The Rhizome project has been helping to organise the Eduserv Digital Identity event which is being held at the British Library on 8 January 2009. Full details of the event are available here. But in brief, the approach for the day is to run a patterns workshop with the help of the Planet project, using a defined methodology to share the personal stories of our 35 plus participants in relation to their experiences of 'digital identity'. To do this we have solicited stories (or cases) from the invited group coming to the event and provided a template (STARR - see below) to help structure each submission. These are held on the Planet Xwiki site in a searchable database. Telling a story is an interesting and thought provking exercise exercise and we welcome anyone to come to the site to submit a personal narrative that they might have to share about digital identity. This is a copy of the case I have submitted for the event:

Name of Story: "Twitter-versed"

Situation (What is the setting or context for this case study?):

The context for this case study is what questions are raised about the nature of ones online presence/identity when one becomes embedded in a 'twitter community' (in this case a modest size of around 100 followers/following). Once embedded within an established community there is a nagging pressure to remain plugged into the Twitter life stream, almost constantly, and sometimes to the detriment of other activities.

Task (What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?)

The problem or the central point of the story (like all good narratives) revolves around a love-hate relationship ... what exactly is this Twitter thing - a multi-channel conversation, a pest, an addiction, redundancy looming for SMS, a potential educational tool, community bonding, a self promotion vehicle for over excitable egos, a live RSS channel, a reputation nightmare waiting to happen? Why are there are feelings of unease if one does not 'tweet' (send a Twitter message) at least once per day? Is it the existential fear of dropping out of the community if presence is not marked? Or is that my digital identity or my digital territory will be lost and I will cease to exist? Twitter exudes a certain lack of reflexivity and the exerts an invasive and pressured need for presence - the need to present some kind of digestible form of real identity into a streamed digital, micro version. How do you engage/disengage, without deleting an account that can fulfill useful purposes?

Actions (What was done to fulfil the task?)

Try and define a simple set of rules for use. Perhaps rules is too strong a word, these were more like notes to self:
* Only switch on my Twitter feeds when I am actually interested in getting the updates from the community
* Only use it if I actually have something to say to someone in particular.
* Use direct messaging as the main tool, for example if I need to send what would be equivalent to an SMS text to someone

Results (What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?)

Limited success - the rules are just too inflexible to be obeyed with ease. Not being plugged in all the time does provide some freedom and space to concentrate elsewhere. I maintain an uneasy feeling that Twitter does not reflect an identity that coheres with my internal sense of self. It feels unnatural to compose intermittent micro-statements that say everything and nothing - shouting to the world I am here, I am here. But this is also the compelling nature of community participation and whether I like it or not I take my voice from one modality to another, adjusting to the affordances of the technology, threading my way trough the strands of my online and offline communities.

Reflections and Lessons Learned (What did you learn from the experience?)

140 characters almost demands an all or nothing response. Keep posting to build something that makes sense over an extended timeline, a conversation, or simply tweet once in a while that I am still alive. I am not going to disappear from the world if I do not Twitter but I would be uncomfortable not having access. My online identity is distributed across many platforms and spaces and I choose to see my blog as one of the key nodes. In my blog or indeed Facebook I feel far more in control of the space I speak into, and the potential audience reaction - even if that is not truly within my power to control. Two issues that still disturb me are the illusion of ephemerality and the partial, unstructured nature of the community. Twitter feels like a spoken conversation yet look back and the tracks remain. Twitter also bends attention to itself and creates a certain exclusivity where sometimes I, for one, can forget that not everyone I know is a Twitter user.

Twitter is a strange animal - curiously addictive but also difficult to work out what value it has - it can be infuriating and gripping in one and the same moment. It is a space of distributed social conversation that blurs community boundaries and for me it represents another site where digital personas are performed ... something that makes it worthy of more detailed study.

Associated links:

http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/10/25/on-twitter/
http://www.margaperez.com/?p=177
http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/   

I was recently challenged with running a series of events inside Second Life for the JISC Innovating eLearning Conference. These were carefully paced to include a couple of orientation sessions for new avatars, a tour and an evening social event (a ‘fashion show’ as it turned out). For me, I was surprised to find that the biggest challenge of all these three happenings was the SL tour. The one that I had initially felt the most relaxed about. On the surface, a simple case of gathering a collection of meaningful locations and guiding the participants around each venue. But as with all things in Second Life nothing is ever quite as simple as one imagines. Having visited each location, built the notecards, the notecard giver, the automated group joining tool and picked a suitable start location on Emerge Island I over confidently assumed nothing could go wrong. Whoops. By 2pm, the scheduled start time, I was already trying to deal with 30 plus avatars in what I can only describe as complete mayhem. I have never experienced anything like it in Second Life before, and maybe never will again. As the sim started to lag with so many arrivals and so much activity the phrase ‘like trying to herd cats’ did not even come close. Through a mixture of shouting coaxing, pushing and patience I finally, with the help of the tours guides, managed to get small groups to teleport out to the first locations in what was some sort of ordered fashion. Phew. It was an impressive moment - exciting, panicky and intense. Perhaps all the things that make SL such a compelling place to be.

