What is it about avatars that make them so addictive, and such a pleasure for us to shape, to consume products for, to create so that they are evocative and edgy and sexy and seductive and aesthetically appealing? As we mold our post-modern bodies with a guilty pleasure, embracing the contrasts of fantasy over reality and disrupt the normal with the imagined? In Baudrillard’s terms, if the avatar is a referrent, a digitally generated image which is pure representation – why do our avatars reference the hypersexualised, the hyperreal, the glossy magazine models with perfect flawless shiny white skin? The coded information in my avatar is read… how?

Perversely, I read my avatar as being subversive. I see it as subverting the reality of an aging sagging body and experimenting with how I am treated, and how people communicate with me across my social spheres. It’s a gender experiment for me that I find fun, playful, and liberating on the one hand, yet difficult to come to terms with on the other hand because the reality is sometimes the post-modern Barbie gets a whole lot more attention that the real and flawed flesh and bones woman. Other times “she” is discriminated against because she is “too” something or another – too beautiful, too sexy, too intimidating, too fashionable.

I’ve been writing about avatars for 10 years now!!!! But still these issues intrigue me every time I speak at a conference and experience a whole range of complex questions from the audience about identity, sexuality, feminism, commodification, representation and hyperreality.

Now, shall I go blonde, or stick with brunette?

Here are my slides – I wasn’t going to put them up because they’re a weaving together of a few other talks which are already on slideshare! Also they are designed to be viewed as double page spreads in the in-world book format. There is a paper based on the “play” section of the paper coming out next month, and I’ve been writing a new paper about the avatar which I’ll be presenting in December, but the latter slides are related to that. So stay tuned if you’re interested!

Thanks to the wonderful Jokay, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the NSW Learnscope “Go Virtual” conference today. There were about 20 participants actually in Wollongong, where the conference was held physically, and another 30 or so participants attending from inside Second Life. Apart from a few technical issues (and these seem to be surprisingly minimal really – just tricky getting voice working and in synch with no delay or feedback) it went very well.

My talk was titled Play and Identity in Digital Spaces, and I combined the material from about three of my previous talks and four or five different papers. I want to especially thank Jazzydee and Achariya for dropping in and contributing stories about their avatars!

Later in the day, I was also involved in a panel discussion about leverages the affordances of Second Life for education. Panelists included:

• Jo Kay, Freelance Design, Facilitation and Virtual Worlds Consultant

• Sean FitzGerald, Independent Researcher, Consultant, Trainer and Presenter
• Angela Thomas, University of Sydney
• Alan Levine, Vice President, NMC Community and CTO, NMC: The New Media Consortium
• Nick Noakes, Director, Center for Enhanced Learning & Teaching, Hong Kong

Here’s a nice shot of CDB and I after the panel discussion. CDB is coming to Australia next month!!! He’ll be doing a lecture tour and meeting up with people interested in using Second Life for education, so if anybody wants to meet up with him (and me!) in Sydney let me know

(Thanks to Jokay and Alan for images)

PS: I’ve been writing a paper the last couple of weeks, and preparing this conference talk, and doing a hundred other tasks, including some extra and unexpected teaching, so the blog has suffered!

The final panel session for the NMC’s Symposium on Creativity in Second Life was wonderful!  Chaired by Alan Levine (CDB Barkley), it involved a diverse range of educators involved in Second Life, reflecting about the week’s sessions and creativity in SL in general.  Educators included:

• Lori Bell (aka Lorelei Junot), Alliance Library System
• Jo Kay (aka Jokay Wollongong), Illawarra Institute TAFE, New South Wales
• Hilary Mason (aka Ann Enigma), Johnson & Wales University
• Troy McConaghy (aka Troy McLuhan), ISM Corporation
• Nick Noakes (aka Corwin Carillon), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• Beth Ritter-Guth (aka Desideria Stockton), Lehigh Carbon Community College
• Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney

Despite issues with sound, we managed to combine both text and sound to do this reflection.  Alan blogged details of the session here, including a podcast and a chat transcript.  I had to do my bit by text instead of voice (luckily I was last so I hastily converted the speaking notes I had into close to proper sentences while other people were talking).  Some of the comments seem to have been truncated in the transcript though, so, for anybody interested, I am including my notes (and they’re a bit messy!) under the fold.

