[employment opportunity - virtual world learning]

Senior Research Assistant

The socio political impact of virtual world learning on higher education

Learning Innovation Group

£28,290 - £34,794 per annum

We are seeking an efficient, experienced researcher for a study funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The study seeks to explore ‘The socio political impact of virtual world learning on higher education' using participatory action research and will examine staff and students from a wide range of disciplines in Higher Education Institutions across the UK. It will investigate their conceptions of and decisions about the way in which they teach and learn at the socio-political boundaries of reality.

You will have a PhD in education or a related discipline and work closely with the Director of the Learning Innovation Group (Professor Maggi Savin-Baden) to ensure the smooth and efficient running of this study. This post will run for the duration of the study until starting on 10 September 2008, or as soon as possible thereafter. The post will be based at Coventry University, in the Learning Innovation Research Group.

Your experience will include working at a responsible level chiefly in a research environment and use of web 2.0 technologies and use of social networking platforms and familiarity with immersive world such as Second Life will be required. Reporting to the Director of the Learning Innovation Group you will undertake research and support the work of the PhD students appointed to on the project.

It is likely that interviews will take place on the 5th September.

[lively learning]

with google's new 3-d avatar-including chat room are there some cool opportunities for using this in our teaching?

According to Niniane Wang, google engineering manager: "A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions? I started asking this question as a 20% project, and I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs."

[creativity conversations at the ioct: bruce mason and peter shillingsburg]

"The creative process: views from practice and analysis."

Bruce Mason (New media advocate)
Peter Shillingsburg (Textual scholar)

Peter

"New knowledge is the result of a rational extension of the boundaries of established knowledge through acts of innovative combination, controlled violation of conventions, and recognition of the potentitals of the unexpected, including accidents."

(from Stephen Brown paraphrasing Margaret Boden)



For an innovation to be distinguished from chaos it must not exceed our tolerance for the unexplained thus will be a failed attempt. So there comes the notion that there is a discipline that underlies creativity - a controlled violation (recognising the potential of the accidental).


Art that can be labelled as significant or great usually has two characteristics:
command of langauge
does something not done before

"The old dog barked backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup."

(Robert Frost)

The first sentence has 22 stop sounds (so takes much longer to read than the second sentence). The second line only has 4 hard stop sounds and none is juxtaposed to the other. It has 8 liquids which run on smoothly without interruptions. In this case creativity is the skillful placement.

But what of *serendipity*?

Housman

"Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon ... I would go for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss ... the pit of the stomach."

Tree Bellicose Graph

"Jaun supine team tree bellicose livid tug adder inner past her honor heel slide. Day word deep tree Bellicose Graph. Dare wuzzy Girt Bag Bellicose Graph, dare wuzzy Muddles Eyes Bellicose Graph, enter wuzzy Ladle Beady Bellicose Graph. Bees hide dare past her render Russian reaver. Juan moaning, dado seeded acrostic past her tweet digress honor udder sight. Bat furs day head topaz oeqvre breech Honda witch dare livid day bag hoary bull trowel."

source

Bruce




Can a group be creative? (think of a million penguins)

In blogosphere there seems to be a consensus that a million penguins was a failure. BUT when wikis fail it is because no one writes anything or it is riddled with spam.

Stats in 5 weeks of a million penguins

• 1500 contributors
• over 11,000 edits
• 75,000 visitors to the site
• 280,000+ page views
  

So, maybe it failed because crowds cannot write well.

Or, maybe it was because there were no rules, everything was left up to the users. There was nothing saying what writers couldn't do.

But we have plenty of evidence of crowds writing. Aarne-Thompson 333

type - AT 0333 the wolf or other monster devous human beings until all of them are rescued alive from his belly
1)wolf's feast
2) rescue

motifs - 1) Wolf poses as "grandmother" and kills child, What makes your ears so big? Animal swallows man (not fatally)
2)Victims rescued from swallower's belly.

So this might be related to a digital tradition:

Wiki transmission
what about edit histories as transmission?
what kinds of wiki edits succeed and what fail?

Traces of Digital Authors


Oral culture leaves relatively few snapshots of texts
Digital culture leaves billions
Gibson's blog shows his latest novel Spook country coming together

but a reader of Gibson's new novel noticed that it sounded familiar...it was from Gibson's blog:

"So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times."

Bruce's note that you need to work within constraints so tried to create a tardis in second life but SL doesn't allow something to be different (spatially) on the inside and outside. So, a workaround was allowing one to teleport to somewhere else (bigger) from within the tardis.

Peter: Henry James and embedded clauses and deferred, Falkner and long sentences, relative duration of time to live life and then talk about it (Shandy!). So telling good stories, creation, is verbal so you need a good command of language. We build our worlds and transport ourselves with words (Coleridge).

[on-demand learning]

Courtesy of Angela's post, insights on Second Life and learning from Corey Ondrejaka: