Ka-boom!

One of the things that I had not anticipated about this course was the fragmented attention. Having 15 students in class that are simultaneously in Second Life creates a remarkably layered class experience. That is actually a polite way of saying it – in reality it feels like a bomb was set off. While each student is physically there in the classroom they are also scattered all over a virtual world. Some occupy the same world, some other worlds – so the end result is a conversation that takes place in multiple spaces at the same time. As a self proclaimed postmodernist this should not phase me at all. But, as a college teacher who’s job it is to help guide the conversation this can be somewhat unnerving.

This is, however, a main feature of living in the 21^st century in which our attention is often spread across multiple screens, multiple worlds. One of the things that I am interesting in, however, is what this sort of fragmented attention does to the educational process, how it affects way we think and learn. I have never understood learning to be a straight line – individual ideas converge as thinking develops through links and leaps. Despite this understanding I often arrange courses in a very linear – almost “well made play” fashion in the sense that we start slow with an exposition and rise toward a climax where all of the pieces are designed to congeal. Why can’t a syllabus be more rhizomatic – no beginning or end, but a circuitous path of links and connections?

What we have here in this course is a collective mind made up of 17 different minds – all headed off in different directions. It will be interesting to dip into this collective mind from time to time to see what observations and conclusions it can draw. One idea that became visible today are the philosophical implications of SL. Watching yourself do things provides that once removed so crucial to phenomenological thought. I think if we can keep the students focused on playing in the world while at the same time observing themselves playing then some of the ideas raised by our readings will be more readily absorbed. The anthropological and post-structuralist material should work well for this. I do like the structure in which we can assign the readings based on the conversation in class, but that means not necessarily knowing where we are going next – kind of like reading a non-linear story. Again – as a postmodernist I should love that, as a teacher I keep wanting to see what is around the next corner. In SL I have taken to simply teleporting to locations where a lot of bodies (or green dots) are located. Like the class - that is the exciting part – not knowing where I am headed and what I will encounter next. This is what Bob refers to as fascination – that crucial part of creativity. In SL and with this course I am engaged because I don’t know what will happen next and that fascinates me.