I ended up choosing Sigmund Freud for my role model somewhat last minute. For the RDB on role models (see blog entry "Footnote: the [logs] are in your favor."), I tried to look at the concept of a role model in a unique way than I, the typical elementary student, had done in the past. So rather than choosing from the list of stock historical figure role models like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., I decided that an object might be an interesting choice. I tried to think of times in my life when an object had possessed some of the same qualities as a more conventional role model would—an object that had provided some kind of inspiration for me. I thought of Lincoln Logs partially because they had inspired me, similar to the way Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy have been inspirational to many thousands of people, and also partly because I was amused by the irony of picking an object so closely related to one of the “typical role models” that I had initially wished to avoid—Abraham Lincoln. I did not realize at the time that choosing such an abstract role model, because of the nature of this series of assignments, would actually come back to bite me in the ass. I could either try to write 4 pages about personified chunks of wood or relinquish my dignity by picking an actual person. Since I had little dignity to begin with, I went the latter route.
*two of the stock historical figures commonly chosen as role models: M.L.K.Jr. and Abe Lincoln
I decided that the main reason that Lincoln Logs had inspired me, the creativity and introspection they allowed me in my times of isolation, had more to do with me than the Lincoln Logs themselves. I realized that the ability to be introspective—to see into one’s own mind and honestly evaluate oneself—is a trait I value greatly in people. I decided not to declare myself my own role model for fear of sounding like an egotistical jerk. But, expanding on the idea of introspection, I came to the conclusion that it was closely related to the skill of listening in that it deals with listening to one’s own soul. Listening is also a skill in which I could definitely use improvement, not only in the aspect of introspection, but especially in listening to others and to nature. Thus, I set out on a quest to find “The Listener”.
I eventually arrived upon Sigmund Freud as an example of a person who demonstrated both an incredible ability to listen to himself, by recording and interpreting his own dreams and thoughts, and to others, through the method he developed called psychoanalysis (See Freud, The Listener). Although I don’t necessarily aspire to be Sigmund Freud (many of his ideas are equally creepy as they are interesting) I do think he provides an excellent example of the powers of listening to uncover truths about (human)nature.
Freud, the Listener with his trademark cigar
Like I said, I don’t particularly wish to be Sigmund Freud. Set aside his questionable propositions, his personal life was odd at best and he had a tendency to womanize. However, the prerequisites for this paper required me to virtually become Sigmund Freud and that I did (minus the womanizing) via Second Life. I won’t lie; In the process of creating my Sigmund Freud avatar in Second Life, I did not achieve any profound sense of freedom or independence, that is unless suddenly exclaiming, “I’m going out of my mind! Everybody out!” constitutes an out-of-mind/out-of-body experience (sorry, that was a stretch). The frustrations I experienced with Second Life can be separated into technical difficulties and conceptual difficulties.
Overall, Second Life was not terribly frustrating technically. I did run into a few problems in the installation process and then downloading updated versions of the software before I had even used the first version I installed. Once I had Second Life running and had created an account (LincolnLog Rokocoko), which is reminiscent of my original wooden role model, there was also a formidable learning curve and just getting the hang of things. At first, I found the process of actually making my avatar look like a particular person annoyingly difficult with the limited options given in the inventory. Our researcher friend and technical whiz, whose name I cannot remember at this time, showed me how to access a much more specific application for changing the appearance of one’s avatar. This made creating a virtual Siggy much easier and consequently more enjoyable.
Conceptually, using Second Life as a discovery-learning tool in the classroom is an interesting idea. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world where people can interact with one another as “Residents” with pseudonyms and modifiable appearances and it is considered by some a kind of computer game, although it does not possess most of the elements of a conventional game. SL has garnered so much attention as an educational medium because of its professed ability to connect teacher, student and world through the use of a self-motivating and fun activity.
The idea to use games in the classroom as an interactive learning experience is not a new one, and my attitude toward such endeavors can best be described as hopeful, yet skeptical. Sometimes it works; sometimes it don’t (sic). The trick is in knowing when to call it quits when it doesn’t. In my opinion, the complications that arise from requiring the use of an application that is intended as a leisurely activity for the spare time of those so inclined to consider such an activity leisurely too often outweigh the educational advantages of using such an application in the classroom. I for one would probably not use Second Life if it were not required of me as part of this assignment, because it just isn’t something that appeals to me. Of course, if given the choice between using Second Life to explore the idea of discovery learning and writing a report on the subject of discovery learning, I would invariably choose Second Life.
I was slow to explore the many islands of Second Life because P1 did not require it and thus there was a lack of academic motivation (and little personal motivation). But with the academic motivation of doing research for this essay, I have since explored Second Life beyond UT island, which I must say that, as a research method, is much more fun than reading books on Freud. I found several rather intriguing places to go and things to see in my travels. One of them being Svarga Island—an island entirely devoted to an experiment in artificial life, with interactive plant life, animal life, and even natural phenomenon. There are many fun interactive activities to do on Svarga, like the room full of musical instruments that one can play solo or jam with a group of friends. I strongly encourage everyone to take the hover-pod tour! I have also discovered that Second Life is host to several virtual contemporary art museums and live concerts. Architecture firms such as Crescendo Designs use Second Life as a professional tool to gain “a unique perspective on both the challenges and opportunities inherent in bridging the SL/RL
gap.” If it weren’t for an initial academic motivation (requirement) to use Second Life and explore for research I would never have come across these interesting virtual projects.
Svarga Island. For more information click the link or teleport to it in SL and take the tour.
If I were to compare my motivation for writing P2 to that of writing P1, I wouldn’t say I was any more excited about having to write either one of these essays than the other. I will say that thinking about P2 was more stressful than thinking about P1 and less stressful in the actual writing process. The extended length of P2 compared to P1 was worrying to me, especially considering that it was on a topic that I thought I had very little to say about. Although I was concerned about the required length of P1 also, I felt confident that I could accumulate enough information to write a four-page paper about Sigmund Freud if I just did enough research. I checked out eight books form the library and commenced the to extracting useful information from them, a process that proved to be quite time consuming, albeit not particularly difficult and even marginally interesting. The whole experience ended up being extremely stressful and not the least bit enjoyable.
P2 was to be even longer and on a topic that could not hope to find one book in the library on, let alone eight. After having said that, this paper is turning out to be quite a bit easier than P1 and less stressful (assuming I can find some quotes and media to incorporate). The topic is much more personal in nature, asking questions about my own experiences and my own opinions involving Second Life and this project. I am finding (does any one else find it extraordinarily perplexing to write P2 and write about P2 at the same time?) that in writing P2, my ideas seem to flow better than in writing P1. I attribute this to the personal slant of the prompt, rather than a prompt to write primarily about someone I don’t even know other than through the biographies I skimmed through.
What research I did do for P2 was by discovery learning in Second Life, a drastically less stressful and more enjoyable endeavor than reading biographies. In doing research for P2 I actually discovered several utilizations of Second Life that were especially interesting to me, such as the example of the architecture firm and the live music that I mentioned.
So the two main distinctions in my motivation for the two projects are the prospect of research and the nature of the prompt; I was more motivated to do research in SL and the personal questions in the prompt made the writing process easier.
The experience of actually using SL to conduct conversations as if I were Sigmund Freud on the topics of leadership and diversity is difficult to describe. The conversations seemed contrived and unnatural at points. This I attribute to three factors. The first of these factors was a difficulty for some people, including me, to get into character and still have a natural conversation. Does the prospect of having a natural, impromptu conversation between a three to five people when each person is trying to act like someone else not seem contradictory? Secondly, I think that the subjects of each conversation were just inherently unnatural subjects. They are certainly not issues I would want to discuss with someone in Second Life outside of the context of school. Finally, the issue of keeping up with conversation—who is responding to whom, what has already been said, and whose turn is it to speak—was stressful for me. I felt that several people were trying to assume leadership at the same time in conducting the conversation. I assess the topic of leadership in actually conducting the conversation as follows: unless a leadership position can be firmly established early on, others will attempt to take control out of the chaos in directing the conversation and, unless successful, will only create more confusion. With a classroom full of aspiring leaders, no one person in each group was able to gain control. This increased the stress level, as the conversations became a slight power struggle and even gave the discussion a tinge of hostility in some cases. Even if a statement was said jokingly, it is nearly impossible to read that in this medium of conversation. The addition of visual aspects (the avatars and complete virtual world), when compared to any regular text-only chat, does not make any difference in the lack of visual clues for reading people’s tone and because we did not use microphones, no auditory tone could be accounted for either. Besides this, the visual features in Second Life did no good if we were unable to divert our eyes from the chaotic conversation for fear of loosing track.
In the actual discussion on leadership, the members of Group 1 (See blog entry SL Discussion: Leadership) seemed to come to consensus on the a few essential traits that a leader always seems to posses. Those traits are passion, confidence, and the ability to listen, learn, and then teach. I chose Sigmund Freud as my role model because of his role as a listener, a trait I consider myself to possess particular deficiency in. The psychoanalytic method relies totally on the therapist’s ability to listen. This is what initially made Freud an appealing role model to me, however, after I had done some research on his life, I saw that the characteristics which make Freud such a successful and important person in history extend far beyond his ability to listen. Freud began to embody all the essential characteristics aspects our Second Life discussion group decided that an ideal role model and leader should. Freud knew the importance of listening—not only to others, but also to himself—and through listening he learned. Freud had an intense passion for exploring mysterious regions of thought and science. He had the confidence to ask controversial questions and challenge social norms. What Freud learned, he taught, thus illuminating the mysteries of the mind for the all-encompassing benefit of mankind. His passions were not driven by a selfish need to understand himself, nor did his passions stem from a desire to understand his patients, who were mostly middle to upper class Viennese women. These two endeavors were simply his window for exploring his true passion, that of uncovering the mysteries of the human mind—an ultimately diverse and heroic endeavor that transcends individual, social, and cultural boundaries, talked about in the second round of discussion (see blog entry SL Discussion: Diversity), by shedding light on something that well all share—a mind.
Freud is not the only person to have attempted to explain the human mind. Trying to understand the minds of others is an important process in everyone’s everyday life. People are able to do this using the sympathetic imagination. The idea of creating an avatar to resemble a specific person and then conversing with that person in an attempt to convey their admirable personality traits is conceptually closely related to the sympathetic imagination and identification. However, the actual act of creating an avatar that only has similar physical characteristics of a real person and then talking to others “in character” was actually very much divergent from the idea of sympathetic imagination.
Sympathetic imagination deals with attempting to imagine another person’s thought process and course of action given a certain situation. In our conversations in SL, we tried our best to talk about the topics of leadership and diversity, making points we thought our role model might also make and asking questions we though our role model might also ask. This is not sympathetic imagination however. The main difference is that of intellectual versus emotional identification. Walter Jackson elaborates on the difference:
“The act of identification consists not in reading into the object subjective feelings aroused by it in the observer, but in perceiving, by instinctive but sagacious insight, the essential character and reality of the object itself.”
The kind of imagination we employed by using information we learned about our role models and their accomplishments to derive conclusions about leadership and diversity was almost purely intellectual. Sympathy implies emotion, and sympathetic imagination requires imagining and identifying with the feelings that our role model might experience in a given situation. Did we really consider what our role model’s might feel in that circumstance? I didn’t. And furthermore, what do we really consider what the “circumstance” is? Is it a conversation about leadership and diversity, a conversation about leadership and diversity with other important historical figures and role models, a conversation about leadership and diversity with computer representations of role model figures in a virtual world, etc.?
Employing Second Life as a contemporary tool for discovery learning is an intriguing idea. “The mission of the Discovery Learning Project is to improve student’s abilities to think and work creatively and independently. (343C)” I think that this project accomplished that goal. However, this type of project also presents complications. For instance, it required every person and every computer to be on the same techno-level and relies on the ultimately unreasonable ideal that computers don’t ever malfunction except due to user error. Whether the extent to which it accomplished that goal was enough to outweigh the complications, I don’t know. Most of the stress generated from this activity was due to some technical problem for me at least. The fast paced and jumbled nature of the actual chat/conversation was also stressful, but fun overall. Research for the assignment was particularly enjoyable because it involved discovery learning through exploration of the virtual world of Second Life. Overall, this assignment was more enjoyable and comfortable, with a much lower stress level than P1. In the casual environment of the classroom and Second Life, we were able to spitball off of each other ideas about leadership and diversity to come to interesting conclusions in a more unique, but not necessarily more natural, way than could have been achieved in a usual class discussion. The experience ended up being an overall positive experience for me, which is saying something, considering my general distaste for writing and computer games.
word count: 2,815
Overall, Second Life was not terribly frustrating technically. I did run into a few problems in the installation process and then downloading updated versions of the software before I had even used the first version I installed. Once I had Second Life running and had created an account (LincolnLog Rokocoko), which is reminiscent of my original wooden role model, there was also a formidable learning curve and just getting the hang of things. At first, I found the process of actually making my avatar look like a particular person annoyingly difficult with the limited options given in the inventory. Our researcher friend and technical whiz, whose name I cannot remember at this time, showed me how to access a much more specific application for changing the appearance of one’s avatar. This made creating a virtual Siggy much easier and consequently more enjoyable.
Conceptually, using Second Life as a discovery-learning tool in the classroom is an interesting idea. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world where people can interact with one another as “Residents” with pseudonyms and modifiable appearances and it is considered by some a kind of computer game, although it does not possess most of the elements of a conventional game. SL has garnered so much attention as an educational medium because of its professed ability to connect teacher, student and world through the use of a self-motivating and fun activity.
