Education 2.0

Here's the latest machinima dispatch from award-winning reporter [and Cause Global contributor] Bernhard Drax, this one on efforts by some teachers to transform education with more daring uses of technology inside the classroom -- and outside of it. Can learning in virtual worlds empower kids to do better? Draxtor Despres, Drax's avatar [the one with the glasses and earphones] interviews a range of educators and officials in Second Life, including those from the International Society for Technology in Education and the Department of Education.

Here's his report:

Virtual Worlds: The New Green?

Much is being said (again) amid the current economic downturn about the benefits of meeting virtually. Might virtual worlds be an even more efficient, effective, and eco-friendly alternative to video-conferencing? Here's Bernhard Drax's latest news report from Second Life on a recent panel discussion moderated by the U.S. State Department on the rise of virtual workspaces. [Hint: There are more than 1,400 organizations doing real work and real meetings in Second Life already.] Drax's avatar, Draxtor Despres, is the guy in the glasses:



For more on Drax, see Mo' Real, a short profile and report by Drax on President Obama's health care reform plans that appeared here, on the Cause Global blog early last year.

Slow

I first knew Douglas Gayeton as the creator of Molotov Alva, the digital avatar who explored the meaning of life in Second Life. Now, some three years later, Gayeton is pushing the boundaries of multimedia once more, but this time in a distinctly un-digital context. With SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town, his first book, Gayeton introduces the people of Pistoia and their progressively rare, digitally unfettered way of life in rural Italy. SLOW, which emerged from a year Gayeton spent five years ago in Pistoia, also marks the debut of his new and richly engaging, journalistic form of remix storytelling.

Using flat film techniques, Gayeton layers most of his portraits of Pistoia with his own, handwritten notes, anecdotes, recipes, quotes, and historical facts, bringing context and color to each. What emerges is an interactive, sepia-toned celebration of the region's romantic, slow, and profoundly authentic existence.

Gayeton explains:

—Marcia Stepanek

Metacasting

Here's Bernhard Drax's coverage, in Second Life, of President Barack Obama's July 11 speech to the people of Ghana, which Drax calls "one of the most tweeted, facebooked, and SMS'ed events" of the six-month-old Administration.

Drax's engaging, mixed-media report blends virtual and offline interviews and video clips to explore the way social media were used by Obama's team to distribute Obama's speech to Africans lacking direct access to the Internet. But the real highlight is Drax's coverage of the interactive, global speech-viewing party convened in Second Life during Obama's remarks and an SL panel discussion that followed, featuring Kenton Keith, the former ambassador to Qatar, and Timothy Burke, an expert in African history.

Drax also interviewed some of the people who sent their avatars to both gatherings. Julius Sowu, who left Ghana for the U.K. in 1981, praised the opportunity he and others from around the world had to convene digitally in one place at one time to discuss Obama's speech as it was happening. Social media [including SL and other uses of the metaverse], he told Drax, are transforming politics and public engagement in profound new ways. "Gone are the days when a news story would break, (Ghana's) minister would send it to the media department to resolve the issue and then present the world with a comment about the issue," Sowu says. "Now that it's on Twitter, it's on Facebook, and it's on Second Life, the minister doesn't have time to spin it."

[NOTE: The suited avatar wearing eyeglasses and headphones is Draxtor Despres, Drax's alter-ego in Second Life, who is narrating the story.]



For more on Drax and his work, see Mo' Real, an earlier post on Cause Global by Marcia Stepanek about news reporting in Second Life.

—Marcia Stepanek

Upcycling

Thursday night on Manhattan's Upper West Side is known as "Big Garbage Night"—the one night of the week when neighbors put out their cast-off couches, bookcases, fireplace tools, old [and sometimes new] lamps, finished books, and other objects to be picked up by sanitation workers in the wee hours of Friday morning. Yet most of the stuff—the best stuff—never makes it to Friday. The not-so-big secret? Residents of this well-heeled neighborhood usually pick it up before the trucks do. One neighbor says she furnished her two-bedroom apartment almost entirely from BGN cast-offs. ["It's perfectly good stuff," she told me. "I'll take it, add my own touches, and make it into something more fabulous."]


At first, this struck me as one of those "only in New York" phenomenons—and then, more recently, as a sign of the economic times. Yet as I watched this self-organized, nocturnal flea market rise up again this past Thursday from my parlor window [Albert, across the street, was sizing up a small, solid oak door left as debris from a neighboring renovation], it struck me that there might be something else going on, that maybe we're all upcyclers now—if not in the physical world, then certainly online. Is the social Web's culture of sharing, sampling, re-tweeting, and appropriation spilling offline, encouraging more sampling and appropriation throughout our lives? [Albert told me today he plans to turn his find into a dining room table, based on an article he saw on Facebook, and start a "how-to" blog to share the experience. Eventually, he says, he hopes to create a do-it-yourself-design business.]

