[Robin Williams is the newest member of the ALA TechSource Blog Team. Welcome, Robin! Recently she and I met and chatted on ALA Island in Second Life, the 3-dimensional virtual world. The text chat transcript of our conversation is pasted below. Greylin Fairweather is the name of Robin's avatar in Second Life, and Maxito Ricardo is my avatar.]
-- Tom Peters (interim editor of the TechSource blog)
[] Greylin Fairweather: Maxito Ricardo!
[] Maxito Ricardo: Hi, Greylin
[] Maxito Ricardo: Welcome to the TS blogging team!
[] Greylin Fairweather: Thank you : )
[] Greylin Fairweather: I'm very excited about it
[13:02] Maxito Ricardo: What are your thoughts, hopes, fears, etc. as you begin your TechSource blogging thingy?
[13:03] Greylin Fairweather: I hope to bring relevant school library technology information in an interesting and useful way.
[13:03] Maxito Ricardo: great!
[13:03] Greylin Fairweather: I am a born techie, but a literature major so I can usually make it accessible.
[13:03] Maxito Ricardo: Hey, I'm an old lit major myself.
[13:03] Maxito Ricardo: Anything in that area really have you revved up at the moment?
[13:04] Greylin Fairweather: I'm doing a lot with documenting the ephemeral
[13:04] Greylin Fairweather: how do you capture what you do on the internet, from web pages to virtual worlds
[13:04] Maxito Ricardo: Great need for more study, research, and tools in that area.
[13:05] Greylin Fairweather: I've been working with Dr. Loertscher a lot on the 21st century librarian concept
[13:06] Greylin Fairweather: and rather than just focus on bringing the social networking computing into the library, I like looking into what the essential characteristics of online communities are and how to translate the best of it into the
[13:05] Maxito Ricardo: Are you finishing up your graduate work at
[13:06] Greylin Fairweather: I finish this semester, yes
[13:07] Maxito Ricardo: I've been pondering the essence of virtual communities, but haven't gotten much past some unstructured pondering.
[13:07] Greylin Fairweather: lol anytime you want to coponder on that I'm in. : )
[] Greylin Fairweather: I've written a little bit and have more planned on it
[13:07] Maxito Ricardo: If we coponder, does that make us a virtual community?
[13:07] Greylin Fairweather: haha
[13:07] Greylin Fairweather: virtually ; p
[] Maxito Ricardo: Coponderers Anonymous!
[13:08] Greylin Fairweather: rofl
[13:08] Greylin Fairweather: I'm doing an internship for Sun Microsystems
[13:08] Maxito Ricardo: So, how are we going to keep track of all this collaborative work we are doing online and in virtual worlds?
[] Maxito Ricardo: Oh, and I want to hear more about your internship at Sun.
[13:09] Greylin Fairweather: screen capture, web capture, machinima
[13:09] Maxito Ricardo: screencasts, podcasts...
[13:09] Greylin Fairweather: And we can share it with posts blogs, ustream and blip, etc
[13:09] Greylin Fairweather: you tube, etc
[13:10] Greylin Fairweather: My biggest concern is that I am very much a practical, this is what you DO kinda gal
[] Greylin Fairweather: rather than a theoretical researcher
[13:10] Maxito Ricardo: You are very action and outcomes oriented?
[] Greylin Fairweather: Yes
[13:11] Maxito Ricardo: That's great
[13:11] Greylin Fairweather: I'm a teacher to the core,
[13:11] Greylin Fairweather: 13+ years
[13:11] Greylin Fairweather: and I like to share useful how to's, solutions
[13:11] Maxito Ricardo: Speaking of outcomes, this
[13:12] Greylin Fairweather: Aww thanks. I still think of our part as more of a beginning
[] Greylin Fairweather: but I love the layout, it's just so easy to navigate
[13:12] Maxito Ricardo: yes, very open and inviting.
[13:12] Maxito Ricardo: For some reason, I always think of an Olympic Village.
[13:12] Greylin Fairweather: lol It's the flags
[13:12] Maxito Ricardo: Maybe this will become the
[13:13] Greylin Fairweather: you should have one to coincide with the real olympics, how fun would that be?
[13:13] Maxito Ricardo: Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day imagining Info Olympics Events.
[13:13] Greylin Fairweather: lol
[13:14] Maxito Ricardo: Retrocon is the marathon.
[13:14] Maxito Ricardo: Reference is Greco-Roman wrestling
[13:14] Greylin Fairweather: rofl
[13:14] Greylin Fairweather: that would be hilarious
[13:14] Greylin Fairweather: For me the greatest bit of the whole virtual world thing is that, as a parent of 2 kids under the age of 5, I get to be home with them and, frankly, am more productive than I would be in a politics-driven cubicle.
[13:14] Maxito Ricardo: great point
[13:15] Maxito Ricardo: Lots of us in SL seem to have young families.
[13:15] Maxito Ricardo: We have four kids, and three of them are three years old.
[13:15] Greylin Fairweather: and I get access--direct access--to a lot of brilliant minds and thinkers that I would not otherwise get to engage with.
[13:15] Maxito Ricardo: So, often when the kids are in bed, I pop into SL as a way to get away while still being within earshot.
[13:15] Greylin Fairweather: I have a 2 year old and a 4 year old
[13:16] Maxito Ricardo: That must be fun.
[] Greylin Fairweather: Yes! We've left the discos for SL lol
[13:16] Maxito Ricardo: My kids are all hopped up on Easter candy at the moment.
[13:16] Greylin Fairweather: haha mine too
[13:16] Greylin Fairweather: no leaving our kids with unreliable babysitters
[13:16] Maxito Ricardo: no need to invest in nanny cams
[13:16] Greylin Fairweather: exactly, waste gas, etc
[13:16] Greylin Fairweather: Did you go to Life 2.0 at all?
[13:16] Maxito Ricardo: no, I didn't
[13:16] Greylin Fairweather: omg it was amazing
[13:17] Greylin Fairweather: all these guys, Nick Yee, Castronova, whose work I love, right there, super stuff
[13:17] Maxito Ricardo: Oh, I love Castronova's work
[13:17] Greylin Fairweather: and that's the great thing about these places, they're filling with useful interactive content.
[] Greylin Fairweather: Yeah! He talked about the exodus to the virtual world
[13:18] Maxito Ricardo: I agree...perhaps faster than the Web filled up with useful interactive content?
[13:18] Greylin Fairweather: perhaps, the way tech moves
[13:18] Greylin Fairweather: but everything we learn here, can be applied out there.
[13:18] Maxito Ricardo: He studies how VW economic activity is having an impact on the real world economies.
[] Greylin Fairweather: Yeah : ) Loved Synthetic worlds
[13:19] Maxito Ricardo: Hey, we could blame the current recession on SL!
[13:19] Greylin Fairweather: lol nah
[] Greylin Fairweather: although...I would spend more money out there, if it made me look that much better with a click
[13:20] Maxito Ricardo: lol
[13:19] Maxito Ricardo: What do you think librarians will be doing in VW's in, say, ten years?
[13:20] Greylin Fairweather: I think that they'll be interactive testing grounds that help us make or improve quality interactive, participatory libraries.
[13:20] Greylin Fairweather: I love the whole third space concept
[13:21] Greylin Fairweather: and anyone who has been in here reads it and thinks, yep, that is what this place is.
[13:21] Maxito Ricardo: VW's are a quick, inexpensive protyping lab.
[13:21] Greylin Fairweather: Where can I safely meet strangers and exchange ideas?
[13:21] Maxito Ricardo: right
[] Greylin Fairweather: They are, and most useful when we carry the ideas out
[13:22] Maxito Ricardo: I've only felt really creeped out in SL only once.
[13:22] Maxito Ricardo: I guess I need to get out more often!
[13:22] Greylin Fairweather: haha
[] Greylin Fairweather: Well and you can always teleport here
[13:22] Greylin Fairweather: Dr. Loertscher was telling me that video games were being blamed for all sorts of ills, obesity, etc
[13:22] Greylin Fairweather: but I think the truth might be somewhat the reverse
[13:23] Maxito Ricardo: yes, teleportation adds a certain edge to any in-world interaction
[13:23] Greylin Fairweather: lol
[13:23] Greylin Fairweather: I think that people are scared, and there are few third places (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), so we stay in.
[13:24] Maxito Ricardo: yes, we all seem to be hunkering down in our real lives.
[13:24] Greylin Fairweather: and since we're in so long, people have developed excellent things to do indoors
[13:24] Greylin Fairweather: supply and demand lol
[13:24] Maxito Ricardo: Do you think virtual worlds have created another aspect of the digital divide?
[] Greylin Fairweather: I think there is a divide anywhere...
[13:25] Maxito Ricardo: yea, any tech advance is going to create a divide.
[13:25] Greylin Fairweather: hopefully technology will drop in price so that more people can afford it
[13:25] Greylin Fairweather: but I'm sure the TV created a digital divide at some point
[13:25] Maxito Ricardo: Until you get to the point where 99.9 percent of the households have adopted that tech
[13:26] Greylin Fairweather: right
[13:26] Greylin Fairweather: there needs to be some infrastructure to make that happen
[13:26] Maxito Ricardo: Virtual worlds seem to be a great place for collaborative networking.
[13:26] Greylin Fairweather: It is unfortunate that some areas don't have access to high speed access. That is to me, a denial of their right to information.
[13:27] Greylin Fairweather: I would never have been contacted by Sun without it.