The idea to use games in the classroom as an interactive learning experience is not a new one, and my attitude toward such endeavors can best be described as hopeful, yet skeptical. Sometimes it works; sometimes it don’t (sic). The trick is in knowing when to call it quits when it doesn’t. In my opinion, the complications that arise from requiring the use of an application that is intended as a leisurely activity for the spare time of those so inclined to consider such an activity leisurely too often outweigh the educational advantages of using such an application in the classroom. I for one would probably not use Second Life if it were not required of me as part of this assignment, because it just isn’t something that appeals to me. Of course, if given the choice between using Second Life to explore the idea of discovery learning and writing a report on the subject of discovery learning, I would invariably choose Second Life.
I was slow to explore the many islands of Second Life because P1 did not require it and thus there was a lack of academic motivation (and little personal motivation). But with the academic motivation of doing research for this essay, I have since explored Second Life beyond UT island, which I must say that, as a research method, is much more fun than reading books on Freud. I found several rather intriguing places to go and things to see in my travels. One of them being Svarga Island—an island entirely devoted to an experiment in artificial life, with interactive plant life, animal life, and even natural phenomenon. There are many fun interactive activities to do on Svarga, like the room full of musical instruments that one can play solo or jam with a group of friends. I strongly encourage everyone to take the hover-pod tour! I have also discovered that Second Life is host to several virtual contemporary art museums and live concerts. Architecture firms such as Crescendo Designs use Second Life as a professional tool to gain “a unique perspective on both the challenges and opportunities inherent in bridging the SL/RL
gap.” If it weren’t for an initial academic motivation (requirement) to use Second Life and explore for research I would never have come across these interesting virtual projects.
Svarga Island. For more information click the link or teleport to it in SL and take the tour.
If I were to compare my motivation for writing P2 to that of writing P1, I wouldn’t say I was any more excited about having to write either one of these essays than the other. I will say that thinking about P2 was more stressful than thinking about P1 and less stressful in the actual writing process. The extended length of P2 compared to P1 was worrying to me, especially considering that it was on a topic that I thought I had very little to say about. Although I was concerned about the required length of P1 also, I felt confident that I could accumulate enough information to write a four-page paper about Sigmund Freud if I just did enough research. I checked out eight books form the library and commenced the to extracting useful information from them, a process that proved to be quite time consuming, albeit not particularly difficult and even marginally interesting. The whole experience ended up being extremely stressful and not the least bit enjoyable.
P2 was to be even longer and on a topic that could not hope to find one book in the library on, let alone eight. After having said that, this paper is turning out to be quite a bit easier than P1 and less stressful (assuming I can find some quotes and media to incorporate). The topic is much more personal in nature, asking questions about my own experiences and my own opinions involving Second Life and this project. I am finding (does any one else find it extraordinarily perplexing to write P2 and write about P2 at the same time?) that in writing P2, my ideas seem to flow better than in writing P1. I attribute this to the personal slant of the prompt, rather than a prompt to write primarily about someone I don’t even know other than through the biographies I skimmed through.
What research I did do for P2 was by discovery learning in Second Life, a drastically less stressful and more enjoyable endeavor than reading biographies. In doing research for P2 I actually discovered several utilizations of Second Life that were especially interesting to me, such as the example of the architecture firm and the live music that I mentioned.
So the two main distinctions in my motivation for the two projects are the prospect of research and the nature of the prompt; I was more motivated to do research in SL and the personal questions in the prompt made the writing process easier.
The experience of actually using SL to conduct conversations as if I were Sigmund Freud on the topics of leadership and diversity is difficult to describe. The conversations seemed contrived and unnatural at points. This I attribute to three factors. The first of these factors was a difficulty for some people, including me, to get into character and still have a natural conversation. Does the prospect of having a natural, impromptu conversation between a three to five people when each person is trying to act like someone else not seem contradictory? Secondly, I think that the subjects of each conversation were just inherently unnatural subjects. They are certainly not issues I would want to discuss with someone in Second Life outside of the context of school. Finally, the issue of keeping up with conversation—who is responding to whom, what has already been said, and whose turn is it to speak—was stressful for me. I felt that several people were trying to assume leadership at the same time in conducting the conversation. I assess the topic of leadership in actually conducting the conversation as follows: unless a leadership position can be firmly established early on, others will attempt to take control out of the chaos in directing the conversation and, unless successful, will only create more confusion. With a classroom full of aspiring leaders, no one person in each group was able to gain control. This increased the stress level, as the conversations became a slight power struggle and even gave the discussion a tinge of hostility in some cases. Even if a statement was said jokingly, it is nearly impossible to read that in this medium of conversation. The addition of visual aspects (the avatars and complete virtual world), when compared to any regular text-only chat, does not make any difference in the lack of visual clues for reading people’s tone and because we did not use microphones, no auditory tone could be accounted for either. Besides this, the visual features in Second Life did no good if we were unable to divert our eyes from the chaotic conversation for fear of loosing track.
