The Virtual Peace Garden

I went into SL looking for an MLK Day reading of his text. We have a day long activity like this at my university, figured somebody would host such an event in Second Life. Looks like I will need to add it to my list of events for SL activities.

Also visited the Human Trafficking exhibit briefly. Lots of lag, nothing immediately gripping, so I wandered to the Peace Garden next door! Seems like more of a "religious resource" location than a Peace Park, but I got a chance to try out a muslim prayer.

Kathryn Dunlap designed a MEmorial called "Water Fight: Not a Drop to Drink," monitoring the disaster in progress that is the world's diminishing fresh water supply. She imagined a peripheral that included a clothesline / moneyline: dollar bills with the "Not a Drop to Drink" logo and website on them. If I remember correctly, participants are supposed take a bill, go to the website, learn about the project, and re-invest at a higher rate to "clean" the dirty money that contributes to water pollution and the commodification of the world's water supply.

Yesterday, I listened to Leslie Jarmon from UT talk about their bold, one-year experiment with SL. Rather than rehash that, though, I want to use this post to clarify my own thinking about why I am using SL, a post I more or less started yesterday. Jarmon did say that students want the use of SL to be absolutely crystal clear and connected to learning goals, so here goes:

I've been meaning to reflect on my first three class uses of Second Life after each class, but this entry will have to re-cap all three. I am using Second Life in Writing in the Design Professions; my students are architecture and landscape architecture students; their assignment is propose a new installation for the Virtual Peace Garden.

Philip Linden, CEO of Linden Labs, creator of Second Life, said in a 2009 interview, "Today what excites me ... is the possibility that SL can make the real world better and safer by connecting different cultures and people more quickly than otherwise might have happened."
http://www.thebosl.com/en/features/news/bosl-news/53-bosl-news/329-a-con...

I just visited Yoko Ono's "Imagine PeaceTower" in Second Life.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Imagine%20Peace%20Tower/128/128/2/

The site is a replica of the existing Imagine Peace Tower located in Iceland. In Second Life, you get to watch a video explaining how John actually "summoned" Yoko to his home when he read about her vision for a Peace Tower of Light; it was the start of their relationship. Obviously it inspired "Imagine" which plays throughout the video. Best video experience I have had in SL.

Book orders are due soon, so I need to commit to some materials for a graduate seminar formally titled "Rhetorics and Poetics of New Media;" the actual course focus will be the "rhetorics" and "poetics" of OLPC.

I just had an interesting talk with Niles Haich, fellow MEmorialist. He showed me some new pages on his MEMorial, which links Teddy Roosevelt (existing monument) to the contemporary environmental movement (disaster-in-progress). His new pages include a teaching philosophy, in which he realizes that "speak softly and carry a big stick" is an appropriate image for his developing identity as teacher. He also composed a September 11 memorial with his students this fall (2009), and he shared a "playlist profile" of Roosevelt with his students.

Another new angle on the Virtual Peace Garden: Defiant Gardens.

"Defiant gardens surprise us by their presence and persistence. These
are gardens against the odds...Defiant gardens first astonish by their
mere presence, and then they astonish when we recognize the sheer force
of will and effort that created and sustained them. Such gardens are
interrogative places, prodding us to ask questions...."

- Kenneth Helphand,
Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime
http://www.defiantgardens.com/

I just joined another Ning social networking group, the Commonwealth Island community. These folks host Camp Darfur in SL; I wonder if I could encourage them to host the Virtual Peace Garden as well?

http://commonwealthisland.ning.com/