While I am endlessly trying to figure out the intricacies of my real life, I have also recently opened up to the idea of creating my new self/new life in Second Life. The truth is that my exploration of Second Life derived from the boredom I was experiencing when I took a course in Technology and Education.
Here is my video of the SL project: Patricia's Learning Landscape
My article on SL can be found here: Learning Environments: Second Life
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
The Summer Has Been Good to Me...
I....
Learned the difference between MMORPG and virtual environments (Second Life), wrote an article on Second Life for Wikibooks, built my own amazing space on JoKayDia Island (the video should be here some time soon - hopefully).
Had an AMAZING teacher, Sandra Schecter (and those come only in long intervals).
Remembered how much I love fast driving... :)
Attended AILA (Multilingualism: Challenges and Opportunities) in Essen, Germany, and ReCALL in Antwerp, Belgium, organized by Linguapolis (both were amazingly fantastic).
Walked through the streets of Barcelona at midnight looking for Sagrada Familia (and that's a ritual already).
Got inspired by my student's blog. HER space. HER thoughts:
"Life is not about finding yourself, but about creating yourself."
Still working on all of the above points...
Facebook
came gently into my life back in 2006 when one of my very socially-inclined
students sent me an invitation; I resisted this invite for months. It reminded
in my mailbox though while I pondered for weeks whether or not I should give up
my freedom to privacy. I knew what facebook was about; I had heard stories
about this social space, the wild land of the
20 something generation. But, eventually, facebook and I, we
ended up in a relationship, like many relationships - a stormy one.
The issue whether or not facebook could be more than just a social space has
popped up again and again. Back in January and February, during the EVO2008
session we were running on the uses of social tools in teaching EFL/ESL, SMiELT,
our discussion got somewhat sidetracked and a number of us ended up chatting
about the possibilities of using facebook with our
students to teach English. The second time facebook came back into our
discussions, this time with a big bang, was the infamous Ryerson scandal when we all learned that students
still cheat – how surprising – this time though they were using a new social
medium to do that (the life of a cheat note had come to a timely end, it
seems). One of the engineering students got charged for opening a study
group which, in fact, was a place to exchange solutions for their chemistry
class. This past June, facebook became a discussion topic once again in a
course I was taking at YorkU.
Last night, July 2, I went on facebook after a month-long, self-imposed
isolation. The truth was that over the months I had become an addict of facebook
and I needed to see
1.
if my life
can still exist with it
2.
what
happens to facebook when one stops facebooking
3.
decide if
I wanted to use facebook as a teaching tool
The answers
are:
1.
my life
got much better without it
2.
facebook
dies a natural death when one stops facebooking (the same as it is with virtual
gaming: “The world exists because of you.”)
3. no, I would not use it for educational purposes.
This last
realization is quite contrary to my stance on the issue at the beginning of the
year.
Why on earth
would anybody even consider using facebook to teach anything? In one of the
posts during the June discussions with my class, the justification for using
facebook in education came from the observation that the site is used extensively
by the Generation Y crowd.
In his article,
Facing the Facebook, Michael Bugeja
states,
"Michael
Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, recounts a class
discussion during which he asked how many people had seen the previous night's NewsHour
on PBS or read that day's New York Times. "A couple of hands
went up out of about 140 students who were present," he recalls. "One
student chirped: 'Ask them how many use Facebook.' I did. Every hand in the
room went up. She then said: 'Ask them how many used it today.' I did.
Every hand in the room went up. I was amazed."
Given then that
the attention of the 20something crowd seems to be centred around facebook
nowadays, the suggestion from one of the discussants was, “Perhaps it would be
better if educators could see the value of using facebook as a tool to
encourage subject discussions beyond the classroom.” Yeah, right!
After the
EVO2008 sessions, Mary asked if I would be interested in
contributing to a discussion on using facebook in our teaching; I
enthusiastically said yes. It was kind of a Marxist crusade
– I had deeply-ingrained high ideals in regards to facebook; I believed that
the 20something crowd was ripe for an educational revolution, a revolution in
which facebook would be turned into a productive teaching tool. Marx’s
ideals came to an end in Eastern Europe in 1989 with the
Velvet Revolution after years of trials; my ideals came to an end
even before the revolution took place.
When I was considering the use of facebook for education in January, I was
mostly driven by my personal conviction that education can and should take
place anywhere. I had this highly ideal conviction that it is my responsibility
to stir my students towards learning wherever they are. I think I was a bit
naive then thinking that I can inspire the 20something to use his/her personal
facebook space to less futile goals than an exchange of seemingly nonsense and
hardly readable posts on their Walls or an exchange of hugs, which, in my
opinion at that time, served little, if any, purpose. I did decide though to
stand back and observe this social space to get the feel of the place; I looked
at their Wall posts and Super Wall videos, read their daily updates, saw how
their friendship grew from day to day, and how each facebook site is different
as it reflects each person’s individuality. I did the same: wrote on my
friends’ Walls, scribbled crazy updates at 2 am in the morning, and looked for
friends to add to my site. I personalized my page – I made it my own to reflect
who I am.
Then, it hit me. I woke up at 4:45 in the morning one day and came to a
conclusion that facebook IS really a SOCIAL SPACE, and that my students really
need to and want to use it to SOCIALIZE. Over these months of intense facebooking, I had
realized that it would be unfair and futile to impose my high educational
ideals on my students on facebook. I realized that trying to stir them towards
learning inside this very social and very informal environment is wrong.
One of the arguments put forward in our
discussions was that because technology is such a big part of their life, it
could be utilized to stir them towards learning. But that’s so wrong. Facebook
is a social place and they should use it for social purposes. It's THEIR place,
THEIR space, THEIR party. Making them use this very social space to learn
things is like crushing a party on a Friday night. One of the other teachers
pointed out that it is incredible how often students use facebook. And, that’s
true; yes, they do. But that’s because they need to. They need to exchange
nonsense videos, the need to send each other hugs, and they need to have a
place to vent their exasperation about education (how telling is that!) in
desperate messages in which they complain how much studying sucks. Taking away
this SOCIAL space from them and turning it into an EDUCATIONAL space would be a
crime.
