Category Archives: Community

Feb 16 1 comments
Community, Economics, Education, Media Outlets, Personal Rants

Why We Still Need the Boston Globe

The Boston Globe is currently running a 7-part series, “Ted Kennedy,” chronicling the history of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D, MA).

The special on Ted Kennedy demonstrates the unparalleled resources of a major newspaper. The institutional history and the access it took to produce the series remain the province of the Fourth Estate, something that must not go unnoticed in this time of “the great print struggles.” More so, the piece shows how, with carefully allocated time and resources, the Globe and other newspapers can take full advantage of the platform of the web.

The videos are excellently produced, and the links to archive photos, headlines, and related documentation serve the goals of the story admirably. A community discussion forum would have brought the piece full circle and made for a resounding win, but I still see the piece as a triumphant display that the newspapers do “get it.” It’s a matter of bringing the financial models in line with a new approach to doing news, os that features like this appear with greater frequency.

I am not, in any way, trying to diminish the importance of citizen journalism. Its contributions to the way we understand our world cannot–and should not–be dismissed as in some way ‘limited,’ or as wobbly in its journalistic commitment or ethics. It is simply a different, equally significant process. Putting it into ‘competition’ with traditional media does neither form justice. I think at times it is easy to embrace citizen journalism as the underdog, and to champion it, at times, to the detriment of the respect for traditional press. The Boston Globe’s Ted Kennedy series, however, reminds us how very important traditional news outlets are to our history, and that, when given the appropriate resources, they can get it right. Ultimately the series demonstrates the rich potential for the news to unite its unique (reputation-based) level of access and traditional models of reporting with new media tools to educate and preserve in a way that, quite simply, no other institution can.

Jan 13 1 comments
Community, Second Life, Uncategorized, Virtual Worlds

Aesthetic and Academic Appreciation: Jeffrey Lipsky

Amberly's Room by jeFF Lipsky

Amberly's Room by jeFF Lipsky

JeFF’s work is fascinating from both aesthetic and academic perspectives. My introduction to jeFF’s work was via Second Life, an online Virtual Community. His art collection was the subject of a critical review I wrote in my studies as a Graduate Student at Emerson College. The paper, “Filthy and Digital Art,” examined notions of “high and low art,” in the digital medium.

My attraction to JeFF’s work was never purely academic, however. I chose his work as my subject because it was visually stunning, intellectually stimulating, and fascinating in its social context. JeFF’s art has a very physical form of depth, as he works in layers to embed beauty and meaning in each piece. Sometimes the inspiration of the work is visually apparent, sometimes it is not. I’ve heard others say they like when they can visually connect what they’re seeing in his art with objects or locations they’ve seen in real life. I like when I look at his work and, instead of seeing ‘things,’ per se, I am moved to simply… connect. I can look at JeFF’s work and feel events, moments, memories, and life. I take in each of the layers separately and, at the same time, all at once. It is as though faith is bringing the seen and unseen together, creating a sensation of being swept through the canvas and into the emotion that inspired every color choice and every stroke of pastel that created the work. It is still and yet in motion, it is physical but significantly emotional. JeFF’s work is compelling, in every sense of the word.

His work, and it’s role in the social context of Second Life was also the inspiration for a paper I wrote at Emerson. The general thrust of the argument was that jeFF’s artwork in its original state (abstract pastel) carried connotations of “high art,” because the medium uses “fine art tools,” a canvas and pastels.

Interviewing Jeffrey Lipsky (photo credit, Colin Rhinesmith)

Interviewing Jeffrey Lipsky (photo credit, Colin Rhinesmith)

Under current social art norms, jeFF has chosen a perceived “low art” medium (the computer, the internet) as a source of inspiration for his work and as a means for exposure. The presentation of his art in a self-curated online gallery arguably changes the nature of his work. The debasing of fine art because of its existence in a digital form is a social notion that *must* be re-examined in the information age.

That paper inspired another project on how the nature Second Life builds community. JeFF has shown an active interest in the advancement of artists from around the world by coordinating Second Life workshops for artists to share their work and offer the kind of critique process that is often missed after an artist leaves the art school setting. The quality of jeFF’s art, what he is doing to help change notions of “high” and “low” art, and his emphasis on building community is a model for other artists and an inspiration to society on how to develop the potential of virtual worlds in all layers of cultural production and exchange.

Jan 08 0 comments
Community, Emerson College, Personal Rants, Social Media

In with the Old

I recently made as my Facebook status, “Aubree Lawrence misses honest status updates.” A former student commented on the status and asked, “Aubree, what do you mean? Just curious. Does it have to do with the ‘old’ vs ‘new’ facebook?”

A quick question that prompted a lengthy response from me. (Surprised? I didn’t think so.) Facebook has a limit on comment length, and it took four full response boxes to reply to Rachael’s question. My response, in full, is reprinted below. My mind is still whirling around the topic. My friend and colleague Vanessa Rhinesmith has been blogging about managing the Social Media in her life, raising some great questions about how to integrate social media to complement her life… and not invade it. Her blog entries, my midnight status update and Rachael’s subsequent question reflect the anxieties we have about Facebook, how it is changing and how it is changing us.

Without further introduction, our exchange:

Status Update: “Aubree Lawrence misses honest status updates.”

Rachael: “Aubree, what do you mean? Just curious. Does it have to do with the ‘old’ vs ‘new’ facebook?”

Me” “Hi there! It depends, in this case, what you mean “old” vs “new,” which seems to get used at least two ways.

Old vs New can mean the formatting changes instituted about 4-5 months ago. The updates caused a lot of confusion and upset, spawning many groups with names like “Facebook, change it back or I quit.” (I made that particular one up, but you get the idea…)

But Old Vs New can mean something else. Social Media, in particular, is in constant flux, changing as the users who engage with it change. Facebook exploded past its origins as an online “who lives in my dorm” tool and became a means of community organizing and a quasi-professional tool. Its membership base grew, and the dynamics of Facebook (in my anecdotal opion) changed accordingly.

My own observation is that the “old” Facebook (”old” is such a relative term) had a degree of freedom and self-expression now missing from the Facebook experience.

In the “new” Facebook experience, one must consider the audience at large when posting… anything. Pictures, even quotes and status updates. There are tools to help manage what goes out to who, no question, but what you don’t let others see can raise suspicion among the denied. You can “de-tag” yourself from images, but your image is still out there posted indefinitely in the most navigable manner possible - a visit from a friend of a friend.

Even your profile can be problematic. I’ve recently been reconsidering my “Religious Views” profile item, which reads right now “Religious Views are lamer than scenic ones.” While early on this got a lot of chuckles, I’ve worried as my number of friends went from 30 to 170+ that I’ve been retro-actively offensive to some people. It’s hard to know what people will take seriously when they aren’t your most inner circle.

Most specifically, however, I was referring to my own status updates, which have gotten very… bland, I guess… since my Luddite boyfriend joined the Facebook party. Love him as I do, I’m sensitive to his feelings. I felt bad recently when he brought up that I posted “is bored” on New Years, when he was one room over.

I struggled Monday night to articulate my feelings into an appropriately “cathartic yet cryptic” status update. The thing is, Steve knows me very well. He’d see through “would rather be dancing” to the relationship anxieties I (and everyone else, let’s be honest) go through from time to time. He’d know it meant I wish I could turn the lights on and listen to music and make an idiot of myself dancing in the mirror at 1:30am… all things I can’t do since he lives with me. In that moment, I was remembering loving living alone. And, at 1:30a, I worried that that might hurt his feelings.

Of course, Steve is Steve, and he not only wouldn’t mind that I wrote it, but I’m sure he’d understand, and even sympathize. I can’t imagine he finds living with me all roses either! So, at 1 in the afternoon here I don’t mind spelling out word for word on my wall what, at 1:30 AM I thought might hurt his feelings. (He also would never bother to read this long of a post, so I have that going for me too.) ;)

Still, it was a moment that magnified for me personally an anxiety that I know many of my close friends feel about the way we “used” to be on Facebook. Facebook is growing in usefulness, but declining in personality. We can only wear one mask at a time, and we change masks according to our audience. On Facebook, we must try to wear many masks at once, morphing us into an “average” of all our various masks and personalities. The look (and outlook) is pretty bland. Its inevitability (the bland morphed mask) is somewhat ironic on a tool called “Face”book.

::laugh:: Does that answer your question? :)”

Is there a paper in here somewhere?

Mar 30 0 comments
CCTV, Community, Education, Second Life, Virtual Worlds

Learning a Second Language in Second Life

Teaching SL/RL
(Above: (top) Ms. Chianti Carmichael hangs out at an assessment station on SL English, while (bottom) Ms. Aubree Lawrence instructs an ESOL class for BA&CE, circa 2005)

Second Life is has incredible potential as a learning platform. I was excited to read on Forbes.com that an English language school in Germany has launched an island “Second Life English.” The island is dedicated to offering FREE (yes, you read that right, FREE) resources for learning English, including virtual ESOL lessons. According to the article, Educator (and island owner) Kip Boahn “feels a new medium calls for a new way of teaching language. Even using the game’s English interface gives students a chance to practice what they’ve learned.” I couldn’t agree more! I enjoy his approach:

During workshops, he uses a team of teachers to present students with different linguistic tasks, which could include anything from asking for directions to bargaining to buy a knickknack. To do those tasks, Boahn and his colleagues use “holodecks,” rooms that can flip through as many as 40 different scenes at the mere click of a mouse. Want to practice ordering American fast food? Just switch the holodeck to Dara’s Diner and line up at the counter.

