Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds

Here's a great video that shows how Second Life can help us teach people about different religions and cultures:

Exploring a New Bar

Perhaps the Wall Street Journal was right yesterday when it reported that “Virtual worlds may look like toys for the geekiest of geeks, but they have quietly slipped into the mainstream.”

Until today I’d made a point as Ishah Tripsa (the Second Life identity I use when I teach) to keep myself connected to philosophical and religious developments and places, virtual educational conferences held in world, and the like. Today, however, I finally broke down and let my first world legal life spill over into Ishah Tripsa’s by joining the SL Bar Association. Located in Second Life’s Justice Center (that's me standing in front of the building), the SL Bar Association has begun offering interesting continuing education discussion on topics related to virtual worlds—for example, how to enforce trademarks and intellectual property rights in world, internet fraud—and has even managed to convince the California Bar Association to give continuing legal credit for attending them. (Would that the New York Bar Association would do the same! While I do the bulk of my required CLE online these days, it’d be great to be able to do it in world.)

Since legal institutions seem to be one of the most conservative types of organizations (along with religious institutions and educational ones), I just couldn’t resist supporting a bar association that was taking a leap and dealing seriously enough with virtual worlds that it doesn't just talk about them but to move in and engage in them.

Future of Religions

I spent today attending the first part of a two-day conference called "The Future of Religions/Religions of the Future" in Extropia's Central Nexus region of Second Life. It had a pretty good turnout with religious studies faculty from around the world attending.


The conference is divided into two parts. The speakers today focused on the way in which various world religions are/can be studied and experienced in Second Life. Speakers addressed the ways in which various religions are using online connectivity and how students of religion can gain greater experience of world religions through Second Life offerings. While the presentation for any kind of conference like this is slow (since they're using typing, not mics) there were new projects from several colleges that seem like they have possibilities for my comparative religion classes.

Tomorrow's part of the conference looks like it will cover religions of the future, online religion, transhumanist religion, etc. I'm not sure or not whether I'll stop by or not. The only presentation scheduled that interests me is one on how religion online can move past static websites and bulletin boards to virtual environments, but that talk is going to happen right in the middle of two meetings I've already scheduled at my office.

Trial of Socrates in Second Life

This past week, my Intro to Philosophy classes spent their time together conducting modern day trials of Socrates, bringing him up on more contemporary charges like treason and seditious conspiracy rather than impiety and corrupting the youth. Each time we do such a trial, my classes—even those that seem weak during the rest of the semester—really shine. Students who are playing the witnesses seem to have really internalized their characters—their lives and their interactions with both Socrates and Athenian society as whole. The lawyers have clearly combed the Platonic dialogues (which we use in place of depositions) and other literature and events of the day (as well as later scholarship) to prepare their arguments. The students who choose to be jurors are harder to engage, though the individual jury opinions they write up work better in doing this than the group jury opinion I used to have them do.

This year, for the first time, my online Intro class also did a trial of Socrates together by creating avatars and conducting the trial in Second Life. I’d been lucky enough to have a classroom space and trial furniture donated to me by another college—Buena Vista University—that had an island (such generosity on their part). The students learned—to various degrees of competency- to get around in Second Life. Lawyers and many of their witnesses met “in world” several times before the day of the trial for trial preparation.

And then we did the trial. It was slower than when we do it F2F. Because most of the students don’t have mics, we had to do the “speaking” by typing rather than voice and most of the lawyers didn’t seem comfortable doing “cut and paste” typing for the questions they’d previously prepared, but typed things out all over again. And about 45 minutes into it, because of glitches in its new update, Second Life decided to do a “rolling reboot”, which meant that all of us had to either sign off for a few minutes or move to another island and then teleport back to our trial room. But despite that, the trial went well and gave the class a chance to interact in new creative ways. Several members of the class actually created their avatars to look like the witnesses they were going to be during the trial (a Second Life bonus that we’ve never successfully pulled off well in F2F classes). And students also had a chance to argue their case in front of more than just other Mercy College students, since several of the Buena Vista students and faculty participated as jurors, and faculty from institutions as far away as University of North Dakota who belong to ISTE (the International Society for Technology in Education) and came to observe the way in which we did the trial.