I just want to start off my 5 minutes here by reflecting on what it was like to be a presenter at this conference.  I have to be honest here, because when the call for papers/sessions went out, I read it and even I was challenged by it, wondering what, if anything, I could contribute.  Some of you will know that I teach students about role-playing communities, I do a lot of work around ideas of play and innovation and the value of including it into the curriculum, and I spoke at the NMC summer conference in June about the ideas of play and participatory culture.  But when Alan sent out the call for papers for this symposium, he emphasized, stressed, bolded and underlined that we should avoid lecturing, avoid powerpoint presentations, and do something practical and creative.  I think its just so easy now for us to think about presenting at a conference in a certain way (i.e. us doing all of the talking in lecture mode) but unfortunately that means its also easy for us to fall into the trap of being very dull and non-creative!  But if anybody can nudge us along and out of our comfort zone and into innovation, its definitely the group of amazing staff and presenters here.

Because I was involved in this symposium, I spoke to people I’d barely spoken to before.  Because I was involved in this symposium, I worked collaboratively with people I’d never had the opportunity to work with before.  In the lead-up to this symposium, I questioned my beliefs about pedagogy, I talked about my beliefs with others, I explored the amazing spaces that other people had created, I built some cubes, I made a book, I discovered some incredible new International fashion houses, I EVEN edited a script.  I spoke with several fashionistas about the hot new fashion trends, I spoke with an amazing avatar artist who very generously gave me free samples to give away.  I explored my friend Laura’s fictional world of author Gloria Raynor’s book “Mama Day”, a world about “how a young African-American woman, Cocoa, comes to terms with her powerful ancestral legacy” and I looked at how Laura had found new and powerful ways to immerse her students in Cocoa’s story.   I visited Boracay and was astounded by the web 2.0 applications he had discovered could interface with Second Life, and sent my first inside-SL tweet to twitter.  I watched Robbie Dingo’s incredible machinima that reinterpreted Vincent Van Gogh’s painting and felt in awe of his incredible talent.  I listened to Larry’s inspiring opening remarks… and I thought, what a privilege it is to be a part of this!

I hope that people attending my sessions will go away thinking about the value of play, the value of role-play, and the value of creating fictional worlds in which to explore real issues: about culture, about society, and about ourselves. 

Many educators are both fascinated and frightened by the possibilities of embracing play, within a rigorous educational context.   Play can provide a context which allows for the cognitive and creative freedoms associated with open-ended experimentation and creativity.

One of the things I think is most important for education is to empower our students. And by empowerment I mean teachers working with students collaboratively for the creation of power. Transformative pedagogy refers to interactions between educators and students that foster that collaborative creation of power.  I think by giving students the space to be creative and to work with us in our SL endeavours we’re giving them opportunities to become empowered.

I was talking over these ideas with my colleague Kim, who I presented a session with about “playful pedagogy”.  We had no idea what shape our drama would take – we could set up a few structures and guide them along, but the way it developed was completely dependent upon participation.  In thinking about our role as educators and presenters here, we felt we were practicing what we preached – you know, not sage on the stage, but guide on the side.  I said this to Kim and he said no, we’re not the sage on the stage, or the guide on the side…. instead… we’re the meddler in the middle. 

So my new saying is: “Teaching is about knowing how to meddle just enough to empower students, to inspire them and to foster creativity.”   You give them some tools, stir them up, get them passionate about something, stir them up some more… and then suddenly they’re the ones teaching you. 

Second Life: avatars, role-playing – it’s already a space where the possibilities are only limited by our imagination.  I suspect that transformative pedagogy begins with us and our abilities to change and try out new things – let’s shake up our pedagogy as much as we can and find more ways to be as creative as possible.

Yesterday I presented my session about avatars and identity play in Second Life. It was more of a workshop than a presentation, and there were some wonderfully fascinating stories people shared about their avatars: why they created them and crafted them the way they did; what decisions they made about identity markers to include; how other people perceived their avatars; and any identity experiments (gender, fashion, race and so on) that they had explored. I really enjoyed hearing people’s stories, and wish I had had the foresight to log a transcript of the chat!! I managed to crash out 5 times during the session :/ This meant I didn’t have time in the end to really recap some of the central points I wanted to make!! Here are some shots from the session of people sharing and participating:

… and a few resources, links, landmarks, copies of slides, free clothes and avatars and so on were given out at the end. If you didn’t get to go to the session (or you missed out because you had to leave early) and would like a gift bag, just send me an im in world!

(My thanks to CDB Barkley, Joanna Trailblazer, Jokay Wollongong, Heidi Trotta, Nick Noakes, Stephanie Misfit, Tasrill Sieyes, Desideria Stockton, Thinkerer Melville, Anne Enigma, Larry Pixel and many many others who contributed in various ways to the session – by sharing stories, posing for photos, letting me use their photos, contributing avatars and giving me freebies to add to the resources kit!)

Next week the NMC is running an entire weeks symposium on “Creativity in Second Life” There are a number of strands: Machinima, Fashion, Sculpture and Modeling, Virtual Photography, and Teaching Environments, social / arts events, and lots of practical and interactive sessions. I am involved in three sessions, all at (sort of) Australian friendly times. Here are the details of these sessions (in Second Life time):

Fri Aug 17 7pm – Fri Aug 17 8pm

Teaching On the Second Life Stage: Playful Educational Strategies for Serious Purposes

Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/64/193/22

Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney

Kim Flintoff (Kim Pasternak), Edith Cowan University

Theatrical spaces have historically been places used to teach, purge and shape culture. For over a decade, virtual reality has offered a new kind of theatrical space; now, with the rise of social networking spaces, many more people are using the potential of the web to perform, critique and comment on cultural issues. Second Life provides a new and exciting space where students can explore issues that are both personal and global in significance. Teaching strategies which incorporate dramatic and theatrical components are perfectly suited in the Second Life environment for engaging students in playful but meaningful reflection on such issues. This session will involve participants in role-playing, reflection and discussion. Participants will also be encouraged to brainstorm the possibilities of incorporating such strategies into their own educational programs.

Sat Aug 18 4pm – Sat Aug 18 5pm

No More Business Suits Please: Creative Identity Play in SL

Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/185/136/43

Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney, Australia

Second Life offers a unique opportunity to refashion one’s self and to play with fictional identities. Yet many of us who work inside Second Life feel trapped in our offline identity roles and conform to traditional discourses of femininity, masculinity, appearance, beauty and fashion. Professionals wear business suits, educators cry out for more modest clothing, and artists wear funky coloured skins. In some contexts, people who resist these discourses are discriminated against. This session explores how we might be able to leverage one of the greatest affordances of Second Life—the avatar—for personal, community and professional agendas.

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Sat Aug 18 5pm – Sat Aug 18 6pm

Panel Session: Reflections on Creativity in Second Life

Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/214/18/51

Moderator: Alan Levine (aka CDB Barkley), The New Media Consortium
Lori Bell (aka Lorelei Junot), Alliance Library System
Jo Kay (aka Jokay Wollongong), Illawarra Institute TAFE, New South Wales
Hilary Mason (aka Ann Enigma), Johnson & Wales University
Troy McConaghy (aka Troy McLuhan), ISM Corporation
Nick Noakes (aka Corwin Carillon), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Beth Ritter-Guth (aka Desideria Stockton), Lehigh Carbon Community College
Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney

Nice marketing ploy – create your own Simpsons avatar. Everybody wants one – and even though there isn’t an automatic way to embed, I’ve seen screenshots all over flickr, a flickr group dedicated to them and they’ve started filtering into my daily blog feeds.  Aren’t memes fun!

meez.com is an online community incorporating forums, private messaging, friends and basically a community targetting younger users (with defined spaces for 13-15 year olds). From the site:

A Meez is your 3D I-D which you create and use to represent yourself everywhere you go on the Internet. You can personalize your Meez to look like you do in real life — or try on a completely new look. It’s up to you.

Interestingly the most important thing you do to begin is to create your avatar – and the “fashionista” part of the forum seems to have more hits than most other categories apart from music, personals and roleplaying. I keep reading all over the place that: the avatar has become the new big thing; 2007 is “the year of the avatar”; avatar is “the buzzword of 2007″; “the age of the avatar has arrived” and so on (multiple sources).

So, I don’t much like the meez avatar options – I’ll be happy when my SL avatar can be exported out of SL and used everywhere I want to have an avatar.  Plus, since I have invested a lot of Lindens into my SL avatar, I don’t much feel like spending any money on a meez avatar and so I have to have a freebie look.  And what costs the most “coinz” on meez?  Shoes!!!

Alan’s write-up of my talk is on the NMC blog here – thanks so much!