The Virtual Peace Garden

As I have been prepping for this class and reading Zizek's The Desert of the Real (recommended, but not required reading), over and over the image of 9/11 and the images of Abu Ghraib keep coming up over and over again as significant, powerful, circulatory, etc.. For me, the images still seem un-real; the 2nd airplane heading into the second tower still looks like fiction.

A guy by the name of Bud Poston, posting videos under the name of MyClueIn, has probably captured the McLuhan / Fiore style of composition better than any other video interpreter of McLuhan I have seen.

A War and Peace in the Global Village video:

This synopsis of a SL discussion about how non-profits might use SL is interesting, but also very much surface-scratching. The big question is always going to be: why go into SL? The answer is always going to be "new audience, networking," but the follow-up question needs to be cost-benefit: how many hours building in SL makes it worth while if the network built is one, two, or maybe 5?

http://secondlife.techsoup.org/node/295

Kairos, the online journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy has announced a special issue calling for work that considers the intersections of the military, technology, literacy and pedagogy. Projects from the fall 2008 seminar "War and Peace in the Global Village" might fit this special issue. http://kairosnews.org/kairos-cfp-dot-mil-special-issue

I discovered Camp Darfur in Second Life, although I'm not sure how to link there. I found Camp Darfur on the web where I learned that organizations can request a Camp Darfur kit and provide education on campuses and in communities.

I just learned, after reading the FOR Peace and Justice blog, that there is a global, grassroots campaign to establish Ministries and Departments of Peace in governments around the world. In the US, that campaign is being run by The Peace Alliance. Thanks to Dennis Kucinich and others, there is actually legislation drafted with 70 co-sponsors, although only 1 republican so far. Creative response to the kind of war-first thinking that dominates so many governments globally!

"The computer's true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way" (89--WPGV).

I'm still in the process of figuring out how I am going to use Drupal to organize my Virtual Peace Garden, and starting with a blog post to try and figure out where they will show up and what they will look like seems like a good starting point.

I hope to be able to embed videos like the one I created for World Refugee Day, 2008. Looks like I need to enable full html. This video is a short history of the work the United Nations High Commission for Refugees did to protect southern Sudanese refugees from 1988-2007.