Sunday, November 11, 2007

Getting Started

I am setting up this blog as a place to think about and record my explorations of Second Life.

I am working with several collegues at Clemson, especially Jan Holmevik, to research how 2L can be put to academic use: both as a pedagogical medium and as a portal for professional research and exchange. We are contemplating buying an island, part of which will be devoted to "WoolfWorld," a Virtual Bloombury project.

Here's my first e-mail about it, followed by a more formal proposal write-up:

Dear all--

I am teaching my Modernist London Grad seminar in the Spring in MATRF. I've re-titled and re-described it to include my recent work in Space/Place, but today's Second Life demo made me wonder if there is some way I could create a space on the graduate island for housing visual archives for the course.

There is a fairly strong interest in Woolf studies in the compilation of some kind of "Virtual Bloomsbury": the cooperation between Clemson Digital Press http://www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/SCRThemed_Iss_VWoolf.htm and the Center for Virginia Woolf Studies (Housed at California State University, Bakersfield)
is an example of how far this process has developed in terms of archiving and producing publications.

I don't really know what I am thinking, but I have quite extensive visual archives on Woolf (and T.S. Eliot) http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/dial/t&vseminar/tvlinks.htm
including PowerPoints illustrating many aspects of their lives and works, and my grad students have been creating a series of visual seminar reports and altered books for the course, many examples of which I have archived. It seems like housing these in Second Life might be a good way to create an on-line community and the next step in virtual Bloomsbury.

There is already a virtual London group on-line http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/projects/projectDetail.asp?ID=55

I bet if I sent out a call for participants on the Woolf list serv, we might get some takers… But I have no idea really what is possible or how much work it would be. I am interested in feedback on these as yet quite vague possibilities..

No comments: