This was a thoroughly gratifying experience – the students were marvelous too and very patient, which helped – and, in the end, said things like: “I thought the course was really really cool.” It hardly gets better than that: this is what I’d like my twenty-something year old students like to say about my classes!

In summary, the experiment showed that many classroom processes could be transferred “in-world” (meaning: to Second Life) not only without a loss of quality but at times – as in the case of role plays – with a noticeable gain.

Which brings me to the issue of constellations. In short, constellations are interventions using a spatial representation of elements of a system – be it a family, an organisation or a person. Space is used to “set up” an issue that needs to be resolved. “Setting up” in practice means choosing representatives for aspects of the system related to the issue – these representatives can be other people (strangers) or inanimate objects. With objects, a constellation could look like this in SL:

The leader has set up a problem using colored objects: each object represents an aspect of a problem. Moving the objects simulates changes to the original problem setting.

I am currently planning to lead an organisational systemic constellation in Second Life as part of the anniversary of the workgroup AK E-Learning convened by Avameo. (When: Sept 9, 18:00. Where:  Kybernethik 1)

See also this 2008 post (in German) by A Mertens (with recent discussion) on online constellation work. I will be writing a lot more about this in the weeks to come – also because I’m wrestling with a longer academic article on the issue of virtual transfer…

Second Coach: Birkenkrahe Aya

First coach: Marcus Speh Birkenkrahe

... but who is this guy?

forget stan and ollie, buster and billie, butch cassidy and the sundance kid, forget the marx brothers – now there are “besel and mo” – short for besel bearsfoot and mo rhys, two avatars let lose on the wonderful wild world of second life®, who began blogging yesterday.

perhaps i’ll let you know from time to time what i’m up to as well but mostly i’ll be absorbed by the amazing adventures of the avatars besel & mo.

- Give the writing of a short story suitable for role play (a situation which had emotional value) as an assignment (students were permitted to simply provide a link to their blogs where they put stories like this).

- Paraphrased all stories and put their short version on Picasa from where we projected them during our in-world session.

- Prepared an appropriate warming up exercise which involved placing your avatar on a staircase according to the question “how much did the internship fulfil your expectations?”

From Stories for Roleplay

- Letting the students decide which of the eight stories presented we would use for the role play.

The story picked by the students was a rather extreme example which, however, seemed to trigger a lot of emotion among the audience.

The role play this time was not a play back of a given scene but a directed role play whereby the narrator (Juliane) played herself and gave detailed instructions to the other actors.

From Stories for Roleplay

The final survey on the quality of this class and the interest in more role plays confirmed our own initial enthusiasm for this method. This is another example where class room activities can with relative ease transferred to the virtual 3D environment. In fact, my hunch is that for role play in particular the threshold for inexperienced actors (i.e. most students) to participate in a role play via their avatar is lower than in a real classroom situation. The student can hide his embarrassment behind the avatar – this way of working through issues benefits from that.

One can argue that a real life role play is much richer because of body language, gestures, facial expressions etc. – but most students (more than in our in-world experiment) seem reluctant to go up on stage.

This was a great, instructive experience!

In yesterday’s scenario, we tried a role play method known as “playback” where a group of (max. 4) actors plays a scene told to them by the protagonist. The students played the scene (as it had happened), then the protagonist was asked for comments and the floor was opened for a brief discussion. In a second scene, different actors then played out a different scene – in this case based on the things our protagonist would have liked to say but didn’t.

The result was, at least for me, quite impressive. From the moment that the playing itself started, the energy “in the room” (i.e. on our virtual island) was high and everybody seemed very involved – just like during improvisational theatre in the real world! The client/protagonist said several times that he enjoyed seeing both scenes from the outside.

We closed the evening with our – by now habitual – opinionator session for which I had prepared a couple of questions including “I would like to do more role-playing”. To Jutta’s and my surprise after what seemed like a successful session, all students disagreed. Questioned about the why, two things seemed to be the problem:

1. students are not used to talk about their feelings and the emotions accompanying both positive and negative experiences on the job.
2. those who shared their stories including feelings felt that they’d been “whining” and complaining too much.
3. students did not understand the advantage of role playing over mere discussion.

We’ll give it another try next week with a role playing method that is a little more involved and should activate the whole group more. I think Jutta and I found good arguments on (3) – regarding (2) it would have been good to help the protagonist of the evening in particular to “step back into the group” so to speak (we ran out of time there). And issue (1) of course is a serious limitation of our whole university education: apparently, we do unleash our business administration and management students onto the world without the knowledge that their feelings are their most prized possessions – telling them, among other things – what to do, what ‘feels’ right and wrong and who they (really) are.

Having said that: I didn’t know this at age 20 or 25. Heck, I didn’t know this until I had seriously fucked my first big management assignment up!

So, still happy with the experimentation, and in particular with my helpers (Jutta/Naomi) and the students of this course!

And to round it all off: here are the pictures and slides (in German).

(reposted from the virtualHWR mixxt community)

What I’m missing out on is niftly and neatly documented by a short video that one of my facebook friends sent me today. The ability of the online world to take the piss out of itself is refreshing at times. Otherwise my teaching in Second Life is going great – status updates here.

More interesting than virtual venues was the HWR Berlin career day “new/social media”, organised by the splendid Denise Gücker, attended by plenty of students and made into a rich event by excellent talks from paypal, ]init[, VZ, Fox Mobile Group with a kick-off talk by my colleague Frank Habermann – accompanied by heavy tweeting. The talks showed that this market is booming and hungry for talent especially those interested in rapid project management.

And now I’m off for some time in the garden – real plants, real dirt and no Internet connection – bliss!

These may be strong words…I spoke even stronger ones at my talk at the Publishers Forum 2010 organised by Berlin-based Klopotek AG today. Though I couldn’t attend the entire event, it was clear that most of the talks and the buzz was dedicated to the e-book craze fueled by the success of Amazon’s Kindle (no link – not hard to find – it’s everywhere) and the iPad (equally easy to find…)

Since these two are very different, one should not compare them: the Kindle is indeed an e-book reader, yet another device for privileged consumption of intellectual goods. It is not the future of the book. The future of the book lies in communities of readers, who are also writers (not Tolstoys all of them) and the Kindle is, if anything, community-hostile. Not so the iPad: as a transportable Web-access device it is friendly towards social media, the most highly developed path towards online communities. The iPad is, of course, not just an e-book. Hopefully, it will provide access to smarter virtual books as suggested by David Gelernter in his recent article in the FAZ.

See, this was a large part of my talk in a nutshell. There’s more of course – my view that publishing will once again become a cottage industry. That publishing houses have to embrace this new reality and the new power of the communities of content creators. And so on – all wrapped in a nice historically motivated review of knowledge management as we knew it. Which is dead because now we have social media and KM is happening all around us – both inside and outside of companies, one more than one channel at a time. The slides of my talk are here in English or German. The text will appear in a special issue of buchreport after the conference.

Will my words come back to haunt me? I don’t think so. If the Kindle is the future of the book then a window frame is the future of the house.

On one hand I don’t envy the publishing industry, on the other hand I am optimistic that they will indeed learn from the bad decisions made by the music industry. If only because books aren’t songs.

After becoming aware of a recent article by a doyen of German new media scholarship (yes, this may be an oxymoron), Rolf Schulmeister, I found Michael Kerres’ comment on Schulmeister complete with follow-up comments from a number of people engaged in the German (academic) blogging scene. Most notably, the original article discusses a number of small case studies and is very interesting to read.

While I enjoyed both the original article and the discourse following it, I couldn’t help noticing a number of issues.

In my recent teaching of students both via blog and by virtue of blogs (the students earn all their credits based on their blogging, evaluated with the help of a rubric – an indispensable tool), I could observe the creation of the culture of comments in vitro – via aggregation in netvibes where all student blogs (apart from the group project blogs) are registered,  I can follow the development of posts and comments (both of which were obligatory during the course) on a week-by-week basis.

Monitoring the results, I realised something that I had already felt and known through the coaching on blog writing and presentation, which the students receive routinely and continuously: you cannot judge blogs only by their content (as if they were text-only) but you must also evaluate the quality of the blog as a visual medium meant to navigate within the blog and within a much larger space, the wider blogosphere.

This is a severe limitation of the discussion by Schulmeister et al, who look at blogs and comments from the point of view of Habermas’ theory of communication: criteria of “best blogging” (including the writing style and the blog design not so much in aesthetic but functional terms) are not applied at all. There is no sign that the authors are even aware of them.

To read up on this, check out Bruce Spear’s “Writerly Advice” column, also developed during and for a graduate level course: in my view this is one of the deepest and at the same time, by virtue of the author’s own writing abilities, most useful and practical descriptions of “best practice blogging” at a level way beyond the typical “how to blog” tutorials available en masse on the web.

As Uwe Hesse and Christian Spannagel have remarked on Kerres’ blog, the claims of Schulmeister’s article may also be limited because it limits itself to the German blogosphere. Any investigation of this particular scene cannot easily be generalised to the entire system, the intensely global blogosphere. And this doesn’t even include critique of the limited technological vision implicit in the article – which brings me to the, for me, most interesting evolutionary aspects of blogging:

successful networking on the net, building and nurturing communities at the core of a culture, rarely only uses a blog as its only element. Perhaps this is less known in Germany where many academics still seem proud of not having a twitter account. To take a look at a booming cultural landscape – not academic as much as artistic and commercial, beyond the borders of “Heimat”, see the ArtsJournal blogworld and the BBC WorldService “OverToYou” blog – or at a lower level of sophistication (still in beta test) Fictionaut for writers – both starting points and feedback hubs of global dialogue. What we can witness here and in many other virtual places is an amalgamation of real and virtual publication and exchange.

The blog, or rather: the blogs, are at the heart of the feedback loop that informs mass-scale content creation but they’re not, they’re never alone.

An evolutionary chain 2000-2010 could look like this: web site -> one-author blog -> multi-author blog -> multiple-multi-author-blogs-with-multimedia. The killer question for me is how this evolution will shake out. (If I may venture a guess: virtual worlds will make a surprise entry.)

The examples discussed in the article by Schulmeister refer to a single element but claim validity for the entire system using a theory (Habermas), which I personally think is great but which is not suited to evaluate culture or cultural development. A mix of Bateson, Flusser, with a dash of Erickson and a little von Förster thrown in for innovation, are better suited, I think.

The global communication, having gone viral, is no longer just a dialogue taking place on dialogue-based infrastructure.

Not to be misunderstood: I think it is absolutely great that Schulmeister wrote this article and I appreciated the debate on Kerres’ site – I learnt a lot from being exposed to their thoughts. So – thank you!

Für den schnellen Überblick dieser Veranstaltung lohnt sich, auf JeanPol Martins Blog nachzuschlagen. Da findet sich eine lebendige, lustige und frustige Debatte dieser Veranstaltung (inkl. meines Klein-Kommentars), die ich so genossen habe wie lange nix mehr im akademischen Betrieb. Dabei war es meine erste Konferenz seit 15 Jahren, bei der ich “bloß” Teilnehmer war – ansonsten immer Sprecher. Und ich empfehle jedem Kollegen, der sich (wie ich) gerne auf dem Podium räkelt, sich mal ein Educamp anzutun. Meine persönlichen Highlights, in dieser Reihenfolge:

1) Leute, die ich nur aus der virtuellen Welt von Twitter und Second Life kannte, einmal persönlich beschnuppern zu können – wie Tobias Würtz (van Zadark), Dörte Giebel (Dora Quar), Jean-Pol Martin, Alexander Rausch, Mel Gottschalk u.v.a.m. Ich war dabei erst recht scheu, weil ja jetzt jeder sehen konnte, wie wenige Haare ich wirklich auf dem Kopf habe, aber nach Kurzem fühlte ich mich gut aufgehoben und kann bestätigen: der Transfer Virtualität – Realität funktioniert!

2) Wegen meines re-vitalisierten (ohne Viagra!) Interesses an Second Life Edu (Info für Neulinge: meine Hochschule hat seit Januar zwei eigene virtuelle Inseln – mehr zu SL Teaching in diesem ausgezeichneten Artikel – Feb 2010 – Dan Holt’s Advice for First-Time SL Teachers) haben mir die von Würtz, Trude, Tietgens und Brettschneider moderierten und initiierten back-to-back Sitzungen am Samstag inhaltlich das Meiste gebracht. Hier tut sich so viel, dass mir der Kopf schmerzt!  Mitschnitte gibt’s net, aber es wird ein Follow-Up-Treffen in-world geben (contact me).

3)  Viele Einzeleindrücke, die erst wirken müssen – so die Sitzung zum extrem interessanten Game-based Learning (Moderation und In-Talk: Wey-Han Tan), Ricarda Reimer u.v. a. zum e(r)forschenden Lernen, und eine von der Gilde der Bibliothekare (“Librarians 2.0″!) von B. Lambert moderierte Runde zum Schicksal der Literatur (besonders belohnend: die Erwähnung des explosiv wachsenden Start-Ups PaperC, das u.a. aus der HWR Berlin hervorgegangen ist) usw. Selbst das Essen in der Mensa meiner Alma Mater war wieder…interessant.

Wenn Ihr von dem ein oder anderen mehr hören/sehen wollt, kontaktiert die verlinkten Tweeple selbst! Das Educamp ist, wie vielfach beschrieben, schwer zu beschreiben. Ich hoffe, es bleibt so erfrischend – und wenn nicht, dann machen wir eben eine andere Dose auf.

(Yes, I know this was all in German. No worries, I will return to my non-native idiom in due course.)

Sagemeister explains  how such a sabbatical could be a major visioning exercise rather than – as usual for academics e.g. – work as usual without having to teach, usually including travel and sightseeing (which can be nice, too). And how in order to identify your vision of the future, it helps to talk to other people who have been there (and consider it successful).

I’m in the process of writing up my own research proposal for the local research committee – after weighing all the pros and cons, I’ve decided to turn our second life based new virtual school (it hardly exists yet), or “interactive teaching in virtual spaces” into my sabbatical research topic. This will also allow me to avoid having to travel far and wide and the work needs to be done anyway.

In second life, we’re planning to put a giant tree in the centre of one of the islands, as in cameron’s new movie “Avatar”.