Second Life and the role of educators as regulators

Regulation, governance and harms stemming from the use of virtual worlds and other Massive Multi Media Online Role Playing Games (MMMORPGs) in higher education, are poorly understood and under-researched issues. Second Life, developed by Linden Labs, provides users with a series of generic ‘terms of service’ and codes of conduct, yet place the bulk of responsibility on individual users or groups to report misbehaviour or develop their own behavioural codes, enforcement procedures and punishments suited to their particular needs. There is no guidebook to assist users in the processes of risk identification and management. As such, the various benefits of MMMORPG technologies could be offset by the risks to users and user-groups from a range of possible harms, including the impact of actual or perceived violence within teaching and learning settings.

While cautioning against the direct translation of real-world regulatory principles into the governance of virtual worlds, this paper suggests theoretical and practical guidance on these issues can be taken from recent criminological developments. Using Lawrence Lessig’s (1999) landmark work on cyber-regulation as a starting point, this paper examines the literature on video-game violence to illustrate the need for educators show awareness of both real and perceived risks in virtual worlds as a core element of an emerging educational pedagogy. We identify how the multiple roles of the virtual-world educator become useful in framing this pedagogy to improve student learning, to dispel myths about the risks of immersive technologies and advocate for their adoption and acceptance in the educational community.

Avatar Obama in the age of liquid celebrity

Barak Obama, orator extraordinaire, the embodiment of the American success myth, 'global' prophet of the adoring masses and multi-media auratic figure, is the leading illustration of what is the expanded nexus of celebrity, spectacle and politics in the age of what Zygmund Bauman refers to as liquid modernity or 'the era of disembedding without re-embedding' (2001, p. 89). This is the era in which a traumatic sense of fear, uncertainty and transience defines one's relationship to the nation state, and social (media) centre, as they lose their economic singularity and cultural coherency and cohesiveness in a world system ever inter-connected and driven increasingly, incessantly by supra-corporate concerns and spectacular celebrity-based presentations. In this world of 'togetherness dismantled' (Bauman 2003, p. 119), the disenfranchised individual feels they cannot meet the trans-capital intensive, show reel-like, boundaryless world on solid ground. That adoration, or a liquefied definition of it, is key to this imagined and affective communion between Obama and those who adore him, suggests that there is a terrible wanting and simultaneous waning to those who look for such rootedness and the promise of deliverance in the celebrity political figure. This is a charismatic authority figure who promises this solidity yet streams in and out of material view, unable to fix or properly propagate their communion beyond triumphant spectacularism. Their 'lightness of being' (ibid, p. 123-9) is powerfully seductive and decidedly empty because it echoes the instantaneous (instant) way in which all lives are increasingly led. I will suggest that liquid celebrity is one of the cornerstones of liquid modernity, and Barack Obama is the epitome of this 'runniness'.

Click if you like this or occupy as spectacle : situationism and a technological derive

This performative, multi-media lecture re-reads Guy Debord’s book, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media and the Internet play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. Debord claims that all ‘having’ — that is, all forms of accumulating capital — ‘derives its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances’, and that individual reality, which is shaped by social forces, can ‘appear only if it is not actually real (Debord, thesis 18).’ Using the multiple functions and staggering proliferation of various image making technologies used to record and represent OCCUPY actions as a starting point, we respond to Debord’s proposition by examining the ways his analysis of the spectacle both enables and impedes a thorough critique of social media as a spectacular technology par excellence. Part reflective essay, part critical analysis, and part performance, ‘Click if You Like This’ connects various situationist strategies of ‘artistic interference’ — such as the dérive and détournement — with expanded cinema in order to generate a series of questions and provocations about the politics of place, the degradation of social space, networked images and the ubiquity of contemporary ‘spectacular’ technologies, which have colonized all forms of everyday life. This presentation questions whether contemporary forms and strategies of interference are the same as their historical precedents.

Multimodal theatre experiences : Africa and 2 dimensional life of her

Australia’s theatre for young audiences (TYA) has concentrated on young people’s interest in techno-savvy narrative complexities since the early 1990s, and has done so with positive outcomes. Building from a reflective inquiry, which is based on a TYA practitioner’s viewpoint, I explore two Australian contemporary theatre productions for mixed audiences: My Darling Patricia’s Africa (2011) and Fleur Elise Noble’s 2 Dimensional Life of Her (2011), which utilize old and new technologies for differing purposes. I present the following article in two parts: The first section briefly contextualizes TYA plays in Australia using digital technologies, along with a review of the literature that introduces an ongoing dialogue about digital media in theatre. The second part showcases the creative development process and the synopsis of Africa and 2 Dimensional Life of Her before I discuss the use of old technology in Africa in the form of a techno-tele-character, and the impact of new technologies in 2 Dimensional Life of Her as a transmediated theatrical occurrence. Recommendations are made for ways that TYA practitioners might consider mixing old and new technologies with the live to compete in the cultural marketplace.

Click if you like this, or OCCUPY as spectacle : a technological derive

This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media, and the proliferation of digital images play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. It explicitly addresses the connections between global capitalism, public space and digital technology by responding to selective quotations from Debord’s book in creative and anecdotal registers.

Testy

Short story commissioned by Slow Canoe for multi media live reading

Occupy this: a dialogic derive

This dialogue is the text-based component of an evolving performative multi-media lecture. By re-reading Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, in relation to the global Occupy movement and the rise of social media, we ask: in what ways does the proliferation of digital imagery enable and limit this recent form of political activism? By subjectively responding to selective quotations from Debord's writing, we link the triumvirate of global capitalism, public space and digital technology, producing commentary on the displacement imposed by contemporary 'spectacular' technologies, the networked 'technical image' and the politics of public space.

