Where measurement, not memory is the absolute arbiter of value

"For if the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction." P14 Simon Schama Landscape and Memory

Despite having spent many years studying botany, I am not a gardener.  I much prefer to think about the physiology and biochemistry of plants than to nurture them.  However, like most generalizations there is an exception.  I find it restful and somehow satisfying in the holiday season to lay waste to the plant kingdom.  It is a seasonal thing.  I like hacking, breaking, ripping, slashing, and wrestling plants from the undergrowth - uprooting plants that have gone wrong.  And yes it is just a little disturbing to realize that the only times I am reckless and wanton in the shrubbery nowadays is when I am tearing out vegetation.

Today I battled with the ivy engulfing a disused garage built from volcanic rocks at the end of the section – helped and hindered in equal measure by the dogs, Nibbler and Stan.  As a consequence I am deeply scratched, sticky with sap, and densely coated with fragmented plant matter, and as the day closes I have only cleared one scoria wall..  One wall doesn’t sound impressive but like Schama discovered with the Thames – the wall uncovered is “a line of time as well as space” (Landscape and Memory p5).

The uneven surfaces of the concrete steps, the grown over flower beds and the ancient grape vine still tied in places with insulated wire, that I have un-smothered, are "a line of time" – they bring back different memories of my past.  Memories of when the concrete was mixed in a wheelbarrow and the steps were built; memories of when the flower beds were planted, fertilized and tended; and memories of checking the vines, netted to repel sparrows and thrushes, for the deepest most swollen purple grapes and then carelessly spitting out the seeds.

I have been thinking about Second Life over the break.  Like many educators I have been trying to make sense of the blog posts and comments on Terra Nova  and elsewhere challenging and counter challenging claims about

• Linden Labs reported numbers of residents/ avatars/ players, [“We're very pleased to announce that in the last two months, we have added over 1 million Loyal Subjects to our Kingdom."]
• The significance of the corporate nature of the initiative.
• The main topic of SL conversation is sex,   
• The difficulty in finding anyone to interact with (I know these last two claims do not work well together).
• The pedestrian opportunities for individual creativity, and
• The disappointingly limited use of the potential of 3D virtual worlds in an educational context [ to merely recreate the traditional pedagogies found in classrooms and lecture theatres].

I checked out the links on Why should educators bother with Second Life? Rationale for and against and read Leigh’s SL post , SL bookmarks and Bee’s debut in SL

But I didn’t laugh until I read Dmitri Williams SL post on Standard Metrics of Use.  Check out Dmitri’s argument about comparing virtual worlds and see how easily his measures could be tweaked to measure student engagement in learning in a 21st century classroom near you. I loved the way that  his measures for VW are so much tighter and clearer than many of the ideas for measuring student engagement in an educational context.   

I'd like to have measures of these basic things for any given world:
Duration
Intensity
Economic activity
Multiplicity
Active users

Here are my potshots on what those would look like:

The first three are cumulative for all accounts/avatars owned/used.

Duration (could also be called "stickyness"): The amount of time the person has been a user of the world, expressed as a population mean with a standard deviation. This would be retroactive time from today, telescoping backwards. The user need not be on every day. Gaps between logins are allowable, with the maximum allowable time gap between logins being 90 days. Use example: "The average user of MegaWorld has a duration of 83 days." The standard deviation of the mean would help explain whether the typical person logged in once and quit or actually hugs the mean.

Intensity: Average hours per day per user. Sure, subject to all kinds of distortions for people who leave accounts logged on for various purposes (selling goods in Lineage 2, e.g.). Nevertheless, pretty useful as an indicator of bandwidth and interest levels and roughly comparable across worlds.

Economic activity A: A binary variable reporting whether the user does or does not pay for access to the virtual world.

Economic activity B: The average amount paid per user per week across the world population.

Multiplicity: Another population mean, an indicator of the number of accounts or avatars maintained by the user. This number would then be used for the previous three to obtain per-character averages. Note that the number could be either more than 1 or a fraction of 1 if the account is shared.

Lastly, I would like to see the term "active users" simply be anyone who has logged in to the world within the past 30 days. Not perfect, but simple and pretty good for an apples-to-apples measure across VWs.

As a result of re-reading Schama, the assault on the garden and thinking about SL, I find myself completely cured of wanting to measure 21st Century student engagement – what a daft idea.  Instead I want to embrace myth, metaphor and allegory, and to bring back memory as the arbiter of value for the 21st Century Learner.

Comments

[Lineage 2 Cheats]

good points