Second Life is Hype

Although I have a Second Life account, I rarely use it (I am Unh Oh in Second Life). To be honest, I have been quite underwhelmed with education's embrace of Second Life. Most of it consists of "virtual classrooms", unfinished experiments, or things that people won't really use on a regular basis, because Second Life as a whole can be sluggish, it requires specific thought to install and run (I have to go to my computer, open second life, log in, wait) -- it doesn't sound like a hassle, but given other lower-threshold tools at my disposal for communicating -- it is simply too much of a time drain.

I can (and will) write quite a bit about Second Life in the next couple of months, for it illustrates well some of the problems we face when trying to fit analog space into digital space. Assumptions about hierarchy. Assumptions about economy.

This MarketPlace story illustrates one of these critical points -- that it appears that companies are beginning to pull out of Second Life, after the gold rush. As one person succinctly puts it:

"Second Life is a world in which you can fly just as easily as you can walk. Maybe the idea of building a store doesn't make much sense."

I will extend that argument to educational institutions. Assumptions about hierarchies, how economies can work, gender roles, cultural assumptions, power structure. Wow. It is like a mirror at times that illustrates the flaws in these assumptions. It is a magnifying glass that illustrates some fundamental, underlying, bad assumptions about the role of technology in education.

I think (but have no evidence) that Second Life's population numbers are grossly inflated. I believe that not there are not that many people who use it regularly, compared to much broader services -- including myspace, youtube and facebook. It may not seem fair to compare these -- they are different things indeed -- but the cost of time -- what can I do in the next 3o minutes - I can wander around Second Life, or a I can create a blog post, update my Facebook account, check my email. It is an easy decision. One is a big blob, takes a while to load, and can take time to do stuff -- the other things -- specific, task driven, efficient.

All of this illustrates some bigger lessons about digital learning. I believe that we are seeing in Second Life can definitely be applied to LMS systems (WebCT/Blackboard, Moodle, etc). But more on this later.

1 minute on OLPC

Read this WSJ analysis on the One Laptop Per Child initiative
Read this Hardware comparison of the OLPC and the Asus Eee PC

A lot of smart people worked on the OLPC, but is it enough? Does it have a life span? Is it too clever?

Getting in the hardware business is always tempting -- building a ecosystem where you can control the platform. Make something that is in a box, you can hold in your hands. Wouldn't it make more sense to just open source the whole damn thing? Let anybody make them?

I think it is instructive to consider the role of conventional technology -- and how the cost of the mundane drops. $19.99 DVD players, for instance. Consider the complexity of a mechanism that uses a laser to decode bits of data on a disk, convert it back into video and audio, and throw in a modest amount of interactivity.

This is a model that really blows things apart. The hardware becomes secondary to the content. This is what has to happen with OLPC. The hardware has to cease to matter. The operating system and it's core functionality should run on almost anything that people have lying around, or are willing to make is the quantities of a $19.99 DVD player.

I don't really agree completely with the WSJ because of this. I do think OLPC will not be the specific device that fuels a revolution, but it will fuel something -- the next EEE PC will probably cost half of what it costs now - using conventional, off the shelf technology. It will run whatever OS someone wants. Including OLPC. That is a good thing.

The goal should not be to build little green laptops, but to make computing like that $19.99 DVD player.

--hal

The Microsoft Box

This posting in Engadget gave me a moment of pause. The Microsoft UMPC platform has only been around for a couple of years, but it seems that it never really caught on, and while companies are continuing to come out with new versions, that this device has dropped to over half of what one cost new in less than a year tells me that they simply aren't selling. It is a problematic device to be sure, something that Microsoft has concocted that is still in search of a market.