The tour was a learning experience for everyone and I have gathered together the threads from the post-tour discussion so anyone else who wants to create a tour in SL can take away the good practices that we all discovered:

1. Make sure you have a group set up in advance (for us this was the "JISC SL sessions" group) and use an automated group joining tool in-world to make it easy for everyone to sign up;



2. Prepare the tour locations and save on a notecard. Use a separate notecard with instructions for setting up the client to provide a good experience at each spot,  such as the graphics and media settings. Ten locations in two hours is plenty, with a few extra added and marked as "related" for people to come back and explore at leisure;



3. If you have tour guides then brief them in advance.
   1. On the notecard (thanks to Michael Vallance for this suggestion) you can add some pertinent questions about each location and aim for a more quest like experience;



4. Get everyone to arrive in an area with seating and get everyone to sit down, so that you can see numbers and minimise distractions;



5. In front of the seats have a media screen where you can place the instructions - texture with an image or stream in a webpage. Put a script inside the screen so that when it is touched it hands out the pre-prepared tour notecards. The instructions on the screen should give basic orientation instructions such as:
   1. How to join the group and activate the tag;
   
   
   
   2. The structure of the tour (see below);
   
   
   
   3. Get the tour guides to help those who are struggling;



6. Then, and this depends on numbers:
   1. Organise into small groups of not more than 4 (any more is just too tough to keep together) and send off in staggered departures;
   
   
   
   2. Or for larger numbers simply send off the participants in pairs. Each pair "friends" each other so they can communicate via IM and then support each other. The pairs head off on their own and make their way around;
   
   
   
   3. Tour guides can be located at the arrival points at each destination and keep everyone moving around the circuit;
   
   
   
   4. Use the group channel to check where everyone is and keep the tour as a whole in motion;
   
   
   
   5. Gather everyone back to the starting location at the end for a debrief and for gathering impressions;



7. A small tour circuit works far better than a large one. With a limited number of locations it means that groups (or pairs) will bump into other as they wander around - recognisable by their group tag - so lots of serendipity and always a friendly face somewhere at each location.

Creating a tour is an excellent activity and this is something that I would like our participants on the MUVEnation programme to also have a go at doing. Choosing spaces inside SL to visit is a reflective exercise and requires some thought into why you have chosen a location – its value and its purpose.

What: JISC innovating elearning conference social evening

Where: Emerge Island http://slurl.com/secondlife/Emerge/69/80/36

When: 7pm UK time, 6/11/08 

Bring big hair!

'In design, one plus one equals three or sometimes more.'
Josef Albers (1969)

'Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.'
Herbert Simon (1969)

We make design decisions all of the time and Second Life offers particular design challenges that demand us to address not only our teaching approaches but also space, architecture and aesthetics. The art of design is not a natural skill but one that is learned and developed – Simon called for a science of design. Albers captures the complexity of design in the quote above, one that acknowledges the multi-layered nature of design and the multiple interactions that occur between these design layers when they come together.

'When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.'
Richard Buckminster Fuller

My question is - are we as educators in virtual worlds equal to this challenge?

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MUVEnation - the course,
originally uploaded by StevenW Bohm.

After several months of hard work the EU funded MUVEnation programme opens its doors to participants.

The course - ‘Teaching and learning with MUVEs’ - is a free one year postgraduate
programme, delivered online, for future and in-service teachers who want to
use innovative methods and tools to address learners motivation and
participation issues in compulsory education. MUVEnation is aimed at helping
teachers acquire the necessary competencies to integrate massively
multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) into their teaching practice.

Registrations are now open for the programme which kicks off in November 2008. Full details are avaiable form the MUVEnation site here - http://muvenation.org/press-releases/ - and by downloading the pdf course brochure.

Download Brochure_MUVEnation.pdf

Please feel free to distribute this information anyone who may be interested in joining us.