In the actual discussion on leadership, the members of Group 1 (See blog entry SL Discussion: Leadership) seemed to come to consensus on the a few essential traits that a leader always seems to posses. Those traits are passion, confidence, and the ability to listen, learn, and then teach. I chose Sigmund Freud as my role model because of his role as a listener, a trait I consider myself to possess particular deficiency in. The psychoanalytic method relies totally on the therapist’s ability to listen. This is what initially made Freud an appealing role model to me, however, after I had done some research on his life, I saw that the characteristics which make Freud such a successful and important person in history extend far beyond his ability to listen. Freud began to embody all the essential characteristics aspects our Second Life discussion group decided that an ideal role model and leader should. Freud knew the importance of listening—not only to others, but also to himself—and through listening he learned. Freud had an intense passion for exploring mysterious regions of thought and science. He had the confidence to ask controversial questions and challenge social norms. What Freud learned, he taught, thus illuminating the mysteries of the mind for the all-encompassing benefit of mankind. His passions were not driven by a selfish need to understand himself, nor did his passions stem from a desire to understand his patients, who were mostly middle to upper class Viennese women. These two endeavors were simply his window for exploring his true passion, that of uncovering the mysteries of the human mind—an ultimately diverse and heroic endeavor that transcends individual, social, and cultural boundaries, talked about in the second round of discussion (see blog entry SL Discussion: Diversity), by shedding light on something that well all share—a mind.
Freud is not the only person to have attempted to explain the human mind. Trying to understand the minds of others is an important process in everyone’s everyday life. People are able to do this using the sympathetic imagination. The idea of creating an avatar to resemble a specific person and then conversing with that person in an attempt to convey their admirable personality traits is conceptually closely related to the sympathetic imagination and identification. However, the actual act of creating an avatar that only has similar physical characteristics of a real person and then talking to others “in character” was actually very much divergent from the idea of sympathetic imagination.
Sympathetic imagination deals with attempting to imagine another person’s thought process and course of action given a certain situation. In our conversations in SL, we tried our best to talk about the topics of leadership and diversity, making points we thought our role model might also make and asking questions we though our role model might also ask. This is not sympathetic imagination however. The main difference is that of intellectual versus emotional identification. Walter Jackson elaborates on the difference:
“The act of identification consists not in reading into the object subjective feelings aroused by it in the observer, but in perceiving, by instinctive but sagacious insight, the essential character and reality of the object itself.”
The kind of imagination we employed by using information we learned about our role models and their accomplishments to derive conclusions about leadership and diversity was almost purely intellectual. Sympathy implies emotion, and sympathetic imagination requires imagining and identifying with the feelings that our role model might experience in a given situation. Did we really consider what our role model’s might feel in that circumstance? I didn’t. And furthermore, what do we really consider what the “circumstance” is? Is it a conversation about leadership and diversity, a conversation about leadership and diversity with other important historical figures and role models, a conversation about leadership and diversity with computer representations of role model figures in a virtual world, etc.?
Employing Second Life as a contemporary tool for discovery learning is an intriguing idea. “The mission of the Discovery Learning Project is to improve student’s abilities to think and work creatively and independently. (343C)” I think that this project accomplished that goal. However, this type of project also presents complications. For instance, it required every person and every computer to be on the same techno-level and relies on the ultimately unreasonable ideal that computers don’t ever malfunction except due to user error. Whether the extent to which it accomplished that goal was enough to outweigh the complications, I don’t know. Most of the stress generated from this activity was due to some technical problem for me at least. The fast paced and jumbled nature of the actual chat/conversation was also stressful, but fun overall. Research for the assignment was particularly enjoyable because it involved discovery learning through exploration of the virtual world of Second Life. Overall, this assignment was more enjoyable and comfortable, with a much lower stress level than P1. In the casual environment of the classroom and Second Life, we were able to spitball off of each other ideas about leadership and diversity to come to interesting conclusions in a more unique, but not necessarily more natural, way than could have been achieved in a usual class discussion. The experience ended up being an overall positive experience for me, which is saying something, considering my general distaste for writing and computer games.
word count: 2,815
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