I think this is another example of imagined functionality. What I mean by this is that we imagine times where technology would be useful, but in reality that extra functionality is never really utilized. 4x4 SUV's in Florida, for instance -- there are only a small percentage of people that need that functionality in a state where it never snows. This device of course runs Windows apps, but none of these applications are optimized for a tablet experience. They use a 30 year old desktop metaphor that severly compromises user experience. We are stuck with an on-screen keyboard that cripples our ability to type as easily as a laptop. The small screen necessitates squinting at times, because the software that will run on these devices is designed for larger screens. Of course, we can hook it to a monitor or projector to get a bigger display, but with $400.00 solid state laptops, what is the advantage of this device? We can imagine all the ways we *could* use this device, but I doubt anyone here actually has put down cold, hard cash on one. That is because at the end of the day it doesn't really replace things we already have or expand opportunities. I have used my iPhone to check pricing and reviews on an item while shopping at Target. I can't see myself doing the same with this gizmo.

Microsoft is stuck in a box, and they simply can't get out. They take a form factor that has never caught on widely (the tabletPC), try to shrink it with some vision that people will take these everywhere, but I have never seen anybody with one. That is because given the cost of this device, and a slightly more expensive laptop, it is a slam dunk. One is a series of compromises with too big a form factor to slip in a shirt pocket (which means I will take it with me everywhere). The laptop is bigger, but is much more functional. There is a formula for functionality versus size, and Microsoft simply can't find it. Witness the failure of the Zune -- again, a bunch of technology pieces that don't add up to a coherent whole.

Luptonista

I went to a great presentation last night by Ellen Lupton. She is a academic -- typographer/ designer -- and half of her presentation was on abuse of typography -- the other half was on diy -- particularly crafts and pet peeves. She brought many "out of real life" examples about typography and drilled home a few critical points -- what bad things happen when we smash fonts (but sometimes it does look cool), spacing and more.

From my notebook:

diD YoU KNow that there is a thing called "Church of Craft"?
http://www.churchofcraft.org/

some more random notes

www.design-your-life.org
www.thinkingwithtype.com

Books
diy
diy kids

and others -- do an amazon search on ellen lupton.

She was awesome, and gave me ideas for something I am working on for next year's DE conference and maybe something a little more.

Luptonista

I went to a great presentation last night by Ellen Lupton. She is a academic -- typographer/ designer -- and half of her presentation was on abuse of typography -- the other half was on diy -- particularly crafts and pet peeves. She brought many "out of real life" examples about typography and drilled home a few critical points -- what bad things happen when we smash fonts (but sometimes it does look cool), spacing and more.

From my notebook:

diD YoU KNow that there is a thing called "Church of Craft"?
http://www.churchofcraft.org/

some more random notes

www-design-your-life.org
thinkingwithtype.com

Books
diy
diy kids

and others -- do an amazon search on ellen lupton.

She was awesome, and gave me ideas for something I am working on for next year's DE conference and maybe something a little more.

It is not free unless I say so

An upcoming presentation/panel at TLTR here on campus is titled "Free Culture* (*while supplies last): Mashups, Remixes, and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines".

While I understand that the intent is to let people know about the state of copyright law, education and - that term again - Mashups - there are some things about the topic that I am sure won't be covered.

Of course, everyone (except perhaps Andrew Keen) is down with the idea of Free Culture (unless it pertains to my own work of course!). Higher education is at it's present philosophically believes in Free Culture, but the busines of Higher Education is diagrammatically opposed to Free Culture.

I will spend some time talking about why that is, but there is quite a bit of hypocrisy to go around. I struggle with this quite a bit when it comes to my own work, I am still not how this could work.

But, it appears that there is no one on the panel that actually makes stuff. We get a presentation about copyright law and education, and the problems here. This is quite the wrong discussion to have -- even the title is in the wrong place. It's to let people know what the deal is, what can be done -- but things are so beyond screwed up that it is almost like explaining the war in Iraq (support the troops, support Amurica!) in a way that is acceptable for a pacifist. It just can't be done. Copyright and intellectual property is beyond broken, it now points to deeper problems with how we approach knowledge and content in society -- not a particular country's laws -- but how we as a species consider it. So much is assumed.

