week 6 reflection

This week was the start of school at MPI. As a result, I spend a lot of my time helping teachers that struggle with technology to their basics set up — online syllabi, electronic grade books, network and Internet accounts, e-mail problems, etc.
I also spend time with the early adopters trying new things: social groups in nings, use of Moodle to support instruction (forums, Voicethread’s, podcasts, etc.)
In working with one of our weaker technology users today, it struck me about a quote from Heisenberg or Bohr back in the 1920’s or so (regarding understanding concepts in science):
“when we don’t understand the problem, it is impossible; when we understand it, it becomes trivial”
In so many ways, this last six weeks in our Second Life class has been an example of that. It seems that almost every class one of us will find themselves in a awkward position where our lack of understanding shows that we don’t know how to do something basic: sitting down, wearing an object, changing the texture, etc. Now, six weeks in, most things seem simple: trivial. There are still things that I don’t know and think would be valuable to understand. The magic of the Linden scripting language, and what it implies for designing is a huge topic that we did not cover in the class, other than to change values in scripts to cause hovering text, or color of text, or images that were referenced. Clearly, without a complete understanding of scripting, the real design experience of Second Life is going to be a weak effort at best — copying or adapting ideas from other people.
As an example, in our project the value of the communication board became obvious to me. I looked around to find tutorials on how to build some kind of note board that allowed posting of people’s comments. Eventually, I just purchased one from XLstreet for $1.30. At that price, it was hard to justify spending 5 to 10 hours of my time designing something that already been invented. Yet, I feel I cheated by not designing it myself. An uneasy tension between creation and adoption.

If I have time, I will try and post one more time to put some final thoughts down about this class. It has been a lot of fun and challenging and more than anything I appreciat how the structure has both tackled research AND hands-on construction. A job well done to Dr Peter Leong (SL Ikaika Miles) and his able Assistant Rebecca Meeder (SL Porfessor Swartz)