Elgg Users :: Blog

SLidentities - true or false?

Who are those people that you're interacting with in Second Life and ofther virtual contexts, really?  Is there a real person with honest intentions behind the mask, or are you perhaps encountering someone pretending to be someone else?

I would not find it rude at all to ask for more information about people's identity, if we are talking professional shop, or for other reasons. On the contary, I think this is the breaking moment of genuine interest, a step in the process of trust building. On the other hand, I would per routine discretely check the Profile of just anyone I am considering my offer of friendshop to include this or that person's avatar in my list (so that we can see each other online, and eventually get in touch later). This is not inappropriate or rude at all, it is a commonly known social contactability practice and suppsoed to be quite polite to know what people have shared about themselves in their own profile.
And, as my list of SL friends grew too long to remember one imaginary name from another , I also appreciate the way that you can save your own special notes on each avatar!

It would be interesting to examine to what degree it has been either positive or negative to build up this alter ego persona, for people who have serious intentions about using SL for their professional life.

NB! This post was inspired by a new conversation in the MUVEnation course started by David Winograd (rwho is new to SL and perfer being know by his real name)  and with a reaction from Anna Begonia whose first name is new to me: Antonella Berriolo. Anna claims that it would be rude to asl people in SL about their real life identity, and does not mix her RL and SL friends while David is worried because he is used to a codex where you would be responsible for your contributions.

Eariler today, I was unable get in world, and not surprised as I had noticed a SL server upgrade on the grid status blog //status.secondlifegrid.net/ . After dinner & dishes duty - around 17.30 GMT, I wanted to see if group 2 were still in a meeting at MUVEnation island, but they had left. On the map, I tracked someone and teleported there,he was also from the MUVEnation project; he told me the others had left and we made friends, had a conversation, tried a few things around friendship features and played hide and seek with mini map and teleport, good practice for mentor skills. I need to find out who he was as I forgot to note down his name - but I have several photos of him, close up face only,so that will be an identifier. What we actually did not do, was to try out the six helpful posts of informative exercises, which I took up ather he left

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3175/3046043075_973e98b854.jpg

 

 

 I don't know if he had been taklen there by the course leaders Rosie /Shirley and Pat P. they are also developers at the neighbor island Emerge of the JISC project. What I fould was a powerful training camp with all the nice advice you could ever want for the first few weeks in world. For me, the note collection will serve as reminders t helping me to catch up after half a year away, and a lousy memory.

How to change appearance and dress yourself up, where to get useful freebies (in an economy where most beginners are free riders and terribly poor, this comes in very handy!) How to use camera controls, take snapshots - and how to measure your height. This is where I I stumbed into an emergency! I touched the tall talking box, got the expected measure (an am 1.78 meters which is 20 cm taller than in RL ) - and then I touched a second time. Now the box attacked me, and it lookedfun because I am wearing wings these days. I knew I had a note about how to get rid of a box in your face from the helpful Emerge handbook, so I just wanted to send a snapshot to myself before getting out of the box - and then - FREEZE! 

. Sorry if I made a fool of myself  but these things do happen once in a while; I am sure I did not tell the beasty box to become part of my outfit. The picture looks silly. I will have to get back in world and control that I have not really stolen this piece of useful inventory from the Emerge training camp.

I did practise my camera skills again, see my Flickr album for evidence.

 

Another useful thing that I will remember from today: send a postcard with a snapshot to yourself or another recipient, from in world, and it will have the SLURL on it!

UNder construction - SL downtime

I plan to make a field trip to visit SLeducation UK island II where you can practice many useful skills as group work.

The MUVEnation course that started some weeks ago is what I wish to work on in my free hours these weeks. I am currently brushing up my skills in Second Life. It is very strange to come back after about half a year or more almost inactive, and now again struggling with basic skills, such as building a simple object that consists of two prims, and to place it on a shared whiteeboard for the mentors - those who are accepted in the group 3 for advanced participants.

After a painful failure in a session this Sunday, where I was supposed to perform such building skills in presence of two of the course leaders who really did their best to help me out, but in vain, I felt more confused than comfortable, and decided to brush up this knowledge. I also felt an urge to practise my obviously poor camera control navigation skills.

After a building class 101, and some hours of hard work on my own land, I was able to teleport back to the MUVEnation island and proudly, in solitude, place my little frame with an image of myself, and an edited script that tells when I am noline, or away, which was the easy part of the exercise. I felt so good about having at last aquired a result that I arranged a photo opportunity, with myself floating in the air in front to the board, besides my portrait, on a red chair. Also, I was carrying a poster on a stick with the same frame, to demonstrate my extra effort on fluency in joining more objects. Just for the picture; the extra poster was taken away, and the chair that I forgot to bring with me back home, was automatically returned from the parcel owner.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3063/3041706345_5f7af36149.jpg

http://benwerd.com/2008/11/links-are-context-so-are-link-a

Chris Sessums has written about the educational WordPress Multi-User hosting provider Edublogs’ switch to inline context ads. These turn words within each blog post into ads, without the original author’s knowledge or permission. This is annoying in the wild, but takes on another meaning entirely when the blogging service is marketed for students and teachers:

For example one student mentioned the word “energy” in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned “college” in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida.

