Today I gave a tour of Macbeth for the HUMlab in Sweden! Click here if you’d like to view the video stream of the tour. It goes for about an hour. It was a bit of an experiment for us to do the live streaming, but it mostly worked well, except an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction in which I lost my hair! Thanks to Jim Barrett for the invitation to speak and for doing all the camera work.
For those occasions when I have a presentation about Virtual Macbeth where Second Life is not accessible for a live demonstration, I’ve resorted to using these slides. I’ll record an audio version or maybe there will be a machinima version coming soon.
I am speaking at the 45th UKLA International Conference Making Connections: Building Literate Communities in and Beyond the Classroom.
Here’s my abstract – come on along if you are in the UK and interested 
Inside the mind of Macbeth: Understanding and interpreting literary worlds in a virtual environment.
Angela Thomas
University of Sydney
Virtual Macbeth was designed to demonstrate how we might best use the affordances of virtual environments for Education. Shakespeare’s Macbeth reimagined in Second Life provides an adaptive bridge between classic texts and new media technology. In the virtual, the abstract can be made concrete, and complex poesis and abstractions of Shakespeare’s verse can become embodied, elusive, visceral, and affective. The poetic use of metaphor, image and symbol that permeate Shakespeare’s language is brought to 3D life using the online world as a discursive design space where visitors experience the motivations and emotional journey of character, and explore and make personal sense of the universal themes of Shakespeare.
In this presentation I will demonstrate Virtual Macbeth and discuss the way the design of the island allows students to explore aspects of narrative theory, literary criticism, drama theory, gaming theory and digital culture. In particular, I will highlight the deep potential of virtual worlds for immersive, experiential and student-centred learning. I will also explain how Virtual Macbeth is designed for engaging the participatory and co-creative potential of new media – something young people are embracing in out-of-school contexts but yet to be adequately utilised in classroom contexts. Here, students have opportunities to remake, co-create and mash-up Shakespeare, thus participating in cultural exchange, creative expression, online community discourse and educational outcomes.
During the (Australian) Summer I was invited by incredible and passionate-about-education-in-virtual-worlds colleague Nick Noakes to participate in the Virtual Worlds and Language workshops held in Second Life (link to the associated ning here). I conducted a few tours through Macbeth and talked with participants about some principles for education in a virtual world. Today Nick shared a presentation he co-presented recently about the workshops, and when you look through it, you’ll recognise a number of images from Macbeth! I really enjoyed all of the interactions I had with workshop participants and tracing their blog posts and flickr images and ning comments across the web, and seeing it come together here in this presentation is really impressive! Well done Nick and team!
I created a Virtual Macbeth group on flickr so that I’d be able to view and enjoy the fun other people were having on Macbeth – and it is indeed a thrill every time somebody adds a new photo to the pool, or adds the tag virtualmacbeth to their flickr image. So far there are several hundred images floating through the flickrsphere about Macbeth all created by Second Life users – from students to fashonistas doing their fashion shoots on the island! I love social media!
Thanks to all those people who have been adding tags for me, and a huge thanks to Nick Noakes who helped me to set up the wiki and the rss feeds and a whole lot of other things! Full credit for these images provided when you click them. Please keep adding and tagging, it is greatly appreciated! Here are some of my favourites to date:
Click here to go and watch my interview with Paisley!
Thanks to HVX Silverstar, here is machinima of some of us at the Halloween party on Macbeth yesterday!! Wow. our first machinima set on the sim! Thaks HVX! WHat an unexpected bonus!
In two weeks we’ve had two parties and about 20 tours through Macbeth, and the average number of people who have visited per day is close to 2000, sometimes 5000 on a weekend. Its lovely to have so many people visiting and talking to us about the sim. Here are two shots which although not high resolution, show me in shocked states as I kind of met two Lindens who came to our Halloween party:
That is me and Sidewinder Linden
and that is me and Claudia Linden!!
That is me with Nick Noakes (aka Corwin Carillon), and this is me with my green skin, courtesy of Ina Centaur (thanks, Ina!):
Hi everybody, we’re having an informal Halloween party on Macbeth in Second Life on Friday evening US time (Saturday 2pm Sydney time). Please come along and join us if you’d like some fun. We have the amazing Cybster DJ entertaining us with whatever DJs do for a few hours, and we’d love some more fine company to enjoy the evening with.
Alan Levine advertised the event with the words: “Join Anya Ixchel and her scary friends” – but I promise you that we are not scary, we are very gentle. Even if I do wear my Vampire outfit. Hope to see you there! (Thanks Alan!)
