Den Nordiske Stemme/Nordic Voice :: 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!

When I told my husband on the eve of leaving for Oslo that I was going to give a talk without Powerpoint, he told me I was very brave, which is enough to shatter the self-confidence of any forthcoming speaker! I had been invited to speak at the NFF-NADE conference on Lifelong Learning on the topic of what every teacher should know about using Web 2.0 and had decided that I should use a Web 2.0 tool to deliver a session about Web 2.0. So I made a netvibes page and opened the internet pages I wanted to talk about because they don't show up that well in Netvibes and used that as the backbone of my session. The 6 main points I wanted to make were that using Web 2.0 tools is about

1. Low threshold applications

2. Collaborating

3. Joining (in order to preserve artefacts)

4. Sharing

5. Remixing

6. Being careful about privacy, spam avoidance, copyright

I gave the talk in Danish because Danish and Norwegian are mutually understandable but as a non-native speaker I had difficulty in understanding spoken Norwegian (though reading is easy). There was a very important question about the legitemacy of the Mixwit site where you can make tailored digital 'cassette' tapes which made me look more closely at the TOS when I got home. They certainly seem to think that what they are doing is not breaking any copyright law.

NFF-NADE are partners in the VITAE project and so this was also an opportunity to report on how we are doing in our pilots of courses to enable teachers to mentor their colleagues in the use of such tools.

The Netvibes idea worked quite well although some of the lettering was too small even on a big screen. And of course I had a Powerpoint in my back pocket ready in case the Internet did not work! Unfortunately I did not pay as much attention to the Powerpoint knowing that it was a back-up and now it has ended up on the NFF_NADE website as a record of my session which was not the intention.

I was not the only one to eschew Powerpoint with one presenter opting for a mind map as the main resource for his session. But even he had a very short Powerpoint with a complicated diagram as part of the message he wanted to get across so it looks as though Powerpoint is not redundant yet.

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

When I first got into correspondance with Zohre Ovezlieva from Turkmenistan I am afraid that I had to look it up in a new atlas to find out where the country was. I was interested to find out that Zohre had been working as a local organiser for the American Peace Corps for the last 13 years especially since I think that the Peace Corps has produced some of the best educational materials for learning about intercultural communication that are currently available.

I learned from Zohre that roles in Turkmenistan are divided according to gender and to age and devised the following intercultural conundrum from Zohre's account of how some of the American Peace Corps volunteers react to the situation they meet in their homestay families.

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You go to stay at the home of a family in Turkmenistan and you notice that you never see the older daughter. She is always in the kitchen cooking or doing housework and she does not eat together with the family. Why is this? Is it because

a) the family do not want their precious first born daughter to mix with foreigners

b) the first daughter is always the least favoured in Turkmen families or

c) it is traditional for the eldest daughter to do all the household chores

The next question is would it be possible for you to get to know her better?

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The answer can be heard in the latest edition of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast. What was also interesting was that Zohre decided to put herself to the test by traveling to America for a month to find out what it is like being a foreigner in a country which is very different from your own. There she had to get used to speaking with strangers such as bus drivers and shop assistants but also had to learn to remember that Americans would not automatically feed her when she arrived but would instead expect an honest answer to the enquiry 'Are you hungry?', a question she was not at all used to being asked.

Closer to home I was able to meet with the Fun Fearless Female of 2008, Signe Møller. The award was given to her by the Danish edition of Cosmopolitan magazine for her work in setting up a charity to help disadvantaged chidren in Kenya. Signe's charity is called 100percent2the children because she wants to give donors the choice of supporting her projects directly or indirectly by designating funds for administration. Signe found herself in Kenya as a result of a career break. Kenya was the place which spoke to her most strongly after volunteering in projects there, in South Africa and in India. Her training as a Chaos Pilot gave her the tools and drive to decide to set up her own charity when she realised that existing charities were not helping in the way she thought best. Inevitably the question of corruption arose and Signe has experienced this both in the western donor organisations and in the recipient countries. As a result of the tumult in Kenyan politics she has noticed that the problem has worsened compared to last year.

I am intrigued by the Chaos Pilots course and intend to follow that up in more depth in a later podcast. A course which a rightwing Danish politician has tried to ban has to be worth investigating.

My final contact in this podcast was the Nicaraguan ambassador to Denmark, HE Ricardo José Alvarado Noguera, who visited our school to speak with the students. Coming from a country dependent on aid and remittances for 33% of its GNP he was very aware of the connectedness of the countries of the world. He put things very concretely when he said that if you make the world safe outside of Denmark, you make Denmark safer.

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!

Scope just ended a discussion around the practicalities for all of us who are enganed in multiple online communities as more or less full members, participants, users, connected with, feeling engaged in, lurking around a bit, checking out, following or just noticing - or, at the other level, belong to the inner circle of leaders and trend setters.

Just to make sure I'll get back, for now I'll make this post as a note to self about following up with my thoughts and reflect and revise my personal  multistrategies / lack of effiicient consistency. Promise :-)