The Virtual Peace Garden

I'm scheduled to teach a graduate seminar in the spring of 2010, and I'd like to use this site again, continue to build on VPG type themes of appropriate social engagement for rhetoricians post 9/11. I've exchanged an email or two with a CS game designer, and I have been thinking about a course that would also develop the Second Life VPG, so maybe a two part course on gaming as social action, with part I being about pushing the VPG in the direction of games / interactive and then actually imagining / developing a game for the OLPC operating system, Sugar.

Bob Samuels' critique of Jenkins and the "radical" advocates of technological transformation still not paying attention to widescale, material, social and economic inequalities. Calls this "automodernity" and "new libertarian consensus." Also calls the social movements of the 20th century (feminism, civil rights, etc.) postmodern critiques of modernism, but they get appropriate by academic aesthetic postmodernism, which Bob is saying we might better understand as "automodernity" because it extends modernism and cuts out the real critique.

The last session brought up the technology vs basics debate, one that often circulates around the OLPC program. Material needs before cultural needs, in a Marxist framework. I find it really hard to argue against material needs, but I also increasingly find myself convinced that sometimes the cultural (or as Levinas, Derrida, others might say: the hospitable, friendship, etc.) might be needed to address material needs. Unless we hold onto bootstrap metaphors, alliances based on friendships might be needed to tackle material needs.

I've been taking notes on my personal blog (http://tenaday.blogspot.com) but for this 2 pm Saturday session that may or may not talk about Second Life, I thought I would keep notes on VPG.

Betsy Gilliland, "Whose logic? Multiple modalities in high school writing practices."

One of the things we talked about in the WPGV class was identifying specific days of the year when we could use the Second Life Virtual Peace Garden as a place of celebration and / or commemoration.

Kathryn's water project, for example, would use World Water Day, March 22nd.
http://www.worldwaterday.org/

I just learned that September 21 is International Peace Day:
http://www.internationaldayofpeace.org/

World Refugee Day is June 20th:
http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/refugee/

Today was a Virtual Peace Garden day:

1. Heard from the CEO of the International Peace Garden. I hope you are reading this, Doug, and will contribute to the site! http://www.peacegarden.com/
2. Re-read some of Charles Jencks' Garden of Cosmic Speculation.
3. Found a "Gardens for Peace" website. http://www.gardensforpeace.org/

I'm starting to think about a new class for the fall of 2009: Writing in the Design Professions. I want the students to keep the VPG alive by proposing monuments and/or sections of the garden in Second Life; I won't likely make them use this site (although I should really give that more thought).

I would just like to extend my thanks once more to the class Topics in Rhetoric and Writing, one for which the Virtual Peace Garden is itself an appropriate extension. I took that class only some four months or so ago now from Dr. Kevin Brooks, and some of the central concepts that I learned pertaining to writing and especially to personal expression within English studies are proving highly useful to me as I push forward in my academic career.

Yoko Ono's "Imagine Peace Tower" is a tribute to John Lennon and their peace-seeking life together.

http://imaginepeace.com/news/imagine-peace-tower

When we were reading WPGV, I kept asking myself (and anybody who was listening)--what image of peace is needed? What image of peace would be powerful, fresh, successful? what does peace look like? A Flickr and Google Image search shows the peace symbol and a lot of great nature shots, but in the context of WPGV, a different image is needed. I kept saying "infrastructure" is the image needed, but infrastructure is not very photo generic. The following quotation, however, from a story about the Duk Lost Boy Clinic in Duk County, Sudan, is a verbal picture of peace.