The Virtual Peace Garden

I spent about two yours trying to educate myself on SL. I read a few items from the annotated bib; one really great set of teaching tips, one article about the value of inhabiting the shared space.

I also looked through a wiki that features various projects, including CDC's health education simulation, a place that seems to offer some virtual training in schizophrenia, a Macbeth project done in association with NMC. The good (looking) projects have meaningful interactions built in.

This Annotated Bib is not extensive, but looks good. I wonder if there is much more scholarship published than what is collected here:

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib

Hmm, I see the listserv where I got the first link says, "yes there is more":

http://vr.coe.ecu.edu/vpbib.html

I had a great meeting with Sarah, Satheesh, and Sheree from the NDSU Technology, Learning, and Media Center. Sarah and Satheesh are going to tackle building the Virtual Peace Garden in Second Life as soon as we figure out where to build and learn a little bit more about how to build certain things.

The highlight of the meeting for me was when we were brainstorming ideas, and somebody said something that reminded me of the Garden of Cosmic Speculation: http://www.kathyireland.com/ContentSystem/ArticlePage.aspx?ArticleID=142...

Ulmer ends EM by setting up what comes next: a poetics of flash reason. Not a monument, but a moment of insight, epiphany, clarity. The ME becomes "avatar"--an emblem of one's self (multifaceted, visual, verbal, holistic, integrated)--but the avatar is still looking to influence public policy (just more quickly, I guess).

The real beauty of Ulmer's newest work is that he seems to be going back to McLuhan's Laws of Media to help him with it: http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue/networked.html

Just stumbled across this page discussing SciKu's. There may be hope for English yet!

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-01/everybody-loves-sciku-0

My favorite is

Why study so hard,
When its all here,
so i just sit and ponder
--FahimK

I got word yesterday that our Second Life project has been funded. What that means is that we were granted $4,500 to build a NDSU in SL space, and in the proposal, our Virtual Peace Garden was identified as the prototype of what students and faculty could do in SL. I was even so bold as to suggest that we would have a prototype ready by April 6th for an on-campus conference about Virtual Worlds.

It’s good to be back on the Virtual Peace Garden! Although my contributions have certainly waivered a bit (and understandably so) I will certainly continue posting if other students are willing to do so. And I see that Jenn has posted recently, so the door has certainly been opened then for further discussion on the Peace Garden.

I glanced at the logo that Dr. Brooks sent out earlier today, and my favorite is the second one from the bottom. I prefer this logo because it makes the strongest connection between the idea of “shelter” and actual imagery. The effect has been accomplished by the placement of the two bars in a triangular formation (like the pitch of a roof) over the acronym ASAH.

The whole idea of logos and using as few words as possible in order to convey one’s ideas has been my latest challenge as a writer--one that I am particularly focused on working on over the course of this semester. It became apparent that, as I worked on my MEmorial and my anti-essay last semester, I tended to be a bit too wordy at times. And I further believe that this is a problem that certainly troubles all writers and graphic designers at one time or another--perhaps it is an ongoing problem as well.

Developing effective logos is definitely a great exercise for aspiring writers such as myself, I now believe. And as I move forward with working on my own “wordiness” over the course of this Spring semester, perhaps I will return to a few emblem and logo design exercises--perhaps in my MEmorial http://oilglobe.blogspot.com/ .

A final note that I would like to make is that “wordiness” is perhaps not the best way to define the latest obstacle that I am facing as a writer. Perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that I am now working on, over the course of this semester, my choosing of the most precise word possible. And again, it was the MEmorial project (especially the logo and emblem exercises), as well as the anti-essay project, that made me aware of my problems (shortcomings) as a writer.

Of course, perhaps this “choosing of the most precise word possible” is merely the allusive dream shared by all writers and Gardeners. But there’s no harm in dreaming, right?

I was driving up to Tuesday night's class this new semester, listening to public radio & they talked about 6 word memoirs. In class, our group activity was to design a class icebreaker. A girl at my table said.... 6 word memoris. Weird.

In class, Andrew talked about the one laptop per child program & on the way home, NPR played this broadcast:

'One Laptop Per Child' Program Faces Challenges
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist...

Maybe NPR is playing tricks on my brain.

I've been thinking about walking from Fargo to the International Peace Garden for quite a while now--18 months, maybe? I even made a map this summer of possible stopping points. My notion is that I would stop in the small towns of ND, show the documentary I helped make, African Soul, American Heart, talk to people about southern Sudan, about village life and the global village, and generally try to raise awareness of our fundraising project: to build a boarding facility in Duk Payuel, Sudan.

In Ulmer's discussion of Bradley McGee, the 3 year old who stands for all children killed by abusive adults, Ulmer quotes a long passage from Zizek's "You Should Give a Shit." Zizek says that "the disposal of shit become a problem: not because it has a bad smell, but because it came out of from our innermost selves. We are ashamed of shit because, in it, we expose / externalize our innermost intimacy" (119 in Ulmer; 59 in Zizek On Belief).