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.
Teamwork and collaboration
March 20, 2023Working together
March 6, 2023Our 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.
Team Project – ‘No One…’
March 3, 2023This 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?
The Brief
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.
Submission
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.
Metaliteracy and digital citizenship
February 27, 2023This 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.
From hammer to pixel
February 20, 2023John / 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.
Spring semester 2023
February 13, 2023As 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.
Team presentations
December 7, 2022The 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.
Metaliteracy and the Metaverse
November 2, 2022This 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.
Autumn semester 2022
October 3, 2022Welcome to the module ‘Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?’ being offered as an elective module to students of Technological University School of Art & Design and Dublin School of Archtitecture.
Classes will start on 5th October on Wednesdays at 2:00 pm for two hours. We meet online every week at TU Dublin in Second Life. Please note: you will need a Mac or PC desktop or laptop to access Second Life – you cannot do so with a mobile device.
Full details about the module are available to eligible registered students on the university VLE, Brightspace, where you may self-enrol. Read the Introduction unit carefully where you will find instructions on how to access Second Life and set up your personal avatar. Learning how to get around the virtual world and familiarising yourself with the environment and how to control your avatar will take a few hours so give yourself plenty of time before class starts.
Please read pages 1 to 9 in the column on the right also. If you would like to find out more about what to expect during the semester read the posts in this blog: all class since 2009 have been summarised.
If you have any problems email John O’Connor at TU Dublin.
Once again, this semester we will be working with Prof Murat Gülmez (aka Magua) and his students at Çağ University in Turkey. We will be spending much of our time with Lynne Berrett/Lissena Resident, (aka Wisdomseeker) and her team at Whole Brain Health on Inspiration Island in Second Life.
Class 7: Metaliteracy and Digital Citizenship
March 21, 2022The complexity of issues around metaliteracy and digital citizenship were revealed by Valibrarian Gregg in her talk at the Community Virtual Library today. The visit began with a tour of the lovely facility which is a rich resource of information, data, references and texts while also being a calm space in which to relax – much like a library in RL in fact.
There was a good turnout of students and in addition to Magua and John we were joined by Sitearm and Wisdom also. After the tour Val brought us to the presentation platform which is rich with images and short texts to support the talk, based on her recent book Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities (2020).
A new addition to the space since our last visit is the Black Room where some of the darkness of the worldwide web and the internet is considered.
There was a good discussion around some of the topics raised by the talk, including consideration of the implications for democracy and freedom of thought in the metaverse, particularly if it is controlled by private interests. What impact might this have on a free society?
You can see a video of the lecture from last semester here.
Virtual Environments: Is one life enough? 