Souvenirs of the senses

Migrant mobilities: cruel optimism and the case of AJ D’Cruz

Migrants are mobile by definition. They literally uproot themselves and move to sometimes-distant lands for a variety of reasons. Some move away from real or imagined threats to their very existence. Others seek a better quality of life. And some adventurous souls are inhabited by a restless wanderlust – a desire to roll the dice and see what happens. Such mobility requires fortitude and faith. Migrants move through space and, if they have an aspirational disposition, they attempt to accumulate symbolic capital to move up those social and economic hierarchies that bestow status and prestige within their adopted homes. The migrant journey to Australia often ends with the realisation that one has to make and re-make one’s identity, and perform a series of adjustments – adjustments in terms of comportment, dress, accent and disposition. My father was a migrant to Australia. More specifically, he was an Anglo-Indian migrant – a member of the ‘mixed-race’ community produced by British colonialism. He left India for the UK in 1962 and, after living in London for 10 years or so, immigrated to Australia in 1973, dragging his immediate family with him. Lured to the so-called ‘lucky country’ by the optimistic prospect of building wealth and prosperity under the Southern Cross, his ambitions were thwarted by casual and institutional racism. He died prematurely at the age of 53. This multi-media presentation tells his story through a series of encounters with the historical archive and the material remnants of my father’s relatively short life (letters, photographs, sound recordings, 8mm films). It provides a singular account of the performance practices involved in becoming a ‘New Australian’. Combining personal anecdotes and philosophical ruminations on history, technology, and cultural identity, the performance interrogates and performs a series of migrant mobilities.

High-performance switching architectures for optical networks

The need for high bandwidth, due to the explosion of new multi\-media-oriented IP-based services, as well as increasing broadband access requirements is leading to the need of flexible and highly reconfigurable optical networks. While transmission bandwidth does not represent a limit due to the huge bandwidth provided by optical fibers and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, the electronic switching nodes in the core of the network represent the bottleneck in terms of speed and capacity for the overall network. For this reason DWDM technology must be exploited not only for data transport but also for switching operations. In this Ph.D. thesis solutions for photonic packet switches, a flexible alternative with respect to circuit-switched optical networks are proposed. In particular solutions based on devices and components that are expected to mature in the near future are proposed, with the aim to limit the employment of complex components. The work presented here is the result of part of the research activities performed by the Networks Research Group at the Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems (DEIS) of the University of Bologna, Italy. In particular, the work on optical packet switching has been carried on within three relevant research projects: the e-Photon/ONe and e-Photon/ONe+ projects, funded by the European Union in the Sixth Framework Programme, and the national project OSATE funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Scientific Research. The rest of the work is organized as follows. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to network context and contention resolution in photonic packet switches. Chapter 2 presents different strategies for contention resolution in wavelength domain. Chapter 3 illustrates a possible implementation of one of the schemes proposed in chapter 2. Then, chapter 4 presents multi-fiber switches, which employ jointly wavelength and space domains to solve contention. Chapter 5 shows buffered switches, to solve contention in time domain besides wavelength domain. Finally chapter 6 presents a cost model to compare different switch architectures in terms of cost.

Encouraging adolescents toward mental health careers via website biographies.

This project designed, developed, implemented and is currently evaluating the effectiveness of an interactive, multi-media website designed to encourage adolescents to consider careers in mental health. This Web-based learning environment features biographies of mental health scientists. Evaluation is conducted in a systematic, structured way using cognitive achievement, usability (ease of use), and affective scales (e.g., fun to use) as outcome measures

A Tutorial of the Mobile Multimedia Wireless Sensor Network (M3WSN) OMNeT++ Framework

In this work, we will give a detailed tutorial instruction about how to use the Mobile Multi-Media Wireless Sensor Networks (M3WSN) simulation framework. The M3WSN framework has been published as a scientific paper in the 6th International Workshop on OMNeT++ (2013) [1]. M3WSN framework enables the multimedia transmission of real video se- quence. Therefore, a set of multimedia algorithms, protocols, and services can be evaluated by using QoE metrics. Moreover, key video-related information, such as frame types, GoP length and intra-frame dependency can be used for creating new assessment and optimization solutions. To support mobility, M3WSN utilizes different mobility traces to enable the understanding of how the network behaves under mobile situations. This tutorial will cover how to install and configure the M3WSN framework, setting and running the experiments, creating mobility and video traces, and how to evaluate the performance of different protocols. The tutorial will be given in an environment of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and OMNeT++ 4.2.

Business model with discount incentive in a P2P-cloud multimedia streaming system

Today P2P faces two important challenges: design of mechanisms to encourage users' collaboration in multimedia live streaming services; design of reliable algorithms with QoS provision, to encourage the multimedia providers employ the P2P topology in commercial live streaming systems. We believe that these two challenges are tightly-related and there is much to be done with respect. This paper analyzes the effect of user behavior in a multi-tree P2P overlay and describes a business model based on monetary discount as incentive in a P2P-Cloud multimedia streaming system. We believe a discount model can boost up users' cooperation and loyalty and enhance the overall system integrity and performance. Moreover the model bounds the constraints for a provider's revenue and cost if the P2P system is leveraged on a cloud infrastructure. Our case study shows that a streaming system provider can establish or adapt his business model by applying the described bounds to achieve a good discount-revenue trade-off and promote the system to the users.