A couple of months ago I started experimenting with the use of Twitter and other social media in my wired college classrooms. Meanwhile, out in California, Howard Rheingold was exploring the question of wired attention spans with his UC Berkeley social media class. Rheingold turned these explorations into a series of compelling vlog posts called “Training Attention.”
All of this got me thinking about the nature of engagement in a wired world. It struck me that we’re in need of some form of scaffolding for particpatory and social media use. Specifically, the creation of some sort of attention scaffolding that transports the user beyond a state of random gratification and sensory overload.
Back in 2003, when Second Life arrived on the internets, I was not in a position to take part. My computer wasn’t fast enough and I didn’t have the time available. Since then, I resisted joining on the grounds that it seemed really materialistic and commercial. While there were indeed interesting things happening there, what I saw seemed too close to the social hierarchies of first-life.
Over time, and as I became more involved in education, I discovered the growing numbers of educators and world changers flocking to SL. This gave me a compelling reason to invest my time there. And I finally made the plunge this weekend - four years too late but better late than never. What I found there was indeed compelling.
So there I am in the image above (note: my avatar is temporary) enjoying a conversation with a few other educators in a professor’s virtual condo. Aftewards, Smartlak and I roamed around Eduisland, Athens and a few other places. Here are some photos I took of our first adventure.
Eternally grateful to Prentiss for help getting started. Great to meet Leigh, Mal, andFred Special thanks to Knowclue for rollerskates and Leigh for the tour of your beautiful space. Hope to meet many more geeky big brains in SL and take part in some of the forward thinking education innovation taking place there.
From the start of elementary school until high school graduation, students spend two million minutes preparing for their future. Director Chad Heeter’s documentary 2 Million Minutesexplores the dramatic differences between the way Western students spend that time versus students in China and India.
In his latest vlog post, Howard Rheingold addresses an increasingly difficult problem for educators: Attention in a hypermediated age. Rheingold takes things beyond the usual “let’s debate multitasking - good or bad?” to the real heart of the matter: How to focus the wired mind?
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