Here are a few pictures from various parts of the trial:

The trial setup

Prosecution's opening remarks

Defense Attorney examining Crito

Anytus on the witness stand

Defense attorney examining I.F. Stone


Socrates on the witness stand

The jury

I'll be asking students to fill out a more detailed report of the pluses and minuses of doing a trial this way in an online class but from the comments I've received already they seem to have both enjoyed and learned from it.

Classroom Taking Shape

The freshman computer science class from Buena Vista University (thank you Ken Schweller!) has been helping my Mercy class build our Second Life classroom space. Here are a couple of shots of what they've done so far.

The class setting is on top of a rocky mountain-- fairly appropriate for a course studying ancient Greek philosophy-- on the Buena Vista island. It's got a marble base and Greek columns surrounding it.

And right now, in the middle of it is the "modern trial" setting for when we do a modern day version of the trial of Socrates in early November. To my right in the picture is the witness stand, to the left of that is the judge's bench, and right in front of me you can see the prosecutor's table.

Directly below our classroom space is Plato's cave, a visual creation of the cave allegory that Socrates mentions in the Republic. The BVU students are using their computer skills to do a nice job of picking out what should be in that. That class and mine (which is reading the Republic this semester) will get together in SL to discuss the text itself, why it was reconstructed the way it was, anything else that should be added, the meaning of the allegory, and how it fits in with the rest of what Socrates/Plato taught. And then, in November, as a followup to that interaction, the BVU students will serve as the jury for my class' Socrates trial.
I think everyone on both campuses-- Ken, me, and each of our groups of students-- is excited about the possibilities that bringing the groups together in SL is providing.

A New Way to Remodel Churches?

In my Second Life wanderings, as I've looked for assignments for my religion class, I ran across the church that I'd visited and written about back in June. (Here's that post.) You'd hardly recognize the place. Here's a new picture of me (or rather Ishah, my Mercy avatar) resting in the same congregation's space that I'd worshipped in back then.


There's almost nothing similiar. The floor cushions have been replaced by comfortable chairs, the room is arranged differently, the outside of the building has been remodeled, and the cross and pulpit are in entirely different places. I'm guessing that the pastor has been doing this as she's learned various things that make worship and congregational gatherings work better in the space. If only our first world congregations were as willing to find ways to change the space to make it more accessible and relevant (and of course, if only it could be changed as inexpensively as it can in SL)!

Plato's Cave in Second Life

At this point, about 3/5s of my online philosophy class have created avatars and ventured forth into Second Life. So far folks in the class seem to be very intrigued by it. In the meanwhile, I've been scouting around for some interesting SL experiences for them. Among those that now look like exciting options is the possibility of partnering with a freshman computer science class from Buena Vista University (Iowa) that's exploring cyberspace to create Plato's cave in SL and then explore the meaning of that section from the Republic. Now if Mercy can only get SL up and running in the labs so that the other students in my class (who have computers running Vista or have poor graphics cards) can get on, we'll be all set.

First Life!!

There's a wonderful satire of Second Life-- and a good implied caution about spending too much time only in a virtual world--here . I found it very, very funny.

A Knowledge Space or a Borgian World?

Over the last several days I've begun to read the work of anthropologist Pierre Levy. In some ways his overall views about a future emphasizing collective intelligence seems to echo some of Teilhard's noosphere concept. Until I read his fleshing out of what such a world might be like, it never occurred to me that part of what would be involved would be inventing another way of communicating that was beyond writing but it makes sense. Just as writing, and then the printing press, moved us away from oral communication of knowledge to a communication of knowledge that could happen even when the communicator wasn't physically present (although with the loss of accompanying gestures and tones), so the current evolution of knowledge will produce new tools and ways of communicating that will replace the written word as the major form of communication.

At times the world that Levy describes sounds wonderful and exciting. (He's clearly a real optimist about cyberspace--the exact opposite of the world Gibson develops in Neuromancer.) At other times, it seems to have a concept of collective knowledge that might have a shadow side that's much like the Borg collective. Both aspects seem present, for example, in this quote that's from early in Levy's Collective Intelligence:

“Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to “communicate” through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence. In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront.”

On a different note, today's New York Times has an interesting article on real estate in Second Life. Check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/garden/09second.html?8dpc=&_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all.