The rest of Chris’s post is understandably angry. Links in blog posts are part of the flow of the text; they provide context. The link above allows you to read Chris’s blog so you know I’m not misrepresenting him. The following sentence in isolation:

I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.

Is different to this one:

I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.

By auto-linking words to sites for money, a new thrust or subtext can be added to the post. In other words, with this kind of advertising - even when it’s been marked out in the user agreement and everyone knows it’s there - advertisers are buying a little bit of your intention. (Users may not always understand the full scope of what they’re agreeing to, as they don’t see the ads themselves.)

Print publications often have very separate advertising and editorial departments, for similar reasons. Ads on pages should be clearly marked out as being such, and they should never, ever, ever infringe on the actual content itself. This on any site is bad; on a site for use in education is clearly immoral.

As a footnote, one of the user forum posts Chris highlights says this:

Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore.

There is a very simple consumer protection maxim that it’s worth remembering for any product: if it seems too good to be true, it is. Everyone needs to make money; if you’re using a commercial product with no clear business model, ask yourself how they’re going to claw back their investment - it’s not always going to be in the ways you’d like.

http://benwerd.com/2008/11/who-cares-about-openid-awarenes

OpenID is becoming the open single logon standard, and all kinds of websites and web-based software are using it to allow people to use a single username and identity across all their services.

A while back, Yahoo! did some research on OpenID usability (PDF link) that a lot of people took to indicate that OpenID was too confusing. It was conducted with a test group of just nine Yahoo! staff, so recently Chris Messina decided to research awareness using a survey conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In effect, he paid 301 people two cents each to answer some questions about OpenID.

Neither survey was hugely scientific, but Chris’s results were summarised as follows:

Combining some of the results, we found that:

• of those who know what OpenID is, 14.81% use it.


• of those who have merely heard of it, 6.9% use it.

Given there are over half a billion OpenID accounts in the wild, including some of the highest profile sites out there (Myspace! Yahoo!), it could be argued that this is bad news for the standard.

I disagree. One of the most important parts of a technical standard is the ability for end users to use it seamlessly, without having to worry about what it is or how it works. When you loaded this website, did you stop to think about the DNS, TCP/IP and HTTP protocols that made it happen? When you send an email, do you care about the structure of how it’s routed and the protocols servers use to pass it from source to destination? Very few people would answer ‘yes’.

Similarly, I’d bet that a lot more people know what a ‘feed’ is, or recognise the orange RSS icon, than know what RSS is. (Even then, feed subscribers are likely to only be around 11% of total web users.) It doesn’t matter; they don’t need to know how it works. The sign of good technology is that it just does. The linked post talks about promoting awareness of RSS in order to increase uptake, but in truth, the tools need to get easier to use.

Therefore, OpenID awareness in end users is neither here nor there. It’s very unlikely that an average end user will ever know what their OpenID is. Far more likely, sites will have custom login boxes that invite users to authenticate using IDs from supporting sites and providers that they’ll recognise, the way some are already beginning to do with things AIM accounts. In an ideal world, these login boxes will adapt based on your cookies and IP address (using a combination of serverside scripting, some clever JS and CSS) and suggest the logins that are actually active in your browser. Visiting Google Docs from your university network? Maybe one day it’ll prompt you for your university username - or even log you straight in, using OpenID on the back-end. This sounds like magic, but wouldn’t be massively hard to build, and could simplify users’ web experience instead of muddying the waters by adding another layer of complexity.

http://benwerd.com/2008/11/social-media-the-intranet-is-pe

The purpose of social media is to augment your real life: connect with people, discover new links and resources through them and potentially discuss and collaborate on ideas. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the Internet is just people connected by wires, uplinks, frequencies and protocols. They aren’t so much behind terminals any more, but connected through all kinds of devices that are increasingly pervasive wherever we are: laptops, netbooks, cellphones, portable media devices, GPS boxes and more. Going online used to be a destination in itself; these days, for many of us, it’s something that happens without us thinking about it. Phones in particular are designed for connecting as much as conversing.

