A Braclet to Embrace SL tools ;)

 

When educators enter SL there are usually wondering where they should go or what tools they should use for their educational purposes, better to say, “where the hell should I start” kind of sentences. As part of MUVEnation we have been asked to design a tour guide for tools that can be used for education so this is what I designed and the reasoning behind WHY is done so…

Based on my experiences after a year of living my SL, everyone has its own ideas and dreams from joining SL and although they might share the same tools and places they take different approach in using them. As I’m completely against limiting human mind, I decided not to explain the tools and abilities that they might have in details as I believe it will stop peoples’ mind to think of creative ways to use those tools, moreover, there are things that might not be defined as tools but still be used for educational purposes.

After a long long challenge between Anna’s’ logic, MUVEnation’s description and Viki’s imaginative brain, the decision has been made to create something in the middle… let’s say kind of “Treasure hunting thing” but with a different approach. Basically it will give you the guide to the places where the treasures are and show you everything there but then you have to choose whether or not what you see is a treasure.

Picuter: Eyem Beck

Based on that I designed a sample of tour guide in a shape of unisex bracelet which will accompany people to different island that are offering education tools, where there are tours within the island that will show all the opportunities within the islands. This object is very easy to use, it communicates only with owner so it will not bother others and it exchanges dialog best on triggered command from user which will give time to them to take their time and explore things.This sample will cover three islands that are designed for different proposes but tools within them can be used for education.

1. IBM business centres: for computer and business related subjects
2. Boracay: educational island, mainly focusing on self-governed learning
3. Science Friday: for science related subjects

Although each of the island takes a specific approach but there are common shared tools within them, items below mentions some of those tools with a short description about them.

But before reading that let me first clarify “what an educational tool is?” based on my opinion: education tool can be anything that will add a value of knowledge to person or help them in learning things.

• Places for meetings, gatherings, socialization: this places are consider as one of the main tool for informal and colborative learning where people with same or different ideas can get to gather and exchange experience, information and knowledge.
• Lecture rooms, conference rooms and amphitheatres: for one way knowledge transformation or mmore formal discussions these places are the best tools to be used to meet those purposes.
• Objects to show Pictures, slides, audio and video: some of them are one way knowledge transfer which can be used without presence of educator. This is the good way to engage students and provide them with resources that can be helpful. On the other hand, such tools can be used for group activates with both students themselves or in the presence of the educator, as tool to facilitate the discussions about different topics in real time.
• Books, projects and newspapers: these tools can be either interactive or one way communicators. In some of these islands like IBM innovation pod, projects are linked to news on the web as addition source for student’s information and in Boracay some student projects are available (rez on demand) both as resources and group decisions.
• IBM provides meeting with authors that is a unique opportunity for students to discuss with authors of the books, ask their questions and learn from others ideas.
• Boracay provides interactive objects with research background such as design centre and the audio room. Moreover, it provides educators with whiteboards, a chat recorder that will email a transcript to you every few minutes and in the case of people’s consent recording the meeting.
• Science Friday is providing in- world meeting for their Friday radio broadcasts which will allow people to discuss about the subject and share their ideas which is good example of informal learning.

MUVEshow

 7 Dec 2008

Emerge Island, Second Life

there is no word that can descripte that night… GLORY is all i can say…

we had everything that can make a fashion show interesting

• sexy purple cat
• Gold fingre
• pixie
• winter flames
• snow queen
• lady in red
• santa clues
• and so much more

Best thing about the show was you could were whatever you wished and we dances alot after the event….

those who weren’t there… basically you MISSED a lot

below are some glimps of that amazing night

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Pyramid Portrait Gallery

This week was all about identity and an art gallery to present what we took out of the experince we had this week, the answers to… who you are? how you look? why you look like that? and all other questions which can claify the reality behind each avatar.

So this is what I have to say about what was this week all about for me…

Questions about “who you are” is hard to answer in SL, however it’s not impossible. So many people believe that you can be “who you want” and “what you want” in SL but I might stand there alone and saying NO…

NO, you can’t be who you want to be… and NO you can’t be what you want to be… You are only who you already are… being who you are might not be physically apparent but mental status. Let’s give an example….

I can’t be Dana Summer… I don’t have the voice

I can’t be Einstein … I don’t have the intelligence

I can’t be Rafaela … I don’t have the talent

So I believe SL is the place to show who you are inside … that appearance can each time reveal a part of your inside…

Second Life look is more about “who you are” than our Real Life because then you don’t have limitation… some will say look at her, she is overweighted in RL but she looks like Madonna in SL… But does anyone asked her what you how you would like to look when she born? What about the guy who has Patrick Dempsey’s hair in SL but actually bald in RL?

I believe SL identity is more REAL that real life, that is why I created the Pyramid Portrait Gallery in SL (muvenation island). A black small pyramid that you can’t see anything unless you go through it and look inside…. Just like our personality… you can’t see anything unless you look through someone and see his/her inside beauty.

Why black?…from outside it is a blocky black pyramid… that is how close minded judgmental people see others, but if someone is brave enough to walk through, they can see the inside beauties. There is no description inside… no names… no identity… it’s up to you want you wanna see… it’s up to your mind to find out the mystery behind each Portrait.

There is a cushion on the ground, a key to see things better, lets call it the  WISE EYE, something that will help you see things better…it goes round and round like life and brings you back to the place you were, to give you another change to make the best perception.

If you have time, go there, Viki is standing there ready to great you.

see you there (MUVEnation, 131,121,201)

Interview with Viki Silvansky

 

Greetings everyone!

Today we are interviewing special guest from MUVEnation program in which we are going to ask her questions about herself and what motivated her to become who she is today.

Hello, and welcome to this program.  I’m sure our readers will be very interested to know the background behind this blue head avatar.

 

Q: Tell us why “Viki”?

A: the inspiration behind my name came from Isaac Asimov’s fictional computer introduces in “I, robot” which stands for Virtual interactive Kinetic Intelligence (VIKI). In that book she was a central positronic brain which served as a central computer for robots to provide them with a form of “consciousness” recognizable to humans and develops an interpretation of the “three laws of robotics”. 

 

Q: that’s an interesting name. I would guess you wanted to have Vicky as your name but you couldn’t get it so you put it as Viki. What about the family name?

A: my family name is “Silvansky”, this is because I understand Russian I to me it sounds like Russian which makes me feel comfortable with.  On the other hand, it was in kind of harmony with the name.

 

Q: Can you explain a bit about your history?

A: yes of course, I am an ordinary girl born last year in the cold winter day.  As everybody else, my first days of live were not that easy.  I had to struggle to learn how to walk, or talk, or even sit.  But after a while things started to get better, are starting to find friends and you places which would help me to feel comfortable.  Going shopping those days was one of the most interesting things for me.  But that didn’t last long; I started finding building of objects as a fascinating activity and decided to spend more time on it.

 

Q: what was your main motivation behind your existence?

A: it is a long story, and quite hard to explain.  When I born for the first time I had a predefined responsibility to serve which was exactly related to the name I choose for myself.  My activities started to serve the same purpose too, finding ways to control autonomous machines and I had to admit I was good in what I was doing.  But i was a bit depressing, i was spending hours and hours in one place trying to make things work, without anyone passing around or interaction with any other object. After a while, I started to think what I would like to do next so I would not feel like I’m “Tom Hanks” in “Cast away”. On the other hand, i didn’t want to do only one thing in my whole life and neither what to party every day, so I started to look for around for interesting things.  Some of those interesting things were how to learn some skills to connect my world to the others world and how I can help people to learn from what I already know. That would give me the possibly to interact with others and enjoy my life.

 

Q: That’s interesting!  I’m sure none of our readers would know these things about you. After living such a life what characteristics do you see in yourself that differentiates Viki Silvansky from others?

A:  wow, difficult question to answer actually.  hmmmmm…. I have blue hair as you can see, I love high heels,  I’m quite honest most of the times, You’ll see me nagging a lot and I can get easily get angry over close minded people, I’m a bit risky person, I enjoy teaching and I really love helping newbies.  I think that’s it

 

Q: good to know these, but you usually give a wrong first impression, did u know that? Most people were thinking that you are a selfish, cold blooded, bossy, showoff person. I’m asking this because as I know in your world you can be whatever you wish to be, so how did you build yourself in relation of the effects you’d like to produce?

A: LOL, they might not be wrong fortunately we are in the world that we can be whoever and whatever we wish to be which empowers you in a way. Looking cold blooded may be because of my hair and eyes which will keep judgmental people away. I think that’s kind of good thing because if will end up with real friends who would like me for who I am inside. And yes I can be a bit bossy, and I happy that my look reflects that… if I’m sure about something then I would love them to be the way I know and that’s the time that I will try to convince others as well. But the results are usually on the favor of them too and I would not the only one to abuse others so I can get what I want.

 

Q: what are your main activities here?

A: I usually build things mostly on Surrey Island, that’s where I work.  Sometimes I do scripting as well but not every day. If I have some free time I would usually go to other educational island such as University of Idaho which I have a lots of friends there. Sometimes I attend conferences as well where I can learn new stuff and get to know new people.  Every once in a while I go to Frank’s Jazz palace because I love the music there and I miss wearing beautiful dresses and many other things

 

Q: so you have long list of activities here, but your profile is empty… why?

A: good question, I decided to keep it empty till I know who really I am. Its hard to know everythings in few months, so i thought it would be better to not have things there untill i will sort out my philosophy of existance and then write thing there. I’m almost reaching that point and hopefully I would change it in few months.

 

Q: thank you very much Viki for you time and honest answers. I wish you the best for your journey through your life.

A: thank you for best wishes Anna and thanks for asking interesting question. I hope I answered to the questions that your readers would like to know. But if know they can always comment on your blog and I would be happy to answer that.

 

Q: that would be great. So, dear readers feel free to ask her any question take care and good bye

A: good night

The professional avatar? haha

 

SL is providing the opportunity to use 3 dimensional representations of data and one of these representations is clothing and appearances. I divide different perspective of professional avatars to 4 main groups:

1. Those who believe they “don’t need”: because they just what to focus in the content of their interaction such as those educators that you will see with newbies cloths after a year
2. Those who think “SL is Real life”: they think that they should look like them self’s or professional,  having the same values as RL
3. Those who would like to stay in “moderation”: believing that SL in not RL and they can be as creative as they want but considering being tolerable by other people they interact with.
4. Those who believe that “what you see is just lines of code not me standing naked”: how can possible do anything they wish.

You may wonder which group I belong… the answer is GROUP 3

I have tried different ways to deal with students as professional avatar and I found that it’s important to know the audience. Based on the students I would look different so that they will be comfortable with their teacher. I examined what I’ve learnt in two different scenarios which both were a success for me.

Experience 1: last year I had to present SL to some of university lecturers and staff most of them never played computer games or SL. for them seeing some bit odd could force them to thing this is a stupid gave and never try it back again. At that time, i decided to make Viki not exactly look like Anna but have some kind of relation between them. I decided to wear jeans with boots in RL and even designed a university T-shirt with Viki’s big picture at the back. On the other hand, Viki had the same style black hair, the same T-shirt, jeans and boots. Everyone was almost amazed by the similarities that they could see, that this is not a “world of warcraft” kind of thing and everyone was feeling OK with Viki. after a while when they got used to Viki, the whole story changes and that was when I started triggering the excitement part of discovering what you can be within their minds so I changes things to be different from me but still pleasant.

Experience 2: on the other hand, for teaching those who are in-world only or those how have some ideas about computer games but not much of an interest in SL, I decided not to look like myself and show them something that they say “wow” or even “interesting”. The main key for teaching them was to show “what more I can do here” and motivate them to continue using SL. for that reason, Viki ended up being Barbie like girl with a blue hair, kind of cold face, natural skin girl. For them feeling that you can still be acceptable with blue hair and a cold face as a friendly person were a big step and a motivation to explore what else can be there.

Considering that I usually deal with newbies, while the approach might be different but there are some points that will stay as principles for all sections such as:

• Viki wouldn’t look like her best so that they will not feel bad and being in a reachable step for them to have as goal.
• She would be as human like avatars because it a far too much for a newbies to be comfortable with a bunny or a dragon
• She would refer to her first step to comfort others about the things that might not go well in first steps
• She would not wear things or attach scripted things to her that might distract students (there is already enough distraction in SL)

There is something regarding teaching in SL which i thing is REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT:

Before you start teaching things in SL you should teach them first about the reality of living a second life if they don’t already know it…

I have faced many people that are trying to make a RL out of SL but that is not going to work. Keeping things real in educational environments will misguide them to the idea that whole SL is like that… NO, thats not the reality… reality is that you will see dragons, rabbits and naked people…

If teachers are not going to make sure that students know all the facts about the environment that they are going to use, students might end up confused even disgusted from what they will see in SL specially with articles being published in BBC and other newspapers these days.

 

Some Q & A:

Q: Do you think avatar appearance is an important aspect of educational activities that are being undertaken in Second Life?

A: yes, it is an important aspects because in most of the cases that what others will see as the person. This can come to help to increase the relationships however it should not become as the major problem or a standard way to dress up for professional purposes.

 

Q: What does appearance say about us in a teaching situation in Second Life – to what degree is it the same as real-life?

A: I believe it reveals about thier creativity first and sometimes even it reveals how risky people they are while likes it back to not being affiar of trying new things even if they might be rejected

 

Q: What is an appropriate professional avatar appearance for education?

A: For me, there is no such a concept as “professional appearance”, you might be more effecting in a red ballroom dress than in a gray suit.

 

Q: Does your avatar have a professional appearance for educational contexts? Yes, no? Why?

A: NO, because i believe in it but that doesn’t mean that I will not consider my students and what will make them feel good (but I’m sure wearing a gray suit will not even make Viki feel OK)

 

Q: Is there any appearance you would never use to teach in Second Life and why?

A: I will prefer not to teach naked, because of don’t have people to get divorce 

 

Q: The ability to change avatar appearance could be described as an affordance of Second Life. How can the ability to alter avatar appearance be used as a teaching tool?

A: changing appearances can help teachers to express their ideas, viewpoints and even imaginations. It can help them to make a point of things with wearing the right thing and most important of all motivate their students.

Designing a micro-learning session

Activity 8

In the last blog I mentioned about my view of you in-world orientation places and how they use different approaches for helping newbeis. In this blog, the focus will be on out-world source called “Global Kids Curriculum (GKCx)“ and the method it use to motivated users to try and learn new things so that  I will finally be able to come up with I own learning environment in-world used GKCx methods. The curriculum is divided into 9 main levels, each including some related modules with predefined missions for students to carry out. I’ve been asked to choose one modules out of 4 modules (appearance, walking and flying, talk a close look and chat) within level one as part of my weekly activity and develop my own environment based on that.

I read through all of these modules and have look at the others and realized that appearance is one of the most complicated actions with level one and this module is being followed by level two “avatar: cloth“ module. Moreover, from my personal experience of teaching students how to use SL, I realized that they will prefer to fix they look before they want to do anything else (specially management and politic students) which give them a sense of ownership (at first stage) over their avatar and reflects them more than default avatars. This usually gives them the confidence to interactive with other avatars; not feeling that they are different.

Based on these points, I decided to design my environment based on “appearances“ to that I will be able to adopt it for “cloths“ as well. But the main point considered in the design and development should be following points:

• Allows the development of the Mission’s Powers
• It’s engaging and playful
• Complies with the list of principles for an effective design of an orientation session.

So this is my design scenario J  how much it fits the following characteristics you can judge…

“ An avatars will come to the orientation place, and what they will see is a notice board asking “this is a game that you can choose to look like either Merlin Monroe or G.W. Bush at the end of them, decision is put to you… follow the light and click on them to guild you through”. So basically at that point avatars will start a game with a mission to look like someone and now they have to start follow the lights.

The lights are sequential so you should pass to activate the other one so in each stage users don’t know exactly what is waiting for them.  Lights are standpoints which users will click on them and get the position of changing appearance. By users click and stand a notice board will appear with information in each stage to help them change their appearance such as the shape, skin, hair and …

Choosing different genders can even help users to learn how to switch between different avatars as well and later the chooses can be changed or even for advanced avatars become randomized. At the end of the path, there can be a mirror to show them how they look and a notice board of how they can take a picture of that they created and compare with this what they decided to look at first place.

This is not only an individual design but also can be used for group learning. As long as most of the objects are invisible until the user reaches there so basically they don’t need much of a pre-designed space. They can be copied so there will be some number of them to go through and finally other student or course constructors can judge who the winner of the game is.”

This is the best activity I have done so far…i love thinking about the next interesting idea to develop. I’m not sure how successful this idea will be but I think this would a nice experience for newbies and I would try to develop it in SL but the main challenge for me will be scripting them as long as I’m lazy (really lazy) when it comes to scripting and possibility it will take some time to finish it. 

So dear readers feel free to contact me if you are interested in this project and I’m sure we will enjoy it more if we work together.

Orientation Spaces

 

Activity 7

Today I went to visit some orientation island to analyse how they approach new users (newbies) and what tools they use help them learn better. I spend some time mainly in two places:

• Orientation partly interactive, Virtual Ability (135,124,23)
• NMC Orientation (107,114, 39)

I went to see these places as I’m playing the role of newbies with following basic characteristics:

• I don’t know how to control my avatar  
• I don’t know how to fly
• I don’t know how to change my camera view

I first went to “orientation partly interactive“ and find myself in a big circle highlighting how to control my avatar for moving around… As a person who likes smart design, i have to admit that I loved that place. They had very big notice boards which will give you the ability to read easily with a wooden flat surface to walk, highlighted with green big arrows. The path was so clear that there was no chance of missing them. Moreover the side walk was designed in a way that avatars will stay in the boundaries. Notices there are all a new comer need to know with an actual exercise next to it, to make sure they will learn before they leave, such as dancing floor and bon fine place to sit. They have extended this approach for appearance as well on how to handle boxed of cloths and cloths them self with providing users with examples and freebies.

In the midway a lady which was a mentor there approached me asking whether or not I need some help. I asked her “what is the most difficult thing here?“ and she replied that “for most people, getting this long list of activities in the one session is a bit difficult, not because of the design but the understanding and remembering the actions themselves“. I was lucky to meet an avatar there and ask him for his view on the island. He was so happy with his progress based on the design of the whole session and felt that now he has the ability to handle the avatar. However, I find some miner design problems that I even mention it to the mentor. One of them was related to the flying experience where they put boundaries for users to fly within but there were a big chance that in one or two moments the camera will roll out because of the limited space. The other problem that I faced was the narrow door entrances for whole who still don’t know how to control their avatar perfectly. Other than that everything was perfect J

After that I went to see NMC and from the first moment I realized that the island is more advanced in comparison to previous one, this in not only on the design side but avatars abilities as well. The information provided there could vary from very basic steps to a bit more advances situations. Although, there where different sections to provide what avatars might need even in later stages of their SL but I didn’t quite liked the place as an island for complete newbies. These are lots of things that can be changed to help avatars in learning. Notice boards were added with pictures that would help a lot to know how to handle but at the same time they were positioned higher than normal notice boards which avatars might need to have a step back in order to be about to read. This might then effect the ability to read all the details for some avatars. On the other hand, each notice was places in a office (kind of) place which avatars should go through it, for that each time an avatar should walk straight, then turn left/ right, move a bit closer to the board and again come back the same way, turn and again move straight, and all of these to just see a slide. There was a train kind of thing that will move avatars from one side to the other, but it would not stop at the end, which means if avatars don’t know that they should click on “stand up“ they will be in a loop.

I found some time to have a look at two are places as well like:

• RL student orientation area, Campus (172, 90, 24) and
• Orientation Station, Dore (32, 99)

When I reached the “RL student area“ there was a notice board with a message to give a notecard which I though this might be a bit advance for new people and I was right. I find it more difficult to go through the area trying to act like newbies. Later on, I went to “orientation station“ which was more challenging for that others which Without camera controls and right avatar movements there was no way to go around. The island was designed based on different rooms for each area which will limit the place and with a wrong avatar move the view would be in complete different place. There were a lot of stairs as well which don’t have any edges to prevent avatars from falling down either.

Visiting all of these places made me realize how different approaches can help new people with different bacjgrounds go through learning curve smoothly and if I have to rank them based on how helpful they will be for very new avatars, I will announce the “Orientation partly interactive“ the WINNER.

My Story of First Hours of Life in Second Life

 Activity 6 -week 1

For all of my life, I’ve been fascinated by animated movies and cartoons and suddenly they are telling me that I can be flying ET in the island of fairies now and rainbow hair man the next minute…isn’t that just great

However, my first attempt was far away from fantastic… I had to create 3 avatars before the system will accept any and spent long time to get the system going but all seemed to be ok as long as I had that fairyland in my mind and ………..   The dialogs within my mind continued….

3, 2, 1, and BINGO, I’m there… oooo…what is this? Where am I? Who are these gray creatures around me? Why I’m being pushed? Someone seems to be on my head? This is not like the picture of the SL page? Am I in the wrong place? So what should I do?…

Anyway, after standing still in the same spot (which I didn’t know is the telehub place) for 5 min, I find the courage to make my first moves. I realized after a while that I’m in orientation island so I was excepting to have some kind of slide show (maybe even a web based one) before I actually started to control my avatar. I even tried to talk with some people and ask for help but most of them were in the same situation as me.  The island was far more boring than what I had in mind and it was not helpful in getting me around as well, so I searched for “fun” and ended up in “club” without knowing how to control my avatar. While I was amazed with people’s ability to manage their avatars (they were dancing I didn’t know that animations exist), I bumped into a guy which with my definition at the time was “virtually cool” J (it was completely unintentional J ). That night I was lucky though, he helped me a lot regarding knowing SL. He added me as a friend and taught me how to use the map and mini-map, teleportation and my mouse view. After some time, he suggested showing me some interesting places; first we went shopping for virtual items which I couldn’t really digest it at the time. He even gave me L$100 so I can buy things if I wish to and showed me freebies places such as “deva luka” to get things for free. After fixing my look, he teleported me to “titanic”, which is still one of my favorite places in SL for chillaxing (chilling and relaxing).

After that night, I find the confidence to live my SL and started to explore different places. I started to wonder around and build my network of people which for a while was my only source for help. Afterwards, I decided to search web for how to use SL and I found videos the most helpful tool, specially Torley Lindens posts. In order to gain some experience I would randomly open one of his videos and try to experience it in-world simultaneously. When I started to build things in SL, I found my knowledge on previous 3D application (such as 3dmax) quite helpful to have an idea about the perspectives of different objects and how to handle sets of them as the link objects.

Hmmm, long story short, after more than a year I’m still being surprised everyday and learn as I go along. Now, I see myself not only as Anna but Viki also, with the belief that behind each avatar is a person with all human feelings that controls them.

Message to newbies: In second life you will not face even half of the problem that you face in the first life J and don’t expect your new born avatar run like an adult. Finally, if you are not comfortable in-world use outside sources to learn what you should do in SL.

 

Informal Learning

                                                         

Self-Diagnostic exercise, part A

 

 

 

          

There were many cases that I’ve learned from others specially since I’ve joined SL

My master project was based on “machine ethics” and how that can help to solve gambling problem in Virtual Worlds specifically Second Life. Machine ethic, is a new field which is concerned how machines should interact with humans and other machines, and how to avoid negative consequences of autonomous machines. But to find a way to define philosophy and ethics for machines, you should first know how human philosophy and ethics works. As this was one of the big challenges in my project, I decided to seek help from other people with different backgrounds, theories and viewpoints. I searched SL events list and I ended up with a long list of places such as SOCRATES CAFÉ. So, I gave it a try and went to see what is going on…

That day, they had a pre-defined discussion which was not related to what I wanted but that didn’t stopped my from discussion my topic. I excused them and tell them how important is for me to get others ideas. They let me explain my topic and then they started giving feedback to me based on their viewpoints.  Sometimes they were just asking questions which I didn’t had an answer for them at the time but I’ve realized that in order to make my project implementable, I need to find out the answers to those questions. Finally, that discussion became one of the most important steps in my project and I learned a lot from others. The importance of that discussion and the outcomes were so significant that I added it to the appendix of my dissertation as a proof of the ideas and where I learned them.

 

I hope that people in that meeting learned something as well… some questions and answers highlighted the “aha” moment of some of them which was really pleasing for me.

The following lines are some the interesting dialogs exchanges regarding “using machine ethics frameworks to solve online gambling problems”

 

Questions and answers:

A: I want to create an ethical online casino

Q1: what is unethical about a casino?

Q2: what do you consider to be an ethical casino?

Q3: you want skill based games?

A: I want to create a place to minimize bad chooses

Q4: but is it someone else’s right to take away choices?

Q5: does that limit a person’s free will to pare down the bad choices they can make?

 

A: do you agree that giving knowledge will be an ethical act?

Q: yes viki, but not limiting choices

Q: so then should you be required to take a class before buying alcohol for the first time?

A: why not?

 

Q: how would you get the gambling site owners to agree to that?

A: it’s not for commercial purposes now

Q: you won’t get any to — it’s a highly competitive field. If any of them do anything that cuts profits, they’re out of business. That is like asking the cigarette mfgrs to not sell to anyone addicted to cigarettes….their profits would plummet

Q: that is like selling beer with no alcohol lol

A: not “no alcohol” but I’ll not sell it to u 10 times a day, if u want something with 14% alcohol

Q: then they will just go somewhere else

A: ok, they can go,

Q: you will only end up with responsible gamblers there. Oooo, ok, now I get the point

 

 

Points and feedbacks:

P: I don’t know if objects themselves are good or bad…it’s how we use them

P: I am against setting up a system to limit the free will of man

P: I don’t think it is ethical to change anything unless that thing would prevent life like cancer etc

P: for some people ethics can’t be divorced from their spirituality or religion

P: Personally, I’m a libertarian, so I don’t care much for ‘protecting people from their own mistakes’, but I also don’t believe in allowing others to take advantage of people’s weaknesses…

P: adults should take responsibility for their actions

P: I agree with viki that people can’t take responsibilities without being fully informed

P: You see in this country people have gotten reliant on government and media and society doing their thinking for them. Thus we get the “I didn’t know that…” culture. Because people don’t want to be accountable to their own mistakes in this country

P: I think for online gambling, you could have a system like exists with state-side porn — you have to click through a series of warnings and acknowledgments to partake in it

                                          

The last new “big thing” for me

                                                              

Self-Diagnostic exercise, part B

After a year living my second life, I’m still amazed by it. The graphical parts are wonderful and the possibilities of interactions are never ending…

I have to admit I was telling the same thing when I first started with 3Dmax… but this time there is a different story. I always have this challenge between art and computers science… between something that looks nice and still has computational parts related to it. When I was using other tools like 3dmax or AutoCAD, is considered “my personal interest” as long as it had nothing to do with Software engineering or information systems. But in SL, I can be a computer professional developing graphically nice things in SL which was great for me. There were many “wow” moments for me in SL such as finding a sheep which sends the data back to web using XMLRPC.

For me second life is one of the best tools for simulation, implementation and testing because sometimes just paper based ideas and theories are not making sense and you don’t have huge amount of money to implement then in real work. Using SL changed my whole project from pages and pages of philosophical theories, ethical viewpoints and computational algorithms to a sensible 3 minute demo in SL.

But what I want to do with it? Good question…

Hhhmmmmm, if I could find people interested in “machine ethics” to supervise my phd, I would love to continue using SL as a place to develop my theories. However, I’m still going to focus on teaching and learning aspects of SL as my “personal and professional interest”.