Foul Language for Drunken Sailors

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I love classic literature. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace may be long, but the rambling philosophical thoughts of his protagonist Pierre Bezukhov, questioning the meaning of life, are well worth the effort. I am currently reading Anna Karenina; and the characters are vivid and real, although set in a time with moral standards far from today’s world. The rich language of books written years ago is not only beautiful but reminds me of the decline of decorum.

Books and movies today are filled constantly with the *F* word. Recently, at our virtual world science fiction literary study, we read-aloud a current sci-fi story and I was so uncomfortable because it was filled with curse words and foul language. (This has happened several times!) I found myself looking ahead at the upcoming paragraphs trying to find a good spot to “hand off” to the next reader because I dislike using foul language very much. In fact, a new colleague and friend (Kyoko) sent an instant message because she could sense my discomfort. Now- don’t go thinking I believe in censorship! No way! A librarian stands up for intellectual freedom! I simply have never used vulgarity as it is not my personal style. Yet I realize others may pull it off well in a spicy conversational way.

What’s the purpose of foul language anyway?

Life has a dark side. We all know ugliness, decay, lewdness and evil lurk in the darkness of our world. But must we seek it out, glorify it, or use it as flippant sarcasm? Has our culture become desensitized? Perhaps some words are meant to shock us. But when overused, they lose the value to shock. What used to be lewd, crude or profane has become commonplace among young people in public and on social media.

What’s a drunken sailor to do when 15 year old girls have stolen all his swear words?

Drunken Sailor PublicDomainVectors.org

There is a place for vulgarity and foul language. I’m sure of it. But it isn’t in my vocabulary. Somebody needs to stand up for the drunken sailors! The oscillation between purity-beauty-idealism and soiled-ugly-realism is but one of the many opposites we swing between in life: war and peace, light and dark, and so on. (This has always been true but awareness of it seems so metamodern.) Are we throwing out the beautiful ideal because we no longer believe it is possible? Oh, but it is. It truly is. I have been married to a prince for almost 50 years through many joys and sorrows and can attest to the reality of dreams coming true.

No more worries about reading those bad words out loud!

Last night, as I placed my bookmark in Anna Karenina (which is far from a sweet syrupy novel which I would find a waste of time), I kept thinking about my dread of reading foul language aloud! It reminded me of how I am repulsed by snakes and I would look away from the cover of the books in the reptile section when I was re-shelving them in the school library (where I was the librarian). This repulsion is not a fear but more of an extreme dislike. The “snake man” with a van full of reptiles came to school one day and I decided to overcome my “so- called fear” by shooting a video of them for our school news show. As I was walking along the school cafeteria tables, looking through the video camera at snakes coiled and wiggling, I felt rather nauseous. I went back to my library office to put away my video camera, I thought to myself, “You know– it is okay not to like snakes! I don’t really need to like them and I don’t really need to like snake man either!” I stayed away the next time he visited the school.

As I put my Tolstoy book on my bedside table last night, I thought, “You know what? It is okay not to want to read the *F* word out loud in the science fiction literary study!” Each time, we ask for volunteer readers and some choose to just sit and listen. So, next time… I will pre-read the story and if it is filled with drunken sailor words, I am going to simply say “I pass tonight”.

Metaverse Librarian and Veteran Colleagues

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Seattle Times article by Christy Karras called us “Veterans of the Metaverse” and I suppose that is true having worked there for 15 years! Definitions of the metaverse are not yet set in stone and can be confusing. My own definition of the metaverse is “a computer generated simulation of reality in which one interacts with others through embodiment using an avatar”. Without the use of the avatar, we can certainly interact online but are simply using Internet applications without a sense of presence together in a shared “place”. Webcam tools, like ZOOM, have their place and have helped us all during the isolation of Covid, but virtual worlds make distance irrelevant when used purposefully.

Valerie Hill (aka Valibrarian) at the Community Virtual Library

Exploring the metaverse is quite a task as there are hundreds of immersive environments and new ones quickly evolving. The original “metaverse” (suggested by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash) is the virtual world of Second Life and the Community Virtual Library has a main branch there along with the Virtual Worlds Education Consortium.

Librarians are exploring these environments and after a long career as a librarian, I find a virtual world to be a perfect fit for providing resources to learning communities. In fact, digital citizenship and metaliteracy can be taught in the metaverse and are rapidly becoming essential life skills. What an exciting time to be a librarian!

Code Poetry Cuts Through to the Heart

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Valentine Download

(a poem written in computer code)

vvv.iwantyoutosmile.now

right click in your head

open each file

convert .tht (thought extensions) to .emt (heart/emotion extensions)

coldbaretrees.are

blowingsmell/winterair.you

hear/thelastofwinterhowl.you

canfeel/springcomingsoon.you

know/whatimean.you

know/whatyoufelt.was

apoem.now

unzip the idea

save target as

🙂 (emoji smile inserted here)

New Poetry Forms

I wrote that poem years ago when I was just beginning to learn about html and the various changes of language in digital culture. It was not actually written in html but the language embedded various suggestions relating to computer language. For example, vvv was used instead of the url WWW to suggest alliteration and the word “valentine”. The various “dot extensions” eluded to the many formats of information and how our thinking is being changed by computer languages.

Using a Free Online HTML Code Generator, I played around with using html with this poem.

It is fascinating to think about the various computer languages that are impacting the way we communicate. Code Poetry is added to my ongoing list of amazing poetic forms. Try playing around with language as it is changing. The poet e. e. cummings broke the rules of grammar in interesting ways and we can, too.

What Does Your Personal Dashboard Look Like?

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It’s personal! Each of us gets to set up our personal dashboard on digital devices (computer screens, smartphones, tablets and more) with our own color schemes, favorite apps, and background pics. Students may have the icon for their classroom learning management program, shoppers have their favorite apps to stores, and we all have favorite creative apps, health apps or travel and weather apps.

Personal screen dashboard

So what’s the big dashboard deal?

In the past, prior to the digital age, sources of information were limited. We had few channels of incoming information, such as radio, television and the books. Research meant heading to the library! Now, the library is in our pockets and so are a million apps that we can personally choose.

My personal dashboard is great, right?

Maybe not so great! This personalization of our incoming and outgoing information (as prosumers: both producers and consumers of content) means that our sources of information are unique and there is no more “shared culture of information”. Each of us lives in our own digital bubble of so-called friends and each of us follows a unique personally chosen never ending stream of information.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, big data companies impact what we see by tracking our preferences, for one thing. If I am seeing completely different information than you are…do we really live in the same world?

Is Confirmation Bias a real concern?

From https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-2795024

Our personal dashboards are impacting the way we think. Back when we had limited sources of information there were gatekeepers (librarians, researchers, reporters, historians, etc.) who helped weed out inaccuracies and helped us trust information. That responsibility for evaluation has been handed to each of us- or should I say thrown on us like a ton of bricks since the Internet has millions of pieces of information bombarding us every minute of the day. Unless we are alert and aware, we easily fall into confirmation bias and our dashboards are turned into narrow-focused channels that do not provide opposing views. Our “friends” become our information sources and we choose them because they think like we do. Without critical thinking and the debate between opposing viewpoints, real learning cannot take place.

There’s Still Hope

Being alert and aware of our thinking, of our dashboards, and of our personal responsibility for metaliteracy is essential. If we can embrace that personal responsibility, we have hope for our well-being, for empathy toward others, for valuing the need to listen to other perspectives and for the (dare I say) need for compromise. Social media has the tendency to promote emotionally charged shares, tweets and posts. When we are emotionally involved with viewpoints (often viewpoints we know little about), our chosen ideologies become more important than listening to others. Hope for our future and for the generations to follow us may rest on metaliteracy and the willingness to listen, to agree to disagree and to give our dashboards some real thought. Perhaps hope for the future may even rest on deliberately choosing to pause and reflect, to resist the share button, and even learn how to keep silent.

Is Meaningless Media Mandatory?

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How Mandated Use of Social Media Began

I was a school librarian when the information hierarchy toppled and print was no longer at the top! Suddenly, my school principal and colleagues looked to me to answer the question “What is happening to information?” And, I became the voice of the school on social media. It was simply dropped in my lap. What kind of information professional would I be if I was not aware of the information channels being used as digital culture emerged?

Often, I have told people how it felt at the turn of the 21st century, when it seemed the floor beneath my feet in the library was shaking! I knew there was no going back and that digital culture would change everything. But, I embraced it and said “Bring it on!” even though I had a distaste for social media and the narcissism of everyone yelling “Look at me!” Much of the content we scroll through is self-serving, unimportant, and rather meaningless. User-generated content sometimes makes me long for the gatekeepers who made authors jump through hoops to get published. Entering a library with stacks of high quality materials gave me a sense of trust in authority and quality that one never finds online. (Sure, there may never have been a “perfect 100% truth” of information, but at least we didn’t have to dig through a pile of nonsense to find a truthful nugget.)

Once Facebook took off, every field seemed to adopt social media as a way to connect us all: business people, educators, long-lost family and special interest groups, for example. And take off it did! Within a decade, Facebook and Twitter impacted the fabric of society and others began to join me in the feeling that it is inherently wrong. Yet, everyone seemed to justify using it because… well, everybody was doing it. Yes, it feels mandated.

A colleague recently told me she deleted all her social media except for LinkedIn and that it feels great. I felt a pang of envy at her bravery to cut it off. But the libraries and groups I work with insist on using social media as the best way to reach out to patrons and provide information easily. Again, it feels mandated.

We’re in a Dilemma

The ME! ME! ME! oversharing of personal information is not the only problem with social media. Data mining uses our information to manipulate our behavior, as pointed out in the Nexflix documentary THE SOCIAL DILEMMA. Our incoming dashboards, unique to each of us, compel us toward personalized ads and a tendency for confirmation bias (following those whose ideas align to our own).

Rather than live in fear, for the past 20 years I have been researching information literacy (and the term metaliteracy which I feel describes it perfectly) with the goal of helping the next generation remain human. I joke that we are all cyborgs and it may be pretty close to the truth. Many young people are aware of the problems encountered on social media and organizations like the Center for Humane Technology are striving to find ways to tackle them. For me, my faith keeps fear away and, without faith, my view of the future would appear dark and dismal. Awareness of the social dilemma which has swept across our planet awakens us to our personal responsibility for metaliteracy.

Meta-Death: Not Facebook Metaverse (Please)

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Literacy in digital culture has been my passion for decades now. And the prefix META has played a big role in my research as I adopted the terms metaliteracy in our metamodern era. In addition, my colleagues have spent years learning best practices for teaching in the metaverse, yet Facebook is just now spotlighting that word and changing the company’s name to META!


Meta! Meta! Meta!

Suddenly the world is criticizing this prefix, probably because many people dislike Facebook but feel compelled to use it. Apparently, META means “dead” in Hebrew! Yet, Meta has Greek roots that often translate as “after, beyond, about or among”. For instance, metacognition concerns thinking about thinking. But let’s consider this idea of meta = death.

Metaliteracy and the Death of Print

I witnessed the close of the Gutenberg Parenthesis (the period when the book was king format of the information hierarchy for 500 years from about the 1500-2000 AD) during my career as a librarian. What a fascinating journey it was! It felt like the library floor was shifting beneath my feet and I jumped into digital culture to figure out how information could be navigated after the death of fixed media. Yes…the word death may fit with metaliteracy! Death of print as king (yet long live print) as well as “beyond print” or thinking “about literacy” after the impact of the Internet.

Of course, a book in print is still a viable format and many people still prefer print books to digital formats or ebooks. Perhaps print will survive long into our future (of course a librarian would hope). But most content today is born digital, creating the need to investigate archival of changing formats as they evolve and the hardware used to access them becomes obsolete.

Metamodernism and the Death of Dystopia

Postmodernism ushered in a period of irony and cynicism as grand narratives were broken down and truth became illusive. A new period is arising beyond postmodernism which may allow room for sincerity, hope, and a balance of tradition and innovation. Postmodern literature brought volumes of dystopian fiction which many found bleak and desolate (even though much of it was quite good and who doesn’t like a good zombie story?).

The name of our current philosophical moment is not yet set in stone, but many, like myself, are proponents of the term metamodernism. In my recent book, Metamodernism and Changing Literacy, I investigate the intersection of our era in time with the need to revisit literacy as it has been revolutionized.

The Metaverse and the Death of a Single Reality

The hype over Facebook’s name change may bring the term “the metaverse” into popular culture, but it has been around since Neal Stephenson coined it way back in 1992 when he wrote Snow Crash. Facebook proports to give everyone a voice and connect them across the globe, which suggests that the company’s vision of virtual reality will build upon those connections. Jaron Lanier (often touted as the Father of Virtual Reality) opposes social media in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and the idea of Facebook creating a VR world seems the antithesis of his philosophical view of a metaverse.

The Metaverse (with a capital M as an interoperable space connecting all virtual worlds) has not evolved, but the many metaverse-esque virtual worlds that I have visited for education are a far cry from what I imagine FB is developing. Space for cartoonish avatars playing social games and dancing around has little educational value and there are many high quality virtual spaces in which one can share a sense of presence for high quality immersive learning. No doubt, multiple realities are on the horizon and my passion for digital citizenship expands alongside them.

What does this jump into metamodernism mean for us? Much of our way of life is different now, perhaps dead to us! Some people say privacy is dead. A “shared culture” of music and media with our own generation may be dead as we each create and curate our own personal dashboard. A new way of living has emerged and we are personally responsible to make it healthy, happy and ethical.

Death is a part of the circle of life and plays a role in the cycle of information and libraries. If META means dead in Hebrew, we are given yet another connotation for our philosophical time, our evolving communication tools, and the way we will live in the future. As winter brings the death to our natural world, spring burst forth anew and we oscillate among the opposites we encounter on this planet. That’s about as metamodern as it gets.

Grammar Cops Blow Their Lexical Whistles

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Is grammar dead now that we use emojis, autocorrected texts and fast-paced instant messages? The Grammar Cops at the Community Virtual Library advocate for good grammar in digital culture through understanding of registers of language.

Understanding when to use formal grammar and when to let it go is a 21st century metaliteracy skill. The Grammar Cops believe that grammar is simply good manners to your reader or listener and is essential to good communication. Language is a living thing and is constantly changing. So, the rules are changing and sometimes they can be broken. Only a good writer can successfully break the rules!

What a lively discussion was had on the virtual beach outside the Community Virtual Library. Come inside CVL to schedule a visit with the Grammar Cops and bring the discussion to your own virtual community or class.

Introducing Enchanting Virtual Reality Soon at Your Local Library

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Is #VR coming to libraries? Yes! But how and why? Librarians have always been in the forefront of innovative technology and have fearlessly adopted changing information formats for centuries. Virtual reality is simply another information format and certainly librarians are exploring uses.

Circulating VR Experiences as Resources

While the Covid 19 Pandemic may have closed many library buildings and slowed the use of VR headsets within them, many libraries plan to provide VR experiences to patrons in the near future including educational simulations such as going inside the human body, exploring space, viewing art museums or encountering historical events. Most librarians and educators agree that VR headsets should not be used by persons under the age of 13 or by those with health problems. Virtual reality on a desktop includes environments like Minecraft which has been widely recognized as an educational space for young people. Researchers currently seek to identify the best practices and purposes for virtual reality for various age groups and perhaps the library is a good place for this exploration.

Libraries Built Inside Virtual Spaces

Putting on a headset to “go inside a book” such as The Diary of Anne Frank might provide a powerful experience, particularly for visual learners. Yet sharing VR as “library resources” is not the only way to utilize virtual environments. The library itself can be built in a virtual space so that patrons can enter together and talk with real people in the same way one might in a physical space. Library programs such as exhibits, storytelling, book discussions, special events, workshops, anything we think of doing in a physical library, can take place in a virtual library. In fact, some things that cannot possibly be experienced in the physical world can happen virtually, such as falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or walking on Mars.

The Community Virtual Library is an example of a “real library in a virtual world” with a main branch in Second Life and outpost branches in numerous other virtual spaces including both desktop and headset VR. Librarians, educators, and lifelong learners can collaborate and learn best practices for virtual environments at CVL and the partnering educational institutions of the Virtual World Education Consortium hosted in sky pavilion above the virtual library.

Community Virtual Library in Second Life
CVL Reference Desk

Yikes! Metaliteracy Needed Now: Young, Old and In-Between!

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My recent article in College and Research Libraries News shares the importance of embedding metaliteracy in higher education but, if you really think about it, metaliteracy is for all of us from tiny tots to the elderly. Have you seen little ones accessing fun games and videos (hopefully somewhat educational) on their parents mobile devices? My four year old grandson recently picked up a wrapper from a kids’ treat and said, “Look there’s a QR code. Let’s see what it does on your phone!” His parents are aware of the importance of limiting screen time and provide him with lots of outdoor activities, but there is no escaping digital culture. Yes, literacy has changed and even the youngest among us juggles multiple formats of information as he becomes a prosumer– both consuming and producing digital content.

Augmented Reality apps are available now for toddlers!

ApplyDu for kids

Elderly Folks have Metaliteracy Needs

Working with elderly people in the library, I am reminded that we all have personal literacy needs. An 85 year old grandmother may want to learn ZOOM or Facetime to connect with family. Choosing which application and which device for communication is part of metaliteracy and the apps keep changing. One elderly woman asked for help setting up her new smart phone and it was her first time using a touch screen device. “Is it me or is this phone really confusing and difficult?” she asked. Learning to swipe up, down and side to side or to gently tap instead of push the screen frustrated her but her phone company told her that the flip phone she had was obsolete and sent her a new model. We have met several times in the library to help her get more comfortable. Metaliteracy includes constant changes in the way we communicate and adapting to changes in digital tools can be uniquely personal for each of us.

Metamodern Students “walk through” Instructional Design

Metaliteracy can be taught in any setting including a virtual world! To help a class of students in Dublin understand their own need for metaliteracy, I “sat on top” of my slides as the students walked through them (which is way less boring than listening to a lecture). Utilizing new digital tools may be fascinating but it requires understanding that metaliteracy is a personal responsibility. Parents, educators, and people of all ages need to think about their changing literacy skills and having conversations about it makes for a good start on becoming metaliterate.

Tech Geeks Help with Constant Changes in Digital Tools

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For 14 years now, I’ve been working with machinima in Second Life and other virtual worlds. I have always been disappointed in my video quality because getting those screen settings set up correctly has been troublesome! First, the viewer has to record with a good graphics card. Then, you have to capture the video in the highest possible quality. And, finally, you have to have the correct settings in the video editor.

Here is my very first machinima recorded at ISTE Island back in 2007. My daughter met me inworld and I took a shot of her crossing a bridge before heading over to the library (what became the Community Virtual Library). Okay- I know it is unwatchable quality! But the memory of that first capture is so vivid and real to me, I just want to keep it in the archives!

Learning to work and help learners in virtual environments requires juggling multiple programs. It is difficult to keep up with the format changes, especially as video has improved with HD and formats (mp4, etc). Having a PLC (professional learning community) is essential and a colleague just took the time to share screens with me and go through all my settings! Thanks so much, Sitearm.

Juggling Multiple Applications and Screens

Sitearm working in Virbela and sharing tools

Searching for Help Online

During our screensharing session, Sitearm and I looked up free open source editing software (Shotcut) on Selby Evan’s blog because we found the problem with my poor quality machinima. I was using an old outdated version of Adobe Premiere that is incompatible with the higher quality video available now. Free open source software tools may not have all the “bells and whistles” of professional software, but hey- the price is right!

Machimima Quality Comparison

Take a look at these two versions (raw footage) of our recent CVL tour to 3rdRock at the immersive storybook Alice in Wonderland.
First, the video exported using Adobe Premiere (720×480) at 30 fps. Scroll to minute 2:14 or so to get a good comparison.

Wonderland Version 1

Now- compare with this higher quality version of Wonderland from Shotcut (1920×1080) at 60 fps. Scroll to minute 1:19 to see the same scene as the one above.

Wonderland Version 2

Shooting, editing, and sharing machinima can be time-consuming and I do not consider myself a professional. However, archiving educational experiences in virtual environments is important in order to document the potential they hold for learning in the future. Digital archival has become essential for us all- both professionally and personally- as much of life is spent online.

We can share tips and tricks on youtube as tutorials are plentiful. There is no way we can individually keep up with all the changing technology tools available but developing a PLC (or a PLN if you prefer to call it a professional/personal learning network) is sure a big help. Visit the Community Virtual Library if finding colleagues in virtual learning environments would benefit your teaching, learning or life.