 Well, let me begin. I'm Charlie Nessum. I sometimes introduce myself as an audio blogger. I was the founder of the Berkman Center and delighted to be teaching this course. I'm teaching it with my daughter Rebecca. Rebecca is a graduate of Cambridge, Ringe in Latin, Harvard College, Harvard Law School. She is now a graduate student in computational linguistics here at what do you call it? Yes. The Division of Engineering and Applied Science. Yes. And a very experienced teacher in the Extension School. On the screen now you will see the website for our class, Cyber One Law on the Court of Public Opinion. And I thought I would begin by actually showing you this trailer. This is the trailer for our course, Harvard Law School. I'm teaching a class with my daughter Rebecca this fall. It's a class about argument, but not argument in a courtroom, which is what I usually teach, but argument in the new integrated media space that I call cyberspace. Students will engage this class and make their arguments in a variety of cyber media, through blog, through Wiki, through podcasts, through webcasts, through community television. Students who take our class to the Harvard Extension experience the class in a virtual world for a second life. With me into the virtual classroom where I will introduce you to my daughter Rebecca's avatar. She is a computer scientist at Harvard and a longtime Extension School teacher. Hello Rebecca. Hello. Welcome to second life. This classroom is where we'll be holding our classes and our other meetings. It's a replica of the Ames courtroom at Harvard Law School where the law students will have their classes. As you can see, we can do all of the things here that happen in a regular classroom. We'll watch the videos of the lectures at the law school and we'll have our own lectures and class discussions and more. In addition, in second life, the possibilities for what we can do are endless. If you want to meet with me informally, I'll be holding office hours here in second life. And I'll be holding office hours here in my real office at Harvard Law School. If you are interested in learning more and especially if you're interested in participating, please take a look at our website. The course of publicopinion.com. Gene Kuhl has just come in. Gene, would you put your hand up? Gene is part of our team. Colin Linesmith over here, part of our team. Danny Silverman. So this little trailer is in fact part of the argument of the class. It's a core idea in the class that we are now at a point in terms of the development of digital technology. When making media is within our hands, this little video is made by Dean. I think it cost, I don't know, in fact, it gave me an estimate of somewhere around $1,000 to make, maybe less. But this is, it's within our means. And in a sense, the core idea of this class is to take the metaphor of the courtroom in which we make arguments, arguments that count. But take it out of the courtroom into the wider environment of the new integrated media space in which any one of us can make a little video like this and polish it up and put it up somewhere that millions of people, if it's got the attractiveness to it, can come and relate to. And so in a sense, the title of the course is expressive of what it's about. It is the idea of expressing argument in the wider court of public opinion. But with the goal of making the arguments effective, we're actually hoping to challenge our students to pick something that they would like to see change or something that's threatened with change that they would like to see preserved and make an argument. Our thought is that we will first have them make the argument in quite traditional form, text most typically. But then we will ask them to take that argument and express it in some form of cyber media with the objective of reaching out to an audience and attempting to build an audience for what they've done and evaluating the process that they've been through. Now, my best put forward in this class is Rebecca. And so I would like to ask Rebecca if she would say a few words. Sure. So picking up on what he just said, we as the instructors of the class also have an argument that we're trying to make. What Dad was just talking about was the substance of the course for the students. From our perspective, we're making an argument about education and about the role of Harvard in education. And what we're trying to promote is the idea that Harvard can be improved by making its education open in a variety of ways. And this class is one example. So everything that we're doing in this class to the greatest extent that we possibly can, we're making open to the world. And we're trying to encourage participation from people. So we have enrolled students in the law school and enrolled students in the extension school. But we also hope to have participation from people all over who are interested in for whatever reason in the subject matter of the course. And we also hope to have a way of drawing that energy in and making use of it both for those people to have a satisfying experience and for our students to have a satisfying experience. So the argument that we're trying to make is that our students can have a good classroom experience and a quality classroom experience that is not diluted by this openness. That's in fact improved by the openness. And also that those people who are out there can get more than just a bunch of class materials thrown at them. They can actually have a way that they participate and are drawn in to work with us. So to make it a little more concrete, the students in our class will be doing projects for the class of the sort that we're talking about. But as law