An exploration of teaching and learning in a virtual world in the context of higher education

This research provides an account of one third level educator’s experience of teaching and learning within the three dimensional multi-user virtual world Second Life. An ethnographic methodology is employed. First, a narrative of my journey of immersion into the field is provided. Three stages in this journey are identified: separation, transition and transformation. Within each stage are distinct sub-stages and each stage is explored in detail. Second, the findings from the data analysis are presented in terms of five key themes: the virtual teacher, learner engagement in the virtual world, the fear factor, getting to grips with methodology and finally, place based education in a virtual space. In the third part, the contribution to new knowledge of the thesis is explained through a virtual world adjustment theory comprising five phases; orientation, euphoria, crisis, survival and transformation. Each phase of the theory represents a movement toward new knowledge and understanding. The overall conclusion is followed by recommendations derived from the research and the implications of these recommendations for potential virtual world educators are analysed

Slice of life in a live and wired masquerade: playful prosumption as identity work and performance in an identity college Bilibili

This article investigates Chinese urban youth’s mediated ‘slice of life’ and playful encounters as part of their identity construction and performance work on Bilibili, one of China’s most influential video-sharing social media sites mediating anime, comics, games and novels. Using a mix-method approach of digital ethnography, participant observation, interviews and data visualisation, this article examines fans’ hermeneutic practices through anime, comic, game and novel prosumption, exemplified by danmaku: ‘bullet screen’, barrage-like comments overlaid on videos. This article argues that Bilibili works as an ‘identity college’ for fans to perform various roles and explore their hybrid identities in a social-hermeneutic engagement process. In particular, the function of anonymous danmaku comments will be closely analysed as it offers a quasi-real-time engagement experience for fans and helps shape fans’ social self. Following a symbolic interactionist tradition, Mead’s ‘generalised other’ and Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are contextualised in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu where fans’ identity performance is regarded as masquerade. Departing from the moral panic rhetoric that Generation Z is ‘amused to death’, becoming ‘infantile and animalised’, or even enslaved by their desires and capable only of ‘cold intimacies’, the findings of this explorative study present a more complex understanding of Chinese youth’s identity work through participatory social media use and networked fandom

Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning

Digital Tools in Urban Schools demonstrates significant ways in which high school teachers in the complex educational setting of an urban public high school in northern California extended their own professional learning to revitalize learning in their classrooms. Through a novel research collaboration between a university and this public school, these teachers were supported and guided in developing the skills necessary to take greater advantage of new media and new information sources to increase student learning while making connections to their relevant experiences and interests. Jabari Mahiri draws on extensive qualitative data—including blogs, podcasts, and other digital media—to document, describe, and analyze how the learning of both students and teachers was dramatically transformed as they utilized digital media in their classrooms. Digital Tools in Urban Schools will interest instructional leaders and participants in teacher preparation and professional development programs, education and social science researchers and scholars, graduate and undergraduate programs and classes emphasizing literacy and learning, and those focused on urban education issues and conditions

THE MACHINE ANXIETIES OF STEAMPUNK: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY, NEO-VICTORIAN AESTHETICS, AND FUTURISM

This dissertation examines the steampunk movement as a significant contemporary expression of the human condition. Although its aesthetic inspiration comes from the Victorian past, as re-tooled, re-imagined, and re-energized for the twenty-first century, steampunk’s underlying interest is in a speculative view of the future and a concern for the contemporary individual’s struggle to retain autonomy in a de-centered, deterritorialized world. As such the steampunk movement participates in, and contributes to, an important ongoing philosophical and aesthetic dialog. The project examines the motivations for steampunk’s visual inspiration in the Victorian. Technological and scientific advancements in that period greatly impacted societal traditions and the role of the individual within it. Economic, social, and political changes revolutionized daily life and the individual faced a new self-consciousness as she confronted, and adapted to, these significant changes. Today, similar technological advancements force new tensions between the individual and the world around her. Astounding developments in computing and artificial intelligence, and the concept of the cyborg and other hybrid beings challenge the contemporary individual’s sense of self. By looking to the past, steampunk seeks to recuperate the Victorian individual’s successful navigation of technological change. She does so in order to facilitate our own navigation of current waters. vii The project traces the movement’s modest roots as a literary sub-genre of science fiction, explores its sources in the Victorian, and describes the movement’s rapid evolution to global phenomenon. Today steampunk is fully integrated into contemporary culture as an aesthetic observed in visual, decorative, and fashion arts, comic books, movies, and television. The project explores the current landscape of art and philosophy in order to position the steampunk movement within the larger scope of the contemporary scene. A triad of prevailing philosophical trends—postmodernism, transhumanism, and posthumanism, help to reveal steampunk’s involvement in the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic dialog.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1015/thumbnail.jp

From digital creations of space to analogous experiences of places :living in second life and acting in Flash Mob

PhD ThesisThis dissertation aims to raise the question of how individuals and groups become placed – or take up place – in the contemporary environment and to consider what forms the need for situatedness takes today, by examining the phenomena of the Flash Mob and Second Life. In a Flash Mob, an email activates a virtual community and converts it into a physical performance in the city, challenging a new cognition of place, where place is constituted by the event. On the other hand, Second Life takes the form of a digitally constructed world, which opens the possibility of a “virtual place” that enables users to establish connections not only with each other, but also with the [virtual] environment itself. The two case studies together question place in its materiality and its symbolism, and it is argued that they act as media to re-code “groundedness”. Thus we reach a paradoxical conclusion: although the contemporary world suggests a dynamic and more flexible existence on the earth, the need for “situatedness” and the demand for “well-grounded claims” remain stronger than ever. The structure of this research reflects a double set of conditions that, although not new, have intensified due to the emergence of new technologies: first, the expansion of the human body beyond its corporeal limits and second, the augmentation of the perceived world beyond the mere materiality of any kind of environment. Therefore the thesis studies how, on the one hand, bodies, communities and crowds transform within digitisation, and, on the other, how the world develops as a consequence of the digital reconstruction of grounds. It examines the way in which individuals detach from their “real-world groundedness” by forming bonds-connections to these digitised grounds, which display – as generators of endless possibilities – a kind of utopian openendedness. Finally, it explores the phenomenon of “virtualisation” to raise the question of whether the contemporary world is infused by information and thus augmented in terms of meanings, connections, and attachments, or is instead made of a series of projections, transforming reality into an idealised version of itself.Panayiotis Triantafillidis Foundation,The Greek Ministry of Education: Newcastle University

Netprov

Netprov is an emerging interdisciplinary digital art form that offers a literature-based “show” of insightful, healing satire that is as deep as the novels of the past. This accessible history of Netprov emerges out of an ongoing conversation about the changing roles and power dynamics of author and reader in an age of real-time interactivity. Rob Wittig describes a literary genre in which all the world is a platform and all participants are players. Beyond serving as a history of the genre, this book includes tips and examples to help those new to the genre teach and create netprovs

BUILDING THE VIRTUAL WORLD: SOFTWARE, BETA TESTING, AND THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE SIMS ONLINE

Originally released in 2002, The Sims Online (TSO) was one of the most hyped online games ever brought to market. Many critics believed its connection to The Sims would ensure its success. However, this potential was never reached, and in August of 2008, EA/Maxis shut down TSO, terminating users' accounts and removing all traces of it from the Internet. Despite its failure, TSO remains an interesting text for analysis, especially as a case study of the growing importance of virtual worlds on the Internet, and as a cautionary tale for future virtual world development. Combining a cultural studies approach with the emerging media studies' subfields of "ludology" and "software studies" this dissertation examines the formative period of TSO's development--how was the game developed, created, and used in its earliest stages (especially its beta test, in which users play the game before the official release in order to uncover problems with the software). Whereas previous examples of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) genre were fantasy-based, TSO fashioned a world very much modeled on the familiar; players would navigate their Sim avatar through a landscape filled with simulacrums of the material artifacts, cultural rituals, and social practices that are common in American culture. TSO was not a game about battle and conquest--it was a game about the meaning of production and consumption in our lives and leisure. The dissertation focuses on the overlapping and even blurring meaning of consumption and production in users' experience of TSO, as well as in the architecture of the game. The analysis of the crucial beta test phase provides a particularly focused examination of the collision of these terms