, and had this game been available, I would have been obsessed with it. The Sims is the ancestor of SL, practically. I like how people/avatars can engage in a number of creative endeavors, from publishing and trying to sell books, paintings, furniture, anything. Not only are there SL art galleries, they hold conferences on how to run a successful SL art gallery! That’s being proactive! But, half the time the work for sale/display is mediocre, and I do wonder how much exercise these people are getting (though many reputable museums, galleries, and active people have SL presences). SL would have been an incredible platform for our aggregation of Emily Carr’s life and works. How cool to walk around a simulation of Emily Carr’s house and look at her works on her walls, her letters in her desk, perhaps. Unfortunately, not everyone participated in SL, and our goal was to reach the broadest demographics possible.

I’ll be honest, at first I considered Second Life and Open Cobalt to be immersive simulations for those who wanted to escape the realities of the three-dimensional world (why look at a digitized sunset rather than the REAL sun setting JUST OUTSIDE?). And though I still think that is a component, I was very impressed by Open Cobalt, despite the cheesy music. This is a very ambitious alternative reality that has huge potential for sparking learning in people because it is more exciting than real life! I think that’s the thing about Second Life and Open Cobalt–they’re more exciting than reality, because they lack the constraints of reality. When this is applied to science and interactive learning, this can be hugely valuable–for example, imagine looking at digitized representations of DNA strands in Open Cobalt, rather than as a static image. The DNA strand could be enlarged, rotated, and truly explored. Projects and plans can be organized AND implemented! Imagine building your own plane, or submarine! This really could be an incredible tool for integrating learning into play, and play into learning.

For the first time, I’m dealing with the distinctions between a blog, done specifically for a class, and a livejournal. Oh, I was an avid livejournaler back in the day. Then I forgot about it for a few years before remembering it. Lo and behold, there were the ramblings of my 15 year old self, right where I left them, “exposed as a meat sandwich” (a line from my favorite Margaret Atwood poem). If this was my livejournal (which I have since downloaded and then deleted), I would write about how my grandpa died this week, and the whirlwind I’ve been within, being with family and arrangements and the heartache. But since this is my blog for LIBR559M, I’ll only mention this as the reason why I have been so disconnected this past week. This class has been a part of the intensity of this week, though; LIBR559M is permanently etched into me because of it. I was writing that last blog-post when he died, sitting quietly next to him holding his hand with one of mine and typing with the other. I was the only one there, everyone else had finally left after being at the hospice house for three days. After he passed and everyone arrived, my Aunt asked me why I had stayed. I wanted to say something profound but instead I told the truth–that my grandparent’s don’t have internet, and I needed the wifi connection at hospice to get some overdue classwork done. So I guess I have this class to thank for being there with him in his last moments. Heavy, right? These last sentences are reminiscent of my lj, but I’ll let them stand.

Only today, Saturday, have I finally had the brain space to listen to the powerpoint for Module IV on Creativity and Social Media. And it gave me some more to think about regarding the last post, about the potential for a social media campaign at the art museum’s archives to sustain researcher and visitor participation. Dean made some great points in the powerpoint about the necessity of creating a social media program that responds to the needs of the researchers instead of the staff building a program based on perceived user needs. To sell the idea to my boss, I would suggest doing some focus groups of researchers, donors, and members to get their insight into what would be most valuable to them. Perhaps even set up a planning committee for it, which could bring in younger, more social-media savvy participants who could introduce older or less 2.0-aware participants to the potential inherent in social media. Also, I would include artists in the focus groups and planning committee, because part of the goal of an arts archive is to allow artists from the past to inspire those in the present and future. Talk about creativity in 2.0.

In the past, archival interns have written papers or done powerpoint presentations on their research, and I would advocate for these presentations and papers to be made accessible on the archive part of the website. One of the long-term goals of the archive is to increase awareness and recognition of the influence of the regional artists which they celebrate, and making research public is a great way to allow research endeavors to continually inspire people. In his powerpoint for Module IV, Dean talked about “life-long learners” which was a phrase I heard often during my time in the education department of the science museum I worked at for a while. It was great to think about how that term applies to so many different spheres, and how 2.0 technologies can help create and sustain those drives in others through collaborative participation.

The wake is tomorrow, the funeral Monday. My task today has been to go through my grandparent’s photo albums and pull out all of the pictures of him to fill two large photo boards. Earlier, I had two of my younger cousins helping me, and I couldn’t help but smile when I realized that I unknowingly had set up a loose catalogue schema to protect the original order of the photos–each of the kids had some sticky notes and a pencil, noting which book each photo had come from. I had to go through the books again after they left, though, because they had missed some photos of their grandfather–they didn’t recognize him when he was younger. I also couldn’t help but remind my mother that we would have to redo many of the albums, because the photos are on those gross acidic sticky pages. Gotta get some inert polyethylene sleeves, or acid-free lignin-free paper. The archivist in daily life.

Wow. My first blog post. I feel like there should be some sort of fanfare, or deep, meaningful comments. This post will contain neither. I begin not with a bang, but a whisper.