students, we don't really expect them to be techies in any particular way. We're trying to teach them how to use various different technology. But one of the greatest resources that's going to be available to them for this class is the wide audience of people who are interested in the course because they're interested in one of the particular technologies that we're dealing with for this course. And because of that, those people will be able to bring a scale and hopefully associate themselves with one of the project groups to help accomplish one of the media projects that we're looking at. So this trailer video that we just watched is an example of what we wanted to produce. But we ourselves were not capable of doing all of the little pieces that made this trailer come out as well as it did. We required the help of Dean to do the video editing and the actual camera work for this course and the help of Rodita to manage the second life part of the video and also to make our mouths move properly. And we required the help of, I'm going to get the name wrong, but I think Tau Takashi to do the machinima, which is the actual camera work that happened in second life. And all of these things come out looking wonderful, not because we learned how to do them, but because we were able to persuasively argue for the importance of doing this project in a way that drew these people's energy into our project. So hopefully that will be the question that we'll pose to you is how can we effectively make the argument for openness at Harvard coming out through the Berkman Center? How can we figure out how to engage the rest of the university in the project of letting the world see all of the great things that we're doing here? And let me just take a step back. This Ames courtroom that you see built in second life was not built for our course. It was rather built for a conference that the Berkman Center participated in, co-sponsored last spring here, called Beyond Broadcast. This was basically a conference that brought together people from public media and community media who are confronting the fact that their traditional markets, the traditional boundaries of their markets are dissolving with the internet. And they see themselves challenged to move into themselves as actors in the integrated media space. And so this replica of the Ames courtroom, which was where Beyond Broadcast was held, was made for that conference and people got into the idea of coming up through mixed media from that conference. And this course in a sense grew right out of that. Now, just to say a word or two more about the openness aspect. In a sense, the design that we're looking for is one that takes a traditional class stimulus. It could be any subject. It doesn't have to be law. It doesn't have to be cyber. A traditional class stimulus which has got to work for a face-to-face audience and make it work for an audience beyond face-to-face. Now, what are those possible audiences? Our ambition is to make it work for a Second Life audience through the Extension School. To make it work as well for a Cambridge Community Television audience through CCTV. To make it work through not necessarily an internet at large audience, but perhaps discreet audiences who experience the program through internet, up through broadband. And to do that in a way that makes each audience feel in some sense that it's the primary audience. So part of the design is that I am the primary host for the face-to-face class. Rebecca is the primary host for the Extension School class and directly relates to that Extension School class. And if we're successful in getting up on CCTV, which is a problem I'll mention to you in a moment. I think Dean is very likely to be the host for that Cambridge Community audience that frames what it is and speaks directly to that audience. And we would replicate that form as we go to other audiences. But the idea is that each audience should be addressed directly by someone that frames the stimulus in a way that makes it suitable for that audience. The second thing I'll mention about the aspect of openness at Harvard. We're not suggesting that all of Harvard necessarily go this way. If we were to do that, I'm sure that it would feel threatening in the nth degree to many, many faculty members. On the other hand, there are many, many offerings at Harvard which would seem to have great potential value beyond our classroom. And we've spoken for years about reaching out to our alumni, to our community, to the world. And here this medium offers us the opportunity to do it. There are tons of problems associated with distance education. Distance education has a basically sorted history of people signing up for money, kind of credit mills getting generated, and the quality of the education going down as the volume goes up, and the whole enterprise turning out or being vulnerable to turning out as a kind of money churning operation. So you can imagine that a university like Harvard is cautious in going into the environment. It's also in some way threatening to a university to think that its word will be spread everywhere. Traditionally, the core of a university has been its library. The scholars come here. We give credit. We charge huge amounts of money for tuition. And so somehow the idea that the product would be offered raises the threat of devaluing the product that we're actually charging significant money for and living on as a business plan. But all of those problems seem to need to be approachable, not necessarily vetoes of enterprise, but definitely demands on those that are creating it to be sensitive to those kinds of issues. So that's a large part of what we're worried about. Let me jump in here