Attending a Second Life Worship Service

Last night I attended a church service at a Second Life progressive church (as opposed to lifechurch.tv, the conservative church that opened on Easter and has spent tons of money creating a second life campus that can stream its regular service in world) called the United Church of Christ in SL. The building, built by a second year seminary student at Emory and her partner, was beautiful—individually designed cushions in the center of the floor to sit on, mats lining the walls for extra seating, large, clear glass windows making up the roof and other details made being in the space quite pleasing, although I could have lived without the large cross hanging suspended over the one entryway. (Crosses are, by their very nature, meant to be grounded in the earth, aren’t they, both because of their original use as instruments of torture and because without an earthy connection, what would Easter mean?)

Having said that, the service itself was very weak. It made me aware of the need to really think through worship from scratch if it’s going to work in world. I’m sure a little of the problem was that the service was designed and led by a seminarian without a lot of worship experience (though with a big heart and a worldview that seemed warm and hospitable). Aside from sitting on the cushion, much of the worship was structured in typical modern style, with the worship leader standing behind a pulpit talking at the congregation during the sermon or leading the congregation in prayer. While this style clearly has limitations in our ‘first’ life churches, it has even more problems in Second Life. The preacher stood behind the pulpit and typed the lines to the sermon one by one. We sat there and watched her type. There were none of the body signals or facial expressions or tones of voice that so often carry a first life sermon, just the hands moving and arms going up and down for the typing. The long pauses in between lines of text appearing made it very hard to follow, much less engage with. And the responsive prayer, which we were given ahead of time along with the lectionary passage, also didn’t work very well. Each time we were to do the ‘all’ part, we each typed in the response line, which showed up again and again on the screen. The only part of ‘traditional’ worship that seemed to work well was the sharing of joys and concerns, where individuals shared a hope or worry and then the worship leader responded to each concern with a brief prayer.

The service left me wondering about the best way to do worship in world. It’s clear that worship has to offer something other than the kinds of things that lifechurch or this UCC church have tried. Maybe there are other houses of worship in 2nd life offering more engaging worship. I’ll try to search around and check it out because if there aren’t, someone needs to puzzle through what kinds of worship would work in Second Life that would actively engage those participating in a congregation.

Books, Cheese, Gardens, and Papers

It's been a busy month. My desktop crashed, causing me to have to reload Windows and then copy everything from the laptop. At the same time I had a 50 page paper due for one of my grad school courses and then, when that was done, all the termpapers and final exams that my students turned in had to be graded. But they're DONE!!!!

So now I'm turing my attention to summer type things. With the exception of the Onaways (which I would have thought would show themselves first), our potatoes have all begun to show themselves.

We put cucumbers, peppers, and lettuce in last week, along with a lot of different kinds of flowering annuals. We've also planted the hanging baskets and gotten them up on the front porch. And about two hours ago, I put our tomatoes (four different kinds this year, including Green Zebra and German Johnson heirlooms) in the ground.

My hopes for the next month until my summer grad school courses start are mainly to:

1) play lots of guitar and flute;

2) knit. I finished one scarf this weekend, but I've two more that I've promised people to go before I can start something more creative;

3) play video games. I'm part way through Zelda on the Wii and will have to redo Scratches, since most of the game was lost in the computer crash. Plus there are my avatars in A Tale in the Desert and Second Life to keep busy; and

4) make cheeses of various kinds. Late Saturday night we made mozzarella for the first time and then promptly ate it, so I want to spend more time making not only soft cheeses but hard ones as well.

Unfortunately the reality is that the three summer courses have each assigned three to seven textbooks that Ishould try to get through before they begin in mid-June, I've got to have a doctoral project in mind before those classes begin, and the church still has its regular daily demands so the music and games may have to wait a bit until some time in August.

Second Life Church

I'm spending more and more time thinking about creating a Second Life church, since the ones that already exist on world seem to be either non-Christian (the church of Elvis, a church for vampires, etc.) or extremely conservative. My view is of a progressive, welcoming intentional community that would find a way to teach and embody the best of Jesus' radical hospitality, both on world and in everyday life.

The downsides? I've never planted a church before, I don't know how to build things or program in Second Life, and I don't have a team to work with me. I keep checking around to see if there's someone else out on the internet who might have similar interests but so far I haven't been able to find anyone. Still, I keep feeling the pull of the Spirit in this direction!