Reflection for March 12 class - virtual reality

For this class, we covered a lot of ground and I opened up to some new possibilities, having seen Second World and World of Warcraft for the 1st time. I can imagine the excitement of NetGenners at these fantasy/reality worlds. I'm a fairly imaginative person and having been into SciFi for a long time I can attest to the attraction I have for some of these applications. Tron was a watershed moment for me, but kinda from a graphics level as well as a fantasy level.

I remain disturbed that war and conflict seem to be keystone trends in manjy of these virtual worlds and I'd like to know if anyone else here feels the same way. I'm not sure this a healthy outlet. March 11th saw a teenager in Germany kill 16 people including himself - "a classic case of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world" [New York Times, March 13]. Of course, there is no way to regulate this information and the genie is out of the bottle already.

We also made a podcast file together, which was very enjoyable, based as it was on Dr. Ellen Wagner's excellent, professional and academic talk of the previous week. That had a feeling of cameradery which we do enjoy as a cohort group in this class.

I do firmly believe that now, more than ever, people need real connections with other people, and deep and personal connections, especially in learning situations . . . I think that technology should be viewed as only an enhancement and not the main subject; though it is, for us of course, a subject in itself worthy of study. I'm just not sure how much serious growth is possible, though, without real experience through human connection, unless we want to be part chip ! (I think some imagine they would enjoy that).

I'd rather not smell things through my monitor; real smells abound all around and that's e-nuff for me.

Ellen Wagner podcast script

Ellen Wagner points out the following question - that as educators,

How do we move beyond the fascination with the latest and greatest and focus on sustainable innovation?

At a minimum, by applying the Gartner Higher Education Hype Cycle model to this question, the slope of enlightenment as portrayed in the model would need to be elongated and extended as much as possible before plateauing.

Any technology that thus has legs and real application to learning could answer this question on its own by being viable, durable, and widely used - though it would need to meet multiple criteria to be successful; being widely used alone does not necessarily make it a good learning tool.

Dr. Wagner's question must be not only answered, but indeed be identified and faced by a greater segment of the population of the learning community if we are to realize true sustained innovation, not once, but as a paradigm.

Dr. Ellen Wagner reflection week 6

Dr. Wagner's talk was very informative as all of our speakers' talks have ben; I enjoyed hers more than Kurt Bonk's as it seemed more grounded in the realities of social networking and web 1-2-3-4. Since Wagner, Bonk, and are all interrelated, there is a lot of breadth to the developing discussion and that in itself is very illuminating to the process of e-learning. Transparency is a big issue here and a very unsettling one indeed. I believe the people "farther up the food chain" need to be more transparent by far in their dealings with everyone else, I.e. more honesty and inclusiveness are needed desperately for institutions in academics and for corporate entities to survive in this brave new world. It is reaching critical mass now and the technology world is no exception. Ellen brought up the fact that we have to leave a trail of tech for others to follow, and I agree with this. She responded favorably to my point about e-waste (the hardware kind) being a big issue in a world "going green". We cannot give short shrift to this problem. People burning computer waste in India to get the copper causes serious pollutants to leach into the air you and I breathe, and it is going to get worse. Gotta clean the dishes before we get dessert, though most won't want to do this, of course.

The Gartner hype cycle presents a good plain-language way to make sense of new technology developments in our lifetimes. I think of it often already when I read about twitter, etc.

Interesting thought that "web 3.0" is 3-d in nature. I like the data visualization and threat simulation angles here - these seem like strong ways to use this technology.

I was encouraged to study "today's learning metaverse" and find that classroom instruction as a modality is on the increase while instant messaging and games are decreasing.

All in all, a standout presentation among the several we've had.

Bravo !

David