actually. I just want to say something about the Harvard Extension School and its distance education program. They actually are offering a hundred courses, Harvard FAS courses for the most part, through their distance education program this year. So this is something that is vibrantly happening and growing at Harvard right now. And something that the people who run the Extension School have navigated very deathly. And they managed to put a huge array of different offerings up in this format. And we've been able, with the support of the Provost Office at Harvard, to begin to explore Second Life as a next step for how this type of distance education could happen through the Harvard Extension School. So we're envisioning a future for the Harvard Extension School where it can continue to expand the offerings that it gives and also deepen the quality of the interactions that the students who engage in the Extension courses have by letting them connect directly with other students who are in the classes with them and connect more directly with their teachers. Let me also just, even though it's a little ad hoc, say a little bit more about Second Life at this point. Second Life, to me, is a wondrous world. It's very new. I'm still looking like a newbie as I walk around in my free Creative Commons t-shirt in the world and try to remember how to come down when I'm flying. But it is just an amazing place. It has over 650,000 residents at this point and hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars exchanged every day. And the amazing thing about this world is that everything that we see there, everything that makes it interesting is the product of voluntary contribution of the residents of the world. It was not built by the company that runs Second Life, Linden Labs. It was built by the residents in the world. And Linden Labs has just done the best job of any of the existing virtual worlds of making it an appealing place for people to come and be creative by giving people the property rights for the creations that they make in the world. People are encouraged to come in and build a business or build whatever type of resource that we want, that they want to build. And we've had the great luck of having Rodika Buzescu come our way through the Beyond Broadcast Conference and help us to put this together and help us through her social network in Second Life to draw in just wonderful builders and creators to help us get ready to do this course that we want to do. So one of the things we're exploring in the course is Second Life and what the potentials are and how governance should work and could work in virtual worlds like this. And it's something that I encourage everybody to go out there and give a try to. Make yourself an avatar. The software is free. Getting started in it is free. And it is something that you'd be sure to lose a whole lot of hours to as soon as you give yourself a chance at it. Yes, one of the first critiques that we ran into was that my avatar took 40 years off my life. It looked much better than I looked, so I don't know about that. And in that regard, a word about law in the court of public opinion. People, when they think about law, quite naturally think about statutes that have passed by legislatures and opinions that have been issued by courts and verdicts that are issued by juries. This internet revolution that we're all part of is obviously a tremendously disruptive force in society with tremendous numbers of established interests being displaced in one way or another by it. And they quite naturally go to court and fights and courts then try and figure out what's going on with the net and they write opinions and people can study them. In a sense, that's law that's generated in the wake of the disruption. That's not the law that we're talking about in law in the court of public opinion. The law we're talking about is a forward kind of looking law. It's more constitutional. It's more focused on the idea that this is a new and expanding space which we're actually constructing as we go and how it's built is critical to what the experience of future life will be. And it's a core element of the Berkman Center to focus on openness. I would say one of the primary motivations of the Berkman Center was to introduce and extend and amplify to the extent we could the sensibility of openness. It's a sensibility that connects directly with the open access argument of the class. And so from our point of view, law in the court of public opinion, taking off from Lessig's code is law. The sense focuses on the core algorithms by which the institutions of our society operate. Harvard being a perfectly good place to start. And the core algorithm for an institution like Harvard has to do with the way it treats its property, its copyrighted material. If you look at the university as a knowledge-creating machine and you say, how does it work? What is its algorithm? Up to now, its process has been that scholars produce knowledge and then give it to a for-profit company which sends it back to other scholars to peer review, which they then do voluntarily and give it back to the for-profit company which then sells the published work to the university library at a huge amount of money and requires any scholars using the work to get permission to make copies. That made sense in an era when it cost a fortune to publish. It does not make sense any longer in this era. And so if one is thinking about reconstituting oneself or one's institution in this new environment, the idea is to look to the core algorithm and reconstitute it in a way that is clean and direct in a way that a programmer would really be proud of. So this open access argument for