The Virtual Peace Garden

I just learned about the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park from my sister-in-law's t-shirt, which depicts three paper cranes. A little web searching revealed Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir by Leonard Bird.

I had hopes of turning this site into an online community, but I guess I need to go recruit people, like the Peace Garden Project has done.

Not surprisingly, the "rhetoric of one" is compelling for those of us who are interested in "global village" type projects. Most explicitly, this rhetoric show up in the title of:

1. The ONE project to end global poverty: One.org
2. The GlobalOne project, highlighting "natural heroes" and wholeness: http://www.globalonenessproject.org/

I will need to keep adding to that list.

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/

Human Rights Day is December 10:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/AboutUs/Pages/HumanRightsDay2009.aspx

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).