There was poor attendance from TU Dublin students at this class so here is a link to the transcript of proceedings. It will give you a sense of the presentation. Tooyaa, Fran and Cats, along with Wisdom, covered a range of useful tools such as making and saving notecards, building, communications options and so on.
Tooyaa also reminded the students of the Masters of the Metaverse modules which can be found here: Lesson Module 1 – Basics and Lesson Module 2 – Synthesis.
The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Eductation annual conference has been taking place over the weekend: VWBPE 2023: Uncommon Realities. In a packed programme with a variety of presentations two students from Çağ University, dogukansalatan and caglasolak, spoke about their participation in this model during the Autumn 2022 semester in International Student Project in the Metaverse: Student Perspectives. You can see read the transcript of their talk or view the recording below:
Sitearm Madonna presented on the theory of teamwork at today’s class. This was followed by a briefing on the Team Project No One is too Small to Make a Difference by John / Tae.
Our friends from Çağ University joined us for the first time today and Sitearm Madonna gave us a gentle introduction on how to work together in teams in a virtual environment. The Turkish students and their facilitators joined in seamlessly as if they had been working in Second Life since the beginning of the semester.
After the talk Sitearm gave the class an immersive collaborative experience through music. It was tremendous fun and we were sorry not to have more time to engage with his brilliant instruments.
This is the brief for this semester’s Team Project – ‘No One is too Small to Make a Difference’.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action in the face of global poverty and the impact of climate change on our planet. Seventeen goals were agreed by all member states in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable Development. We have seven years left to achieve success and secure the future of humanity on Earth.
The United Nations call follows a Warning to Humanity issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists as long ago as 1992. They ‘feared that humanity was pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life’. Six years ago the warning was updated as 15,000 scientists from around the world published World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler suggests that the excesses of the consumerist model are responsible for driving the world rapidly towards a dead end. Speaking in London at the Work Marathon event in 2018 he argued that a radically new approach to shaping our society is required. Rather than allowing capital and technology to dictate we need to bring epistemological, technological, artistic, judicial, social and economic questions together in order to shape the future.
This calls for a rethink of our way of life are growing more persistent as evidenced by activists such as Oğuz Ergen from Türkiye and Greta Thunberg from Sweden.
In 2022 the UN selected Ergen as one of the six new ‘Young Leaders’ in the UNDP-Samsung Generation17 programme for his work on the problem of pollution in the Gulf of Izmir.
Thunberg, speaking at Davos in 2019 said ‘our house is on fire’ and implored world leaders to extinguish the fire before it gets out of control. Later that year she published her talks in a little book titled No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. If one small Swedish schoolgirl can make a difference in the world then it follows that we can all do so.
What difference can you make?
Meet in your teams and discuss this text. Read the referenced texts and look at the videos to inform and expand your understanding. Find additional sources to deepen your knowledge and share these with your team members.
· Discuss your response to the issues.
· How does this make you feel?
· What might you be able to do about it?
Develop your ideas into a collective response and design an action plan in response to the crisis. Decide what you can do individually in your families, local communities or university. Agree on a joint approach and select a single action or a change that you think will lead to a specific outcome.
Develop a strategy to achieve your goal and an approach to communicating it to others in your community so they will join you in achieving greater success.
Build an installation in Second Life that explains your project to visitors and devise a guided tour that you will give to residents encouraging them to do something similar. Each team member should have a specific role in the tour.
Write a reflective review of the team project and how it progressed. Refer to team building theory and describe how it played out in your experience of the project. In particular, describe your own contribution to the project and to the team.
This week we met at the Çağ University Virtual Campus in Second Life where Valibrarian Gregg spoke to the class about Metaliteracy and Citizenship in the Digital Age. Her talk was based on her book Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities, 2020.
Following the talk Val invited us to the Virtual Community Library where Sitearm hosted a debrief session with the students and led a discussion about defining what is meant by the metaverse in a collision of ideas.
John / Tae explores the thinking of Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) whose work is central to an understanding of media theory and provides a useful framework for examining digital social media and online collaborative tools.
As we commence the new semester we were all shocked to hear the news of the catastrophic earthquake that devastated Eastern Türkiye and Syria. Our thoughts are with our friends, colleagues and students at Çağ University which has been unable to commence the new semester as a result. We hope they will be able to rejoin us soon. While the TU Dublin students commenced last week we will keep in mind that some adjustment to the syllabus may be necessary to accommodate them as they return.
The student Team Project presentations were as impressive as ever this semester. We loved the creativity demonstrated in the project builds and the detailed research undertaken by the students and presented in the class. Well done to all the participants on reaching the end of another semester. Huge thanks to all our supporters, guest speakers and student facilitators.
This week John made an error about the clock change back from Irish summertime to normal time. Students were asked to come to class one hour later than normal but, in fact you should have been told that class was going to be one hour earlier … so, we missed an excellent presentation by Valibrarian Gregg titled ‘What is Metaliteracy?’ Val is the founder of Community Virtual Libraries and as a librarian and author she has a particular interest in books and literacy. Sitearm recorded the talk which explains the concept of metaliteracy in our metamodernist world in 23 minutes. Val also introduces the concept of digital citizenship. You can see the video below.
Following Val’s talk she brought the class to The Darkroom as a metaphor for the dark side of digital culture. She discusses the dark side of the some of the many useful apps we use daily basis. Once again Sitearm recorded the 6 minute presentation.
Finally, Sitearm and Val debated the nature of the metaverse and attempted to unpack their own operational definitions. Is Second Life a Metaverse? records their debate on the characteristics required in a metaverse. Sitearm’s recording has a viewing time of 16 minutes.
Virtual Environments: Is one life enough? 