Harvard is exactly that. It's a look to the fundamentals of the way the university works. It's a very tough issue, by the way. It's one thing to talk about open access for faculty of arts and sciences, humanities, poets, even law school professors because we don't make a lot of money off our publications. It's quite another thing to talk about open access, for example, where patents are concerned for biotech kinds of materials where the Baidol Act passed in the 80s has made universities huge profit centers in many respects. And so this argument about openness is a discussion. Like on one end of the spectrum, you can see it clearly open. On the other end of the spectrum, you can see real reasons for being cautious and taking things a step at a time and not displacing everything all at once. And so this open access issue that is an argument of our class is in fact a part of a broader argument that we're undertaking and we're actually in the process now of planning the next Berkman-backed internet and society conference at Harvard, which we hope will be an extension of that argument through the various schools with a gathering of the schools at the end of the year to focus on it. So that moves me through all I had to offer. Becca has put the question, which is definitely our question. That is, well, the puzzle for us is, is it possible to do this? Is it possible to have a traditional stimulus that works in a classroom and have it also work for a series of remote audiences experiencing the stimulus and the adjunct management of it through the different cyber media? So the floor is open. I would say it needs some sugar. Yes. I would say definitely yes. And I'm curious. I know MIT has done some things in open source. I do write nothing on all devices, but I've been most wondering about the content and reports. What are some of the things that you'll have people digging in on? Well, let me answer the first and Becca answer the second. MIT has been a leader in this space in terms of openness. Their open course initiative is a wonderful initiative and a wonderful example. Their open course work doesn't actually involve bringing the classroom itself out into the open space. It's more the materials of the class. So we're doing something different and in some way ambitious in a different direction. But all praise to MIT for what it's done. And to the extent that we can collaborate with them in doing what we're doing, we would totally love to do it. So I'll just give a few examples of what our students are going to be doing. Starting today, we're going to focus on the very popular Wiki technology, which is basically a collaborative web editing technology where many people can edit a web page. And actually our guests for today's class, Elizabeth and Mako, are here in the room with us now. They'll be teaching our students a little bit about how to use a Wiki. So we'll be looking at that from a theoretical perspective and looking at a great energy that has come together to build the Wikipedia resource, an entirely volunteer created online encyclopedia. And also we'll be having our students engage in the collaborative editing process themselves in order to get a sense of what the difference is between doing something in an individually focused way and doing it in a collaborative way. So groups of law students will be taking charge of each week of the course. And there will be groups of about five or six students who will have to work together to basically create a presentation to the world of that week of the course materials. So that's one example. A second life example of something that students will be doing in second life is that they're going to be learning about virtual worlds and how social networks work in the virtual world and how people have gotten power for themselves or had satisfactory experiences. So they'll be going out into the world and doing interviews of famous second life avatars. People who have really done something great or interesting in second life from becoming great second life builders to running a second life newspaper, doing political activism or all kinds of different things. And we'll be putting those interviews up where the world can get a chance to take a look and learn a little bit about stuff that's happening in second life. Colin Reinsmith will be running an audio production workshop for the law students where they'll be learning a little bit about how to make their own type of podcasts and Dean will be teaching them the different ways in which video can be distributed over the internet and talking a little bit about the new technologies that people are using in order to make the interface between television broadcasts and internet video and personal production more transparent. We'll also be working with PRX to take a look at what it means to have people do really good production of radio in a way that is done individually without the financial support of the station where you give people some standards for what you want a radio show, the quality of the radio that you want to have come out, and then find a way to aggregate and distribute all of the things that people are able to put together. So using the world as a core of radio reporters. And in terms of the subject matter, this connects because we're really looking at this phenomenon of non-market-based, non-proprietary efforts to have a lot of people come together and collaborate tightly or loosely to build interesting resources and participate in a significant way in the network information economy without having a lot of capital or anything like that behind them. And I say something about the law part again. In a sense, the substantive part of the class is about