I wish for Free Culture, I really want to believe -- but the data keeps saying otherwise. RadioHead's "pay what you want" album is widely pirated. But wait -- maybe that is not a bad thing -- the album is really on a small portion of a band's income -- it is touring where the money comes in -- so they may come out of it okay.

Film, video and text definitely have a problem here. Each performance of a recorded work is the same. There is no variation. You go once/read it and you have seen all there is to see. How can a filmmaker/writer make money in this environment? Let's face it: if a big name director/filmmaker puts a film out there with the same model as RadioHead, it is doubtful they will even begin to recoup costs. Free Culture be damned when we talk about new media.

Lev Manovich trys to dispel the belief that digital media is different from analog media because it doesn't degrade. I disagree -- he focuses on "lossy compression" in jpeg to illustrate is point that new media is capable of degrading like analog, but but but that is a pretty weak argument -- I just downloaded a jpeg of ronald reagan, and there it is -- in all it's digital glory. I made a copy and it is just like the original. Yes -- if I open and resave as a jpeg, it is damaged -- but this is just an exception, not the rule. It circumvents the bigger question with a technical argument, which is that we are a point in time where things can indeed be moved fluidly with little or no loss of quality, but perhaps with a large loss of context. That I think is much more worth considering.

Again, there is no one on this panel that actually *makes*. This is a problem. Let's not talk about all the different ways someone can go to jail for reusing content -- audio/visual quotes, outright re-visioning of work. Let's not talk about how we can "push back". Let's just do it. Run the red light because the traffic light is broken, and won't get fixed. There is no incentive to do that, but there is plenty incentive to keep things the same.

Beyond the Mix

I'm half-way through reading Language of New Media again, and I have decided that while it is one of the best books I've read in the next five years, the fatal flaw is not getting down with the analog. I talked about that (perhaps elliptically) last week. The digital is dead until we make it live.

Out of this comes the following realization. Mix Culture as a revolutionary form of media does not exist.

We have always been a sum of our parts -- bits and pieces of culture, text, images, sounds, thoughts. These things flow through us, we give them an identity and a life.

We cull fragments and it makes up a big part of who we are. It is our history.

The digital does change things. I will not deny that. We touch it and it changes us.

We put much on the manifestation, the tools....not the message. "Mix culture" as a term is all about the digital. It denies something much more fundamental about ourselves. We look, listen and learn. Stories come from this.

We come from the sum of our parts. We see something new, and it is different, but the thing that drives it, that which makes it intriguing or useful, is ourselves.

This is why I reject the term "mix culture". We have collapsed thousands of dollars worth of equipment and access to a desktop computer. The underlying output does not change. Our palette increases, but if we let the digital define things, we see it's parts as well as it's combination. We need to see the message. We will get over seeing it's components soon enough, and then we can get on with using it effectively.

What I am getting at is that these discussions of "appropriation" of media for re purposing get bound in legal discussions. Laws are these things we make up for a variety of reasons. We need to examine those reasons, not the laws themselves.

We need to get down with our analog selves. Doing digital allows us to pretend that somehow, maybe, this time, technology will make us a better version of ourselves. A Hal 2.0. We better get down with some "mix culture"!

I don't think any of us are really prepared for these kinds of discussions. Forget laws for a minute. What do we want to do? How do we want to treat contributions to our knowledge and our culture? What is language, and can anyone own it? Can we at least share?

"Mix Culture" acknowledges sources (which is good) but somehow sets that apart from what came before -- it is seen as a mongrel, but that is not how these things work. All that has changed is the way that it is done. One person can make a cartoon, not a shop of 12. This is a change akin to the rise of textile mills. Manufactured fabric tore apart a economy -- a way of doing business. This is happening now.

We find this power in the individual liberating but threatening.

Cinema changes, books change, economies change, culture changes. How we think of ourselves changes. This is disruption.

If we give it a name, something unique, we can perhaps embrace the new. See it as a new way of thinking about what we have done before.

What I am asking for is to look ahead.