Value

Some nice people from SL have formed an educator/research cooperative to help educators and researchers make the transition in-world. Their web site is at http://educatorscoop.org/ and the process to be approved is rather elaborate. The cost is not terribly high, given the amount I pay in land tier every month. I’ve applied to become a member.

One of the questions they ask is “what you are interested in and imagine doing in SL as an educator/researcher?”

In part I’m doing it by participating in this little activity with rad and in part the answer has to be, I don’t know yet.

One of the difficulties in dealing with educators and researchers in general is that they seem to want to know what you’re going to study before you even have an idea of what might be interesting. THE big question about SL for me is “What’s a valid question?” The embodiment topic is sort of interesting. Research on “Do people treat me differently in this body or that body?” is probably interesting, but I’m not sure what to do with it. “Yes,” as an answer leaves a lot to be desired.

So, I told the interviewer (yes, you have to have a phone interview! — I hate phones), I’m not really interested in *teaching* in SL per se. I’m not sure that the idea of *teaching* in SL has a lot of merit frankly. For that matter, I’m beginning to question the merit of *teaching* in RL. I *am* interested in the power of creativity as motivator and in the issues surrounding perception of distance. I still run into people — like this group who insist on having a phone interview — who feel like the communication isn’t valid unless they can hear your voice. Or see your “body language”

Which brings me back to embodiment in SL where the POV is not thru the avatar’s eyes, but something else — most often over the shoulder but frequently at some tangent zoom angle. Just because the avatar moves its head, doesn’t mean the person at the keyboard is looking in a different place. Placement of avatars in relationship to each other is — at least for me — a haphazard exercise at best. I find I DO like to sit. I dont know what that means. It has something to do with anchoring the av so I’m free to use the cam. I will move so that the group is in the 20m chat circle from me, even if it means that people on opposite sides only hear me and not each other. Most people don’t seem to even be aware that there IS a chat range, let alone how big it is. I wear a small device, in fact, that tells me who’s in chat range. It updates every 20 seconds and I find it invaluable, but I don’t think that most people find that information is particularly useful. Why IS that?

And one last idea before I pack to go to a physical conference that could be just as easily handled by text chat, my largest reservations about the Coop have to do with the tendency for people to get into SL and not move around. Educators in particular treat the rest of SL like some kind of dangerous third world country where the water is suspect and the food is bacterially contaminated. If all they/we as members of the coop do is sit on the Mesa and chat, then the whole experience is lost.

We’ll see.