Cyborg Literacy Acquisition Through Second Life

The “promise of reform”: each new media holds the promise of building on and making better the media that preceded it

HYPERMEDIACY: “a heightened awareness of a new medium as a medium” (Bolter/Grusin 22)

modernism

“If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible” (Bolter/Grusin 36-37).

The content of any medium is

always another medium

homes

towns

cities

beaches

schools

schools

television

Music production

photo studios

Art museums

GLITCHES

VASSAR COLLEGE VIRTUAL CAMPUS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AoHiaQPGTQ

…has never been used to teach anyone anything

13:59] Guide whispers: Welcome to Vassar Island.[13:59] Guide whispers: This guided tour will give you a brief overview of the island.[13:59] Guide whispers: Vassar Island is not only a work in progress, it is also largely a proof of concept.[13:59] Guide whispers: We are exploring how virtual worlds such as Second Life can support and enhance [13:59] Guide whispers: teaching and learning in a traditional residential liberal arts environment,[13:59] Guide whispers: and in seeing how this environment can support communication between and among[13:59] Guide whispers: the College and our alumnae/i, parents and friends.

Ball State University Virtual Campus

machinima

Virtual reality

In writing of technology’s influence, scholars return to the root of the word, techne,which is rather ambiguous in meaning. Most often defined as art, craft, skill and/or the active application of knowledge, it is the very ambiguity of techne that many scholars find intriguing and beneficial to their ends, even though the pervasiveness and scope of techne also remains a point of contention. Techne is both a tool utilized, working in tandem with knowledge/wisdom to produce an effect or event, and more than a tool, often exhibiting a kind of autonomy which some embrace and others fear. Divorced from or saturated with emotion, separate or inseparable from knowledge and science, ‘mere craft’ or exalted art, these various interpretations of techne illuminate an interesting effect of multiplicity as our lives become increasingly seamless with myriad technologies...

James Robert Schirmer, Acquiring Literacy: Techne, Video Games, and Composition Pedagogy (2008)

PHRONESIS: “knowledge enacted through personal experience, characterizing and expressing the kind of person that one is”

Techne is supremely contextual : KAIROS (Isocrates)

Video games provide a compelling ground for the development of techne and phronesis:

Players draw upon multiple resources associated with who they are (phronesis)

What is available to them at the moment and how they know to apply it (techne)

And what the moment calls for (kairos)

CYBORG LITERACY

“the integration of a series of systems that compel simultaneous attention to individuals, technologies, and other elements in the contexts they share” (James Inman, introduction to Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Age (2004), 160).

“allows for the pursuit of whatever is interesting whenever it is interesting”

WORLD OFWARCRAFT

BURN2 (Burning Life)