argument, but not argument in the sense of clashing arguments. Rather, we're advancing what I think of as empathetic arguments, the idea being that if you're actually interested in persuading someone, you have to recognize that persuasion is an emotional move that's made by the person from one point of view to another, and that in order for that person to listen to your argument, you first have to present yourself to that person in a way that leads them to understand that you understand and empathize with their position. Once they've lowered their dukes down on a you-don't-understand-me basis, and they come to a point where, oh, you understand the problem, then they're ready to listen, then you're ready to make your argument. So it has about it a core element that recognizes to me the grand challenge of the space. This is a rhetorical space. Taken to its extreme physical coercion is not part of it. We think of law in traditional terms as based on personal jurisdiction, where the state demands that you do something, and if you don't, they take your body and they put it away or they beat you with a stick or they do something like that. The network taken to its extreme with its borderless quality and all of its cyber quality is without personal jurisdiction. And so traditional ideas about law as punishment don't work. They won't work. On the other hand, there's a tremendous part of law which has to do with reason and truth and wanting to be a good citizen, so that the idea of norms to return again to a lessing notion is far more important in the future of this space, the development of norms, the working of norms, than is the idea that somehow we're going to put people away and that'll force them into any kind of given behavior. So it's in that sense that we're looking for the positive role of law in this space and trying to embody that in the teaching of arguments. We actually have an audience of 24 people on Berkman Island in Second Life and one of them is interested in finding out how the Second Life instructors have prepared for a real life and Second Life teaching experience. What are the things that you've prepared to do in order to teach the class in Second Life? I'm not quite sure what the meaning of that question is. In terms of our own training in Second Life, Jean and I are both fairly new to it and we've been trying to learn how to get around and do what we need to do in Second Life and I haven't made as much progress with it as I might have hoped but I am in a position to come in and lead a discussion and do various activities and together with Rodita, Jean and I have planned what I think are just killer activities for the people in Second Life. This is a class that I think is just going to be great. We're going to start off with the very basics of Second Life and some people who are participating who are really seasoned Second Lifers it's going to be a little bit at the beginning. We're going to do introductory exercises with them where they get to know their fellow students but they also learn how to do basic things like how to sit down how to have private conversations and how to have group conversations and that type of stuff how to get from place to place and then they're going to visit the world and learn what's interesting about the world by actually going out and seeing some different areas and doing some little activities in the world and in the third week of the class at the law school we're going to address philosophically the question of virtual worlds and the importance of virtual worlds and take a look at governance of virtual worlds and the way that political protest takes shape in virtual worlds and all kinds of other interesting issues that have to do with how these environments work so the Extension students have a particularly advantaged position in the course of learning about this amazing collaboratively developed type of environment at the same time as they're experiencing it and doing their projects and their projects are going to be focused specifically in the Second Life environment in terms of being picking out some issue that's important to the Second Life community and doing a project that relates to that so for instance recently there's this security breach in Second Life in which some passwords were taken this just happened last week and to me this looks a little bit like a terrorist attack on Second Life from a resident perspective there's been a certain kind of a terrorist attack that's happened and there's a question of what the right way is for the Second Life government Linden Labs such as it is to deal with this and what's the right way for the people in the world to give their input to Linden Labs about how they liked or didn't like that way that it was governed and then there's a question that's down the road from Second Life which has to do with when we get to these two open source virtual worlds which is something that's coming maybe not right away but in the near future and this is a situation where there isn't going to be a company that runs the thing anymore it's going to be a real open source project and we have to decide for ourselves how do we want to govern that kind of a space if we're in it what kind of a government do we want and it's not just going to be a matter of saying oh there's no rules there's got to be some kind of rules or maybe there don't, there doesn't, who knows we have to think about it but from Bankler's perspective it's something where we have to think about how to balance the concerns of individual freedom and social justice in this space how are we going to make those things work together by setting up the rules that we want so for the Second Life it's a matter of learning what it's like to exist in a virtual world and thinking a lot about what the importance of virtual worlds is for us and our future in the space perhaps I should say that the base text that we're using is Jochai Bankler's wonderful new book called The Wealth of Networks it's the most thoroughgoing exposition of what I think of as the thought that has been developing I don't know in the I don't put a Berkman claim on it but it's like Berkman thinking right there in the book very, very, very useful as a spine for our course What is the plan for how you'll draw in the energy of those that aren't at the law school or in the extension school that are participating by seeing the pages on the internet and making things in the syllabus? There are two ways, two major ways that we're trying to engage the energy of people who are participating without actually being enrolled in the class and the first way is that we're hoping that project groups of students who are enrolled in the class will be able to draw in the energy of people in the out-large audience to work on their projects in various different ways and the second way is that we're hoping that groups of people or individuals or loosely connected groups of people will do their own projects and they're the same type of project it involves picking an argument or a subject matter and expressing it in a traditional way and then figuring out how to express it in some new media and how to get it out there and get some energy going behind it so it's going to be quite similar in a way to participating in the class as a student except that there won't be anybody checking up on them or grading them, just all of us connecting and participating with them to the extent that we can Will there be a community like a mailing list or an online forum or something forth? So practically speaking the best place for somebody to go who wants to get involved is our course wiki it's still in need of development for the out-large participant group and sort of looking for some leaders of that community who want to get things kicked off there but there's already a link to a page that doesn't yet exist on our wiki that is looking for that to be developed so the place to go is our course website watch the videos, get into the readings get some of the ideas and then start that wiki growing and it's going to be based out of the wiki But let me speak to that as well the typical course gets put together and okay here it is, bang, here's the course and then we teach it and then maybe we revise it and then we teach it again this one isn't quite like that this has got ambitions at a variety of levels and we're solid on the ground face to face we're solid on the ground with the extension school in second life as yet we are not solid either for funding or for process for Cambridge Community Television or the internet, we can put stuff up but in terms of having the structure all worked out this is a work in progress and we're a good team but a small team and we're looking to engage the energies of our classes, our fellows here of anyone we can find to somehow help us further that so I wish I could tell you a totally elaborated structure here let me do this though one of the ambitions of the class Harvard Law School has a wonderful population of graduate students from foreign countries it's been one of our ambitions from the beginning we use our foreign graduate students to relate to remote foreign audiences Rebecca and I actually did an experiment two years ago I think where we did an event in the Ames courtroom that was webcast students had in advance of that in effect lined up audiences or the webcast in their home territory and they were in discussion groups online with the folks in their home territory so just to be specific I did a lecture on hearsay and war crimes with a woman who had been on the ground in Kosovo with 14 students from different countries in addition to the whole class and each of those 14 students had students in their country watching the webcast at the same time they're online with them in a discussion space and so people for whom English wasn't the first language could say what did he mean and someone who spoke their language and actually knew them is I.M. and so there's a connection that gets made that just seemed potentially very rich I would love to be able to organize that kind of connection with a series of remote audiences we haven't got there yet but in a certain sense we have Brodica right now is hosting an audience of 24 people in Second Life one might say that Second Life could be her home environment so there it is it's happening in a certain sense yes, hi Rebecca Rebecca McKinnon for anyone who I think this is tremendously exciting I'm looking forward to learning a lot from what everybody's learning from the way this course works and I think it's really great to have this experiment going on I do have a question though because as you know a colleague of mine who is not here at the moment is quite skeptical of Second Life and skeptical of the role that can play in a number of social contexts one has to do with a concern that because in order to participate in Second Life you have to have such good bandwidth and such strong computing power that by moving educational resources and activities too quickly onto Second Life one will actually be excluding more people and that particular concern the other has to do I guess a couple other things that kind of concerns have been brought up I'm wondering the extent to which you plan to sort of explore these issues when you're exploring Second Life with your class one has to do with the extent to which virtual worlds are and are not effective in mobilizing change in the real world and the extent to which they represent kind of escapism from really dealing with change in the real world but it's an easier way to feel good without doing something Ethan wrote a very critical post not too long ago about the virtual dark world in Second Life and the view that there are actually much more constructive things that people can change in dark world can be doing with their time and creating the virtual dark world and there are other ways to better raise awareness among a broader range of people on this the other kind of interesting thing that has been brought up is an experience that Andy Carbon had when he created an avatar modeled after a child soldier from, I think it was the Congo post, anyway, yeah he got a Somalian child soldier modeled his avatar after and he found he compared his experience wandering around Second Life as a skinny young black person versus his experience wandering around Second Life as Andy Chowder had the generic white guy and he said people avoided him he said there's this quote he has where he's talking about there are all kinds of avatars funny shapes, points of lights cartoon characters fantasy characters everybody was sort of interacting with each other talking with each other quite happily but people were avoiding him and I'm quite interested to see whether the extent to which you plan to address some of these issues of how people may be bringing their same kind of evils and social problems and prejudices and reapplying them into a virtual world and the extent to which people might think about that and think about how you can avoid reapplying all the bad things we do in real life to apply so there's there are any questions there that I could see so there's the question of are we jumping too far ahead of people in terms of their technical capabilities computers and bandwidth that they have on the ground and there's a question of whether you can have real social needs in the real world that comes from action that happens in a virtual world bringing energy away from real social change by doing stuff in second life and then finally a question of what's the effect of people's real world prejudices when they bring them into second life and I would like to if they're willing to draw Gene and Rodika into answering these questions because Gene is the biggest expert that we have on our team and that I know of that I know of at all thinking about online education and using different technologies for online education so the first question I'd like to throw out to Gene to talk about and then both of the other two questions I think Rodika would be a good person to be the one who answers them but I'll just say a little tiny bit about my perspective on it at least on the second question about people's real world prejudices just in second life just like they exist in the real world behind every avatar that you see in second life is a real person and although we might be changed a little bit by being behind a different avatar as we move around that world or maybe even changed a lot we're still ourselves as we go out there and so there's a question of what it means to deal with these different kind of prejudices but it's important to remember that we're not trying to create utopia here or do anything like that we are still dealing with people as real people in this environment and to me that's one of the most engaging aspects of it is a question about whether second life is any less real than what's happening in real life when what you've got are real people and they're interacting and we have the same type of problems to deal with there that we're going to have anywhere else and as far as the activism is concerned you sent me just yesterday one of the first examples I had known of of activism happening in second life that is tied to activism in real life it was a sit-in done in second life in a fairly creative way but it did strike me in that same way that the sit-in in second life wasn't likely to affect any political change in the real world it was a different virtual world that people use in Taiwan that was the same kind of thing so it was in second life but somewhere else and to me that's one of the questions that we're going to look at or need to look at when we think about what it means to do activism in second life for this class we're focusing a little bit on activism or mostly on activism that has to do with changing things that actually exist in second life rather than in the real world but it's a very interesting question that we want to explore but now I want to throw it out to Gene and Rogega for those questions Gene say a word though first about your background I graduated here four years ago and I'd written my real paper on actually in the history of comparing it to online bulletin boards and so coming out of here I had a lot of thinking about online teaching that I've been doing online training professional development for legal aid attorneys and with respect to the question about the technology I mean even in terms of getting people to use a web browser I have I'm getting property lawyers to actually figure out how to use their house so it's a higher spectrum out there and I think what's important about this class isn't that we're not moving 99% of academia into second life this is like .001 this is just basically a little foray in an experiment it's actually an experiment that is going on in law schools I'm working with another group that is experimenting with a different 3D virtual world there.com also to see how can this be used for teaching so it's going on but I think it's important to note that it is experimental and what we've learned about how to use it now the expectation