Yesterday I did my regular guest lecturing spot at Newman University College – oh excuse me – it’s now Newman University, Birmingham, on digital identity in virtual worlds, which is a big part of the research I do (and there’s a book on it http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/book/978-0-85729-360-2). I do a brief lecture, talk about the students’ avatars that they’ve designed, then they do a task that gets them thinking about how their identity has evolved. I posted something on FB about it, so my friends can see I do actually do a proper job. This is the conversation I had with one friend about it (her comments in italics). I thought they might be interesting here for anyone that’s not aware of how these things work so asked her if I could paste it to here.

Just admitted to my class that, not only am I in bed, I’m also wearing Iron Man pyjamas. #tmi #underminingprofessionalimage  Lots of students, many very interactive; two naked, a couple of furries, a lot in hats and one a Ferrari. Also one very very fat which is* unusual.

Also one very very fat which is* unusual. So, you can be anything you want. Humanoid. Robot. Little ball of mist. Even a car. Something out of The Only Way is Essex. Dressed, undressed. (Do the naked ones improve on what nature gave them?)

Yep each avatar can have lots of forms if they want, you can swtich between them as easily as dragging and dropping files from one directory to another. Usually people have one form that they stick with for most of the time with a small range of costume changes. They might have a freaky one for occasions. There’s some stats that 94% might be more, of participants have avatars with a main form that’s human. And yes, they can be humanoid, robot, ball of mist, car, I have an eyeball, an airship, werewolf, minotaur, loads actually. Most people stick to the gender and ethnicity of their physical forms. But almost always younger, thinner, more muscular, taller.

Change gender. Fly. Be really fit  – in both senses of the word – or not.

In fit terms, only in the sense of muscly. You can be in a wheelchair, but  none of this affects the speed of the avatar. They can all fly, but you can acquire scripted objects that change the way you move, fly better, teleport along line of sight, that type of thing.

How do people decide what their avatar will be?

Ahhh that’s the interesting thing. That’s what my session was about. What makes them choose their appearance? There are some standard answers. some say “I want to be me” meaning they want to appear as they appear offline. Some will actually match body shape, most will go for skin colour and so on. Some people pick something that will shock. The naked guy in my class said he did that. Others will also say that they want to be themselves, but mean it has being their hidden true self that they can’t be IRL. They will pick something that will represent something unrealised in their physical self, if they’re transgender they’ll pick another sex, the otherkin love it because they can finally be the animal they identify with. The people that don’t really care are usually the ones that aren’t taking to SL particularly. they may be using it just as a form of communication, or they may think the whole thing is damn silly. The guy who just wanted to shock couldn’t see the point of SL. If he was upsetting people it wouldn’t matter to him so much presumably. Whereas those  for whom it does matter would want to be seen for who they really are.

You said something about people referring to their avatar as “I” when they’re more confident. So does the avatar evolve, learn to do different things, look different as the student gains confidence?

It’s not so much about confidence as about presence, the feeling that they are part of the world, that people see them and react to them, that they start noticing communities or make contacts. The experience becomes more real to them – it matters more. They also learn things like where to shop, where to get the good stuff, how to modify or build things, all of this drives them towards more personalisation and also gives them the skills to personalise. It’s very close to how we build up an image IRL … it’s called a technology of self … how we learn to represent ourselves to others through the clothes we choose, through modifying our bodies.

But it’s unusual for an avatar to be very very fat. Now, this was the thing that made my ears prick up. You could probably (?) be a Doctor Who Adipose. That would be kawaii, so it might be acceptable whereas maybe being fat isn’t 🙂
Yes … there are some users who think it’s griefing to be ugly, that because everyone can be beautiful that they should be, and that if you’re not you’re just doing it to be confrontational. For example http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=672 The adipose would be more acceptable, but some places don’t approve of non-humans, I’ve been banned from some places because my avatar isn’t human enough. an adipose would be a tiny and that’s a specific subset of avatars that have their own places and their own culture and are recognised as such. Being kawaii is key for them and people are usually more accommodating than other non-human avatar precisely because they are so cute. Actually an adipose would make a cool avatar.

I started thinking: Is that student reflecting how they are in real life or how they think they are in real life? Do they have some kind of body dysmorphia?

There is a definite allure for things like SL for people with body dysmorphia … although i think body dichotomy is more accurate a phrase, when you get down to it; since everyone has some sort of dissonance between their physical self and their idealised or “true” self it’s not really “dys” any more. Some people feel trapped in the wrong sex, others wrong species, or wrong age. but for others it can just be height or weight or eye colour. All of them would probably act out that preference in SL., But for those for whom the dichotomy is greatest, for example the morbidly obese, then there is something about the rejection of the physical that i think makes SL particularly pleasurable.

Has anyone built the avatar equivalent of a fat suit to explore the idea of morbid obesity?

I don’t know. I did take part in an experiment where we all were pregnant  for a while. The bottom line is though, that you’re not really phyiscally disadvantaged by any of these things, what does happen is that you can get some idea of the social responses that someone may experience, and that in itself is interesting.

Are older people more prone to have fat avatars as theoretically they’re less prone to peer pressure?? Is peer pressure ever an issue?

I think peer pressure is hugely an issue for everyone who spends a lot of time in SL and becomes immersed. Even if you’re like me and you’ve got an avatar that gets a negative response often, you’re conscious of the reactions of others and are consciously resisting peer pressure. So it’s still a factor. I think older people are perhaps more prone to peer pressure because SL tends to mean more to them. The younger ones are likely to be having too much fun IRL to really care.