Call it Upcycling 2.0—the rise of a whole new crop of amateur and professional artists, entertainers, designers, and business people who are not simply recycling their garbage, like Terracycle, which makes consumer products from animal waste and old soda bottles. This new wave is re-contextualizing older objects and ideas; creating new visual and structural dialogues between the old and the new, the organic and synthetic, between one set of ideas and another.

One of the most prolific and inspired of these new upcyclers is Adam Kalkin, an artist and architect, whose Quik House projects convert old boxcars into pre-fab and low-income housing. For years, Kalkin has been developing these projects for commercial use, but he's also now organizing a SWAT team of designers to offer such housing to refugees of economic dislocation and global conflict around the world. "The container is a purpose-built object, but when you re-contextualize it—put it in a residential context—you both destroy its original context and create a new one," Kalkin says. He calls this a "new form of upcycling"— in his case, the act of taking modest storage forms [like boxcars] and materials and using them for a higher purpose. Kalkin says his work in this regard is "very much informed by the swell of Web-inspired appropriation and re-appropriation informing our culture at large." [For more on Kalkin's work, click here.]

My favorite example of upcycling, however, is from the world of entertainment—60s crooner Paul Anka's rendering of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit (click, left, for Nirvana's version). Anka is not simply "covering" Kurt Cobain's grunge rock hit of the early 90s. (Kalkin agrees with me.) Anka is creating a higher form of the original. Here he is, below:



For more upcycling, check out Patti Smith's version, here. Also check out Terracyle's latest projects here, as well as William Kamkwamba's work building a windmill in Africa. Also see how the design community is putting on another show this spring to promote numerous examples of upcycling. The trend also is happening in Second Life. Says machinima documentarian Douglas Gayeton, creator of Molotov Alta series on HBO, "Second Life is now more fertile than it ever was, and not driven by commercialism now so much as by idea-sharing and experimentation...an effort by some to upcycle the real world."

(Illustration, Green Machine, by Matt Hertel)

Mo' Real

A small group of social activists, journalists, and filmmakers has begun using Second Life to start covering the news. Leading the charge is Draxtor Despres [aka Bernhard Drax, a 38-year-old, Munich-born machinima hobbyist living in Pacific Grove, California]. Drax recently posted a report on YouTube telling how the incoming Obama Administration will use Second Life to help engage the public over health care reform. Here's that report, virtual video-style, below. [NOTE: Draxtor is the suited avatar with headphones.]



Drax, who has been experimenting with Second Life as a medium for news for nearly the past year, received international recognition in mid-December for his efforts [and recognition for Second Life as a new information medium] during the Paris celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There, Drax was awarded an "Every Human Has Rights" media award for his SL report, "Virtual Guantanamo," a feature story on the "virtual Gitmo" built in Second Life by filmmaker Nonny del la Pena and Peggy Weil, a professor at the University of Southern California. Their work, "Gone Gitmo," offers viewers an immersive experience about what it's like (no, really) to be a prisoner at Gitmo. See Drax's award-winning report, below:



Drax uses screen capture software to film events and gather interviews. Douglas Thomas, the director of USC's Network Culture Project, predicts an expansion this year in the use of the medium in education, journalism, and social advocacy, saying many nonprofits and social advocates also might start using Second Life as a new storytelling medium for encouraging public engagement in their causes. Says Drax: "How can we improve the real world? That's what I'm trying to focus on in Second Life." Drax will start filing reports next month from this virutal world for PBS's Frontline World. Said Drax, in accepting the award in Paris: "I'm proud I've gotten this award but it's a signal that this is viable, that this is legitimate, that this [SL] is not a game."

For more on the development of virtual worlds for social change, check out Games for Change co-founder Suzanne Seggerman and her work by clicking here to see her talk at the recent Pop!Tech 2008. Also check out Contribute Magazine's special report, The Cause Web, [September/October 2007], chiefly the story, Pixelanthropy, about the trend toward nonprofit activism in Second Life.

Other-Worldly

Photographer, filmaker, and multimedia artist Douglas Gayeton is a new kind of digital storyteller. He creates immersive story experiences for virtual worlds and social networks, including Second Life, Gaia, Habbo Hotel and Sony Home—the first high-def virtual world (which released in public beta in June).

In case you missed it the first time around, here's a clip from one of Gayeton's better-known projects, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey. He wrote, produced, and directed this documentary, the first-ever shot entirely within Second Life. The highest-rated video in the world on YouTube, Molotov Alva was purchased recently by HBO.



Gayeton is the chief creative officer at Millions of Us, a San Francisco-based agency that specializes in marketing programs in Second Life. He is preparing a one-man retrospective of his works for Slow Food Nation, a San Francisco celebration of the sustainable food movement that's to be held at Fort Mason over the Labor Day weekend.

I will be sitting down with Gayeton in Chicago in early September to hear about his plans for using virtual environments to raise awareness of social issues. "People sometimes use virtual worlds to redefine themselves and the world in a way that's closer to the vision that they have of it and themselves," Gayeton says. Watch this site to learn more about Gayeton and his thought leadership on the newest forms of social media for social change.

—Marcia Stepanek

The Wizards of Whyville

Still think virtual worlds don't (nor can) matter much in the real world? Think again. Not all virtual worlds are created equal. Just ask any 12-year-old if he or she has ever been to Whyville.

Odds are, that kid is one of the 3.5 million "tweens" aged 8 to 14 who spend, on average, at least a few hours a week on this 9- year-old virtual reality site--and has likely been doing so for years. Whyvillian Andy109, for example, has visited the site 2,304 times since he first registered on April 7, 2000. That's almost a rate of one visit per day for the past seven years, says Whyville cofounder Jim Bower, 55, the Caltech science professor who led the development of Whyville in 1999 and still runs the place. (I caught up with Bower this past week at this year's Digital Now conference in Orlando, where we were both presenting workshops on new trends in social media. Bower, aka "Super Id" in Whyville--a moniker for which he is famous among tweens--tells me that some 23% of all kids aged 6-17 already have a login in the virtual world, and that by 2011, that figure will more than double.)

But Bower and his cause-wired community of kids are just getting started, with a number of them now organizing clothing drives for the poor in Whyville, or waging nutritional action campaigns to fight anorexia and obesity among teens on and offline--based largely on what they've learned about economics, nutrition, and project planning in Whyville.

And don't be surprised if that 12-year-old you know also builds (or rents) a house in Whyville. Or drives a car there. Or is managing a virtual business--complete with employees, a payroll, and revenues to fuss over. Some even write for the Whyville Times (the virtual newspaper) about real-world social issues. When McDonald's first came out with its new line of salads to offer healthier fare, a Whyville Times reporter scooped the mainstream media a week later with a story proving that the line's nutritional value was as sparse as that of a Big Mac. "CNN did the story two weeks later," Bower says.

But what's really making cause advocates and organizational leaders take notice of Whyville is that it keeps maturing, expanding, and innovating--and with a cohesiveness and sophistication quite unlike other virtual worlds on the Internet so far.

Whyville is global. Kids log in from Afghanistan, India, China, Europe, South America, as well as from all over the United States. They share what's common among them more than their differences, Bower says. "In Whyville, kids mostly learn from each other about the impact of their actions on themselves--but they do so first in cyberspace, where the educational activities offered can promote socially responsible behavior," Bower says. ( Violating the community's basic rules of behavior, for example, can lead to a "muting" -- not being able to interact on the site for anywhere from 1-3 days.)

Not everyone is enamoured with Whyville: Some say Bower is building a cyberspace version of a "company town" -- controlled from the top and vulnerable to the whims of its creators. Bower, a passionate advocate for educational reform, vehemently counters by saying the site strikes a careful balance between self-government and adult "judicial" oversight to keep peace--not unlike a functioning democratic community anywhere. Better Whyville's participatory, grassroots "government" than no governance at all, he says.

A growing roster of organizations, schools, and corporations, meanwhile, are beginning to accept Bower's invitation to develop collaborative projects so that the learning can go both ways. (The U.K.'s EMI Music company, for example, has expressed interest in working with Bower to "build" a virtual recording studio in Whyville that would enable kids to write their own music, record it, and sell it to fellow Whyvillians for the site's virtual currency, called "clams.") Whyville's physical-world partners additionally include the National Science Foundation, The Getty art museum, Penguin Books, Scholastic, Toyota, Stanford University, and NASA--in all, 14 major national brands, eight nonprofit organizations, five governmental agencies, and six universities.

Says Bauer: "Virtual worlds do work, and have the potential to be the learning labs driving real change and more socially responsible behavior in the real world for decades to come."

Want to hear more? Tune into an interview with Bower aired by the Podcast Network. Here's that podcast.

What do you think?