a thaumaturgical compendium

Ah, Professor Erde, we hardly new ye. Well, he’s not really dead, he’s actually just being held for ransom.

I was going to try to show the class Second Life tonight, but it wouldn’t let me log in. Oh, well, not the first time that’s happened. It’s been a while, so I guess I may have forgotten the password. An attempt to change the password ended up with a message that I needed to call them. Which I did. Apparently, my lease on life had expired.

The problem was that I actually paid a membership fee for quite a while. I haven’t been using SL as much, and so hadn’t realized I’d stopped paying. (I had paid annually.)

“Oh,” I suggested, “I guess I’ll just go back to a basic, non-paying membership.”

That’s fine, support said, but I would have to pay my back bills of $72, and there was no guarantee anything would be left in my inventory. Um, OK, no.

So Erde is as good as dead. And if I needed any more encouragement to spend less time with him in SL, this was it. Funny thing is I talked to someone in the media about SL earlier today, and sent her along to one of my colleagues who was more heavily involved in Second Life. I guess it’s time to move on.

Yes, I know it’s been a while. I started this semester out on the wrong foot, and have been scrambling for the last several months. If I haven’t answered your email (and there many hundred that need to be answered), I am very sorry. I promise I will get back to you. I considered email bankruptcy, but won’t go that far. If it’s time critical, email me again, since I’m working through in reverse chronological order, and that will push you to the top of the queue.

I have declared a bit of blogging bankruptcy, and abandoned some ideas for blog posts. Here is a partial list of the things I haven’t blogged, but thought about blogging:

* I was in Vancouver for IR8.0. The Mac Book Pro has developed another problem, and it is not charming–so no conference blogging. Lots of people did, though, including my anagramic colleague. Lots of stuff on Second Life, which was fun.

* Inside Higher Ed has an article that strikes a little close to home, denigrating profs with avatars, blogs, and wearing Hawaiian shirts. I far preferred the Chronicle’s advice on how James Bond can make you a better professor.

* Mutating Pictures allows human viewers to determine fitness and evolves faces from symmetric distributions of triangles. It’s already doing well. I am amazingly curious about the final outcome.

* Speaking of genetics, I am ready for the cow man.

Unlike other semesters, I haven’t been dumping my other writing and activities to this blog, for a variety of reasons, but now that I have a day of breathing space, I’ll try to start doing that again.

The announcement from Second Life yesterday was that they have officially banned gambling. The image to the right is of a popular casino, pictured in its recent incarnation here, now gone to seed. As that article from Valleywag suggests, as well as one from Business Week, this move is hardly a surprise. The FBI has been fishing around SL for the last few months, presumably trying to decide what to do about the casinos.

Of course, the casino owners are not happy with the new rules, and the general opinon seems to be that Linden needs to offshore its servers. This is based on a romantically erroneous assumption that the reach of US law enforcement ends at the US border. There are plenty of examples that would suggest that making SL an outlaw environment would make SL residents from the US–whether or not they gambled–into outlaws. But now, all those people who invested serious time and effort in replicating real-world games, or inventing their own, seem to be out on their ear. It has to give pause to others who are interested in developing in Second Life; what happens when Linden doesn’t like you any more?

But as the comments on the Second Life Blog suggest, this raises another issue. If Linden Labs is now saying that Lindens are real money, then it means that people should have control over their own funds. Linden should not be able to suspend people’s service without releasing their Lindens to them in US cash. This has already come up at least once.

This question of virtual money being real money is a hot one right now. China is dealing with the rise of the qq coin–again, relating to its use in gambling. A lot of that gambling is, in fact, currency speculation. The question now is how far the idea that Lindens are “real” will go. Does that mean, for example, that an SL company is bound by SEC regulations if they want to sell stock? Where casino gambling has thrived, will we see the rise of stock schemes and fraud? Are the Feds going to be setting up an SL office with men in black to investigate?

These are the kinds of questions people were asking about the web ten years ago, and the answer was an unequivocal “yes.” How SL contorts to fit into existing international legal structures, a process that is only just beginning, will be an interesting thing to watch.

Spent part of my day in Second Life at the Best Practices in Education Conference. Was great to hear about others’ experiences. Some was stuff I had already learned the hard way, but even then, it was worth the reminder.

One of the recurring themes, which came up in Kenny Hubble’s presentation, among others, was how to provide some sense of order. Just like any class, you need to be very clear about what is and is not acceptable. Given that students feel special freedoms in virtual worlds, need to remind them to experience those freedoms (littering, dancing, stripping, sex) outside of classrooms and class times. In other words, treat it like real life. One of the suggestions was there is a “hand-raising chair” that allows students to raise their hands easily in class, for example.

On the other hand, why replicate RL settings in Second Life? Given that a lot of the rules do go out the window in second life, I think it’s important to try to keep some things the same to cushion students entry into the world. This is one of the reasons I usually make my avatar look a bit like me, and why I will likely track down that hand-raising chair. Nonetheless, I hope that we can move quickly away from these structures and that there are ways of encouraging students to take things in their own direction. Actually, one of the reasons I am eager to teach in Second Life is precisely that the “strangeness” gives students permission to experiment in ways the physical classroom may not.

That bleeds into how to sell this to administrators. A lot of people have had the experience of asking their universities for support only to get blank stares, then having an evangelist on the administrative side “get it,” and ask why the campus is so slow on getting in-world. I suspect, given that IBM and others are making virtual environments a major part of their business (at least on the training and education side), campuses will be slowly coming around. But the recurring theme is that you cannot tell people what Second Life is, they have to experience it. Actually, I’m not sure that is entirely the case. I think good use of video might be an even better stand-in, from the perspective of persuading institutional involvement. I’m going to record much of what we do in our fall class and what other people are doing, and try to put together a “best of” reel to help sell the idea of an island in-world.