Software is being dragged kicking and screaming into this multi-platform reality. In some areas, the feature bloated, platform-locked ways of old are still very much in force; oddly, these tend to be in the enterprise sector, where mobile collaboration could be hugely beneficial. In any given company on any given day, there are likely to be people at their desks, working from home, on their way to a client meeting, attending a conference, and so on. Being able to keep in touch and share information in these situations is important. But try using Sharepoint from your Blackberry, I dare you. Even Basecamp has trouble with this, although I wouldn’t accuse it of feature bloat.

Google, on the other hand, is great at this. All of their major products have versions that can be easily read on each of the types of device I listed above, and are key examples of how web software can work brilliantly away from your desk. They also make them accessible to enterprise customers. More manufacturers will follow suit, particularly given the popularity of the iPhone and the more useful browser in the new Blackberry models. The popularity of services like Twitter, which arguably works better on a mobile, can only help.

We’re working on a service called Teamwire that will be as useful for companies and organisations out in the field as at their desks. (The idea grew out of an idea for Curverider itself, which is often a very distributed team.) There will be others; already, services like Yammer are edging in the right direction.

In all cases, it’s got to be about simplicity from the user’s perspective (always the most important), and standards compliance from a technical standpoint. You can’t navigate endless menus and interstitial screens if you’re on the move; you have to convey information or view a resource in seconds. Similarly, the bling that looks awesome in Safari might not look amazing in Opera Mini on my Nokia. That economy of use translates very well to efficiency within an office, too: the simpler software is, the shallower its learning curve and the more time you can spend actually doing your job. It’s not great news for IT departments, which will be gnashing their teeth up and down the land, but it’s great for people who want to feel the benefits of software without the technical pain.

Just a note to keep up with my blog over at  worldofwebheads.blogspot.com/

My first steps in Second Life are equal to my first impressions: it was complicated!

Not only on the technical level – how to walk in which direction without bumping into things and people, step by step. I had not yet noticed the posters with help and advice, and I knew nothing about right clicking on objects or people to get more information. I also needed to find my friends!  I knew that many of my online playmates (from Webheads in Action) would already be in world, but I had no overview of the place and nowhere to go. I felt lonely! Then, I found out that I could make myself look different – that was still on the Orientation Island. I could make myself fat or tall, thin or short. I could change the texture of my clothes, and the shape of my trousers. I spent a while on my appearance, and logged out after some exhausting, but fun hours all alone in this puzzling but also tempting world.

I knew for sure I had to come back, and the next Sunday there was a Webheads meeting going on, in our brand new club house. Somehow I found my way to the sim. And walking around a lot, I also found the very house – I was excited and felt almost at home. Until I discovered that I could not get inside! From the windows I could see some people standing in the room. I tried to knock on the door. This happened back in the days when we had no voice - well, actually this was about two years ago. I felt excluded and unhappy; it was very emotional. I ran around the building and tried to find an opening. All of a sudden, someone inside caught sight of me, and started chatting. This was a dear friend, Anne, Daf or Rita I think (they are all present in MUVEnation). It was a matter of membership! You had to be a member of the group called Webheads, to get permission into the house - a privacy setting coded into the door as an object.

Now that I was allowed inside, I had a feeling of belonging. We all made friends (again), and there was a poster exhibition with familiar faces from Webheads homepages, I had a strong sense of belonging and the visual appearance of my already known friends was remarkably strong, compared to other synchronous meeting formats - even without the convenient affordance of voice chat.

 A really significant difference that still striked me, was my instant emotional engagement; I felt like part of me was represented in this avatar already, and that my playmates were also very present this way.

MUVEnation - the word has a nice taste. I like it and was delighted to be accepted as one of the dedicated Lifelong learners in this EU funded project, "based on the potential and opportunities afforded by active learning approaches, combined with MUVES as effective solutions to inspire and engage learners and foster motivation,MUVEnation aims to explore, analyse, develop and evaluate, within context, the effectiveness of this innovative way of teaching and learning". This longwind but precise passage is from the short project description handout that was handed over, literally speaking, by one of the project leaders Shirley Williams when we met in Copenhagen at the AoIR internet research conference. By then, I was really busy with other engagements, but I really desired to follow up on my earlier enthusiasm with Second Life, which is as I see it, the primary MUVE that this course will explore. And as the Danish project consortium that I was part of last year, was not successful in our application for a grant, there was no SL teen grid project developed in this context and I pu my engagement away for a while. This is a nice opportunity to get back in world, and revitalise my enthusiasm for MUVE learning opportunities.

We - so far, I've been exploring the Moodle, the PBwiki and some blog posts about this project, and also made several personal brush up visits on my own, to Second Life. Now I'll make my homework (yes, we have mandatory postings in our blog :-). And, try to see when there will be a meeting scheduled that will match my calendar. Alternatively, I might take the initiative and invite some people to join me for somebrain storming on my own little granted land - it certainly needs a makeover!