State of Play V: Regulating Virtual Worlds, and Changes in Education, Connecting East and West
basic info 2007/08/21 01:40
I wasn't able to write too much after the first session. So, rather I'm going to try to put down the summaries of the last 3 sessions I had today.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Legal experts explore how controversies related to intellectual property, real-money transfer, gaming as political speech, time-limit addiction laws and the policing of Internet cafes play out throughout the region. They will also draw our attention to culturally variable assumptions that underpin analytical approaches to these issues.Much of the panel discussion revolved around whether it's better to have communities self-regulate or have external forces to step in. At large, there are three forces at play: 1) community of players regulating themselves, 2) game and virtual world makers deciding what needs to happen within through creating systems certain way, 3) actual regulating bodies like the government. Many factors come into play here. Obviously, it'll be the best if all the players and communities act reasonable enough to reach certain social agreements and norms to control themselves; however, not quite so in reality. That's what makes things complicated. Besides, creating laws and regulations for a world that doesn't really exist is a very difficult task itself. For example, let's say there is a crime in Second Life. What country's law should be applied to that member? Is it for Linden Lab to decide? Or should the U.S. government intervene? What if the player was Korean?
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
There has been an explosion of interest in the use of virtual worlds in education. This panel will examine what works and what doesn’t work, and will present some ideas for the effective use of online spaces for student learning. It will also ask examine how children and teens interact within virtual worlds, and what this teaches us about building kid-and-teen-friendly environments for learning and playing.This session was very interesting because I've always known there's so much learning, in a non-traditional sense, that could be done through an environment like virtual worlds. People indeed train themselves and learn a great deal in this kind of environment. They set goals for themselves, leadership becomes visible, and they collaborate with each other to solve certain problems. Some of the examples in the session were astonishing--like teaching classes in StarWars Galaxy. Now how much of this could be applied to the real world education?
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
Experts explore variations in playing styles, the influence of game mechanics on cross-cultural cooperation, the challenge of intercultural communication, and outcomes of forced localization. This panel will also explore issues of society, governance and virtual worlds as a vehicle for people-to-people diplomacy.Well, as you know, that's the goal of this blog. I want to let known to the world what's here in Korea and Asia and see if we can make any connections between East and West. I was actually one of the panelists during this session. But, I wasn't invited as an "official" panelist, but rather as a translator to Judge Unggi Yoon, who is a very well-respected member here. He'd explain what the MMORPGs are like in Korea and I'll translate that into English for the audience. But, hey, I was still up on the stage. What an honor! ;)
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
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