This sort of flexibility means that, as a teacher, you can cover a lot of ground teaching culture, in addition to language, by creating situational enactments that are difficult to do in a classroom. I used to teach ESOL at the Brookline Adult and Community Education Center in classrooms at Brookline High School. I laugh to think of the many ways we rearranged the classroom to mimic check-out lines, banks, cafes, and even a car dealership! I can’t help but think of how much more efficient it would be to change one setting to the next with a simple click. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for group exercises in imagination, not to mention the language exercised just coordinating the effort! It is truly an interesting example of the sort of gain/compromise tensions that arise when you move real life activities into virtual settings.

Examples like Boahn’s are important as more and more people begin to investigate the potential for education options in Second Life and other virtual worlds. It helps to remind people of the kind of good that can come from a free platform like Second Life, and gets us all thinking about the ramifications of adopting virtual education models. It is certainly useful on the broader scale to consider what SL teaching opportunities might exist for CCTV, and the Cambridge community at-large!

Mar 14 0 comments
Avatar Rights, Community, Second Life, Social Media, Virtual Worlds

Greetings Professor Falken! ::gulp::

This is fascinating to me. Those crazy kids, err, I mean, Researchers at Rensselaer are using Second Life as a platform to test an engineered, self-reasoning avatar. Yes, avatar. The little character on the screen that comes to life when operated by a reasoning human being, only… without the human being. His name is Eddie.

The idea is that using outrageously powerful supercomputers, the RPI engineers can essentially “program” basic reasoning and logic, allowing the avatar to be able to “understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other agents, in order to be genuine stand-ins for human beings or autonomous intellects in their own right.” OK, so that’s scary.

What do we have going for us? Right now the avatars can’t think (did I really just say “think”?) much more advanced than a typical 4 year old. But it is a 4 year old with adaptive learning, “In an instant, Eddie’s mind can be improved, and if the test is run again he makes the correct prediction.”

Our aim is not to construct a computational theory that explains and predicts actual human behavior, but rather to build artificial agents made more interesting and useful by their ability to ascribe mental states to other agents, reason about such states, and have - as avatars - states that are correlates to those experienced by humans.

“Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense.” Homeland defense! So now the already scary “intellects in their own right,” are not just thinking for themselves; they’re being designed think ‘like us,’ presumably in a homeland defense scenario ‘be us.’ Clever way to find out what sort of anarchy will ensue if a cockroach really DOES eat Cincinnati. HA!

(And we thought Wargames was just a silly technophobia-inspired thrill. Can you say “ethical foreshadowing”, Joshua?)

Feb 18 3 comments
CCTV, Community, Second Life, Virtual Worlds

CCTV to ‘virtually’ break new ground

As part of its 20th Anniversary celebrations, Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) will be launching it’s presence in Second Life (SL), an online virtual world. The project is an effort to reflect on CCTV’s remarkable history using a medium that will speak to CCTV’s determination to remain a cutting edge leader in cable access programming.

To help get us started, we’ll be looking at other non-profit communities as potential partners who can offer us their experience getting organized in SL, as well as Cambridge community partners who would benefit long term from a SL presence.

Among our immediate development ideas are creating an SL museum to host archives of stills and motion medium from CCTV’s past 20 years. We are also seeking to understand ways to make this an educational venture AND venue, and as such are looking to set up appropriate classroom space in SL. Finally, because we want non-local (in real life) visitors to be able to appreciate the scope of our current work, we would like to create a viewing area where people can come to learn about our community as it is represented in CCTV’s programming. We hope to make this not just a viewing space, but a space for dialog, and are considering ways to foster feedback and asynchronous conversation in the same space as the viewing room.

Finally, as part of CCTV’s overall mission, we intend to make this not just a local experience, but an opportunity to compile and share our knowledge with other cable access stations considering making such an excursion. Although I’m not sure what the format will be precisely, the final product will offer resources, recommendations, and a retelling of the obstacles (and triumphs!) the SL project encounters.
Since I am technically an intern as well as a member, I will also be considering this from an academic perspective, asking “What does ‘local access’ mean in a virtual world?” It’s a question that ties in with Colin Rhinesmith’s Master’s Thesis. Both will have increasing relevance as we move into a world more mediated than at any point in history!