Responding to Bex’s blog post http://mavendorf.tumblr.com/post/43978411437/useful-things-what-i-have-discovered-as-a-learning some really useful stuff in there. The comment about not being precious about sharing your materials is so true. I still don’t understand the rationale behind not sharing stuff. As I said at an ALT conference presentation on repositories*, there are only three justifiable reasons for not sharing your teaching materials – because they’re crap, they’re ripped off or they’re not finished.  Most people in the room agreed with me, but it’s surprising how often you’ll come across someone who doesn’t want anyone else to use the stuff they’ve produced. And it’s usually the people who don’t have that much stuff to share. I assume it’s because it is so rare for them to create something they want to hang on to every litte bit.

One of the first projects I did in eLearning was the DIVERSE project – a TLTP funded project which had room built lecture capture equipment at various universities. A lot of the lecturers refused to have their lectures videoed; their fear was that if a lecture they gave was recorded, then it could be used in future instead of them. The reponse of the project manager was that if someone could be replaced by a video then they should be. The point being was that if all they brought to a session was exactly the same as they brought the previous time, and would to the next, then they aren’t worth employing as a teacher anyway.

The same is true of a presentation, or any learning materials. If they essence of what you do in a presentation or a lesson can be reduced to a PowerPoint presentation, then what you do isn’t very good. There’s a book by Hubert Knoblauch http://cus.sagepub.com/content/2/1/75 about PowerPoint presentations, which examines this … I remember his keynote partly because his was the only presentation apart from mine at the conference I saw it at that was in English, but mainly because it really put the final nail in the coffin of every complaint against PowerPoint. His point is that the important part in a presentation isn’t the presentation materials, it’s the presenter; there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it as a medium. If a presentation is done badly with it, it’s because the presenter is a bad presenter. I’m at a conference next week, and PowerPoint was banned in the earlier years it ran; now text in PowerPoint is banned. I enjoy the difference in approach, but really it misses the point. It’s not text, it’s too much text, it’s not PowerPoint, it’s people who read off screen. Remove the PowerPoint and replace it with someone reading off a bit of paper – it’s still going to be awful. And really, unless English isn’t your first language, then there’s no excuse for reading out your paper. You should know your subject well enough to talk about it with only a few prompts. If you don’t then don’t waste my time talking about it.

The other extreme is the pseudo-hip and trendy TED stuff where the presenter is usually totally the focus and if any imagery is used it’s very flashy. Sometimes this works, but usually it just looks and sounds very cheesy. It’s academia trying to be too rock n roll and it’s just a bit embarassing really. Yes you want to be entertained to some extent, but substance beats style hands down every time. I would still argue though, that the majority of the substance is you, the presenter, your ideas, and the way you communicate with your audience. And no matter how many times your materials are downloaded, re-used, replicated, that’s stil unique to you.

*Childs, M., Bell, V., Rothery, A., Smith, K. and Thomas, A. (2006) Digital Repositories: The next big thing or another failed learning technology?, ALT-C 2006

Transcribing an interview with Ian Upton, and heard a comment I made saying that the difference between life now and pre-internet (now 20 years ago) is that then I had to make an effort to be present, to stay in touch with people. Now the effort is to be absent. It takes a real concentrated focus to remove myself from communication with others. With everyone in constant touch with everyone else, it’s amazing any work gets done at all.

OK … the first real post. I’m not sure what happened with the last one … gave up on the so-called inspiration and clicked “finish” and it posted it. And now I can’t see anything on my screen that says “edit” or “delete” so it looks like I’m stuck with it. An inauspicious start. Though is a good example of a bad experience as a customer.

So … why start a blog? Well I was encouraged to do so by Grainne Conole when I was chatting to her recently. I’ve had a blog for a while over at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markchilds/ but never really kept it up. The reason Grainne was saying is that inspiration comes from being part of a community of bloggers; that if I got myself a spot on a more open community, where people could follow and vice versa, then I would be motivated to blog. Well we’ll give it a go.

I first checked out Steve Wheeler’s blog Learning with E’s http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk/ but the blogspot interface is horrendous … pop-out sidebars!! Who can deal with them? (Well Steve evidently, not me). So I went back to a platform I first used for the connectivism MOOC back in 2008. Seems to be working for me better so far (apart from the initial post).

I’ve known Steve for about 10 years, and was first inspired to do a PhD by his work, we copresented a seminar on videoconferencing at ALT-C, and he was all theorised up with a transactional distance and I was just saying the equivalent of “well the kids liked it” and I realised I was missing a trick. So his example seemed a good place to start.

The next tricky bit was a name for the blog. I went for inspiration to that a conference presentation I did last year with another friend and colleague Aase Knudsen, on embodiment in the physical and virtual worlds, and how one reinforces the other (and is often overlooked in discussions on telepresence). It seemed like a snappy title (and references Ray Bradbury so can’t be bad) but also summarises the area of technology and education that I’m most interested in, which is how we experience it, and connect to it, and the impact that has on our learning.

So, Aase, Steve, Grainne. The reason I like the job I have (a sort of “freelance academic”) is that there’s a community of people in Technology Enhanced, Supported, E Learning (whatever is the in thing this year) who count as friends, colleagues, inspiration etc. all rolled into one. I guess ultimately the point of the post is to have a voice in that community.

Oh .. .managed to delete the actual first post .. “delete” is apparently called “move to trash” :&