NMC Campus Observer

Symposium on Creativity: Saturday Highlights

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 21, 2007 05:56pm

This was the last of seven incredible days of the NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life. After a full week, I must admit I took a “cat nap” Saturday morning and missed the sessions on “Introduction to Scripting in Second Life”, “Improvisation and Second Life”, and “Effective Communication Design with Scripted Objects” (the latter two were second offerings).

At 4:00 PM we welcomed back the lovely and articulate Anya Ixchel (aka Angela Thomas, University of Sydney) for another insightful session on avatars and identity – No More Business Suits Please: Creative Identity Play in SL

And that is how the Symposium wound down.. but as we said earlier, this is only a start, as now all of the resources here on the NMC Conference Center have been opened up to our NMC Community.

Second Life offers a unique opportunity to refashion one’s self and to play with fictional identities. Yet many of us who work inside Second Life feel trapped in our offline identity roles and conform to traditional discourses of femininity, masculinity, appearance, beauty and fashion. Professionals wear business suits, educators cry out for more modest clothing, and artists wear funky coloured skins. In some contexts, people who resist these discourses are discriminated against. This session explores how we might be able to leverage one of the greatest affordances of Second Life—the avatar—for personal, community and professional agendas.

Despite a rash of SL crashes, Anya kept it lively by having all the participants stand in a circle around, and share their reason for avatar choices. We broke into smaller groups for delving more into some of the identity decisions we make when we choose our appearances- which are truly more than skin deep in Second Life.

And we heard in more detail the experience of people like Desideria Stockton, who willingly took on a classic “Barbie Doll” appearance and had the worst discriminatory interactions with… other female educators!

As described in her own blog post, Anya’s hope for the session was:

it was more of a workshop than a presentation, and there were some wonderfully fascinating stories people shared about their avatars: why they created them and crafted them the way they did; what decisions they made about identity markers to include; how other people perceived their avatars; and any identity experiments (gender, fashion, race and so on) that they had explored

Next, it was over to the Babbage Amphitheater, for the closing session, the educators panel I was facilitating meant to bring the week of activities to a perspective on Creativity in Education. On board was:

• Lori Bell (aka Lorelei Junot), Alliance Library System
• Jo Kay (aka Jokay Wollongong), Illawarra Institute TAFE, New South Wales
• Hilary Mason (aka Ann Enigma), Johnson & Wales University
• Troy McConaghy (aka Troy McLuhan), ISM Corporation
• Nick Noakes (aka Corwin Carillon), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• Beth Ritter-Guth (aka Desideria Stockton), Lehigh Carbon Community College
• Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney

Photo by Jo Kay

And to be honest, the panel was great, but my touch on technology went to pieces! We wavered a bit right up to the last minute about using the voice chat versus streaming audio from a Skype conference call, and because two panelists had poor or no voice chat quality, we opted for Skype… At 5:00 PM my computer, the one streaming the audio totally crashed. We got going again, and started the session- yet a few minutes in, my computer again (all apps, Second Life, the desktop) were frozen.. but strangely enough, the Skype audio was still working and still streaming.

So with help from Desideria Stockton, who helped transcribe by chat and let me know what was going on, we had a bit of panel via chat, and a bit by audio. Amazingly enough, my Skype recording software got about 90% of the audio saved (sorry Desi, it cut you off!) so we have via audio below- the voices of Corwin Carillon/Nick Noakes, Hilary Mason/Ann Enigma, Troy McConaghy/Troy McLuhan (who wove in an awesome childhood tale), and Beth Ritter-Guth/Desideria Stockton… and in our chat log, we have the words of Lori Bel/Lorelei Junot), Jo Kay/Jokay Wollongong, and Angela Thomas/Anya Ixchel — plus the audience interaction.

Reflection on Creativity and Education

So the full panel experience will be a bit of a mashup! See the chat log at:

http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=72

Finally, to officially close out the Symposium, we had closing remarks from Larry Pixel (aka Larry Johnson), which you can find as well in audio form below– and he shared the text of his notes as well including the comments he had gotten from one participant earlier that day:

Hi Larry — little did I know when I took a week’s vacation to attend I would be entering a new world that would put me in creative overdrive, make me stop and ponder my life’s goals, and open my eyes to the possibilities of a whole new direction I would never have dreamed. I was already excited about SL and the possibilities.. I’m taking the red pill tonight, no problem!

Larry Johnson Closing Remarks

And then Larry cued the music, and celebration broke out spontaneously!

Story filed under: Audio / Video,Teaching and Learning,What's Happening
Tags: slcreativity
See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)