is that in five, ten years or whatever the kind of name technology catches up we'll be ready to use it for a larger audience if I could briefly speak to your second and third point as somebody who's partnered with a grassroots organizer who spends her entire day just going out and meeting with people face to face and not through virtual environments I am also very skeptical about the ability of using any kind of virtual including just plain old internet email websites for activism you know you can easily say that this has been criticized as well that all those emails that pass around would use side notifications and whatnot and actually going out there and doing something like calling your senator so I think that's a valid criticism I think across the board of almost anything that you can do online or offline actually if you're sitting around talking sometimes you can say why aren't you calling your senator instead of just chatting about this topic but I think your third point that you made actually speaks to a different kind of activism that can happen which is simply learning and becoming aware that story that you told is an example of how a virtual world affords a new capability of the experience that can change your attitude in a way that you really can imagine you can imagine watching a movie about being a young black man and walking around trying to talk to become a social partner social network but actually having that experience is a completely different persuasive experience and so regarding the topic of this course you know this is about persuasion you know there's I think personally there's a line the blurry line between persuasion and action and I think as one of the prerequisites of actually being able to do organizing and getting people to go out there and make changes persuading them to change necessarily in the first place so I think one possibility of these worlds is providing people with an immersive experience as physically impossible to have you go out into Harvard Square right now and just pretend to be a different person than you are and see what kind of reaction you get you can do some of that but this is a different kind of a much more immersive and much more wide-ranging possibility so I think that there I think that it's a different way of thinking about how to get people to be persuaded in that action yeah so Berdice anything you'd like um well I mean obviously you know you keep referring to me as a second life expert I'm not sure that anyone can be a second life expert it's because of the updates and of the continuous change that takes place in society I don't think anyone can really claim the role of a second life expert but in terms of the society the way I see it you know obviously we're still people this is not utopia in any sense of the word but I think the experience Andy had would have been slightly different or a lot different if you were a black female for example in second life and there were a bunch of articles written on this with a female avatar who had changed the color of her skin and she found that she was even more approached by other individuals so it really does bring about sort of the same conceptions that we've had but I think it also depends again on the group of people that you approach and you try to interact with if for example you try to interact with people who are interested in education I doubt it seriously that Andy would get the same sort of pull back and the ignorance that he's getting from the other community I also think that the overall feel of second life is this is sort of a playground for people so the fact that he was a soldier boy or something like that maybe it sounded or it looked too serious for some people and they just might have just not wanted to deal with it would you feel comfortable just telling a little bit about your experience with the Asperger's Island or is that something you'd rather not? So I entered actually second life by acting as a community manager for a group of people with Asperger's syndrome and they were using it as a simulation for practicing their social skills for those of you who don't know Asperger's is a type of high functioning autism and these people are really really intelligent they just usually have a level of interpreting social cues and dealing with other people so that's that's sort of my background how I got into second life before becoming involved with the Berkman Center now in terms of activism the good sort of the good activism that takes place with you know events such as Relate for Life with the cancer fundraise I think they raised something like a hundred thousand dollars or maybe even more just by collecting money from second life so limited dollars that were then exchanged into real life dollars so there's a lot of that going on and actually the company that I'm currently working for millions of us is going to be working with United Nations on a program that stand up against poverty so the people who are actually going to stand up in second life will count as part of the total number of people to stand up in real life so there's all sorts of ways to engage the community to participate in good things not just in misconceptions that they have of each other alright one last question and then we have to go to class I'm afraid I'm very admirative of what you're still heading and offering and my question is just for the community at large I think the problem for them is to learn these technologies I'm more interested in Wiki for example or production technology all these things are well once the community was noticed obviously it would be more empowered but how can that be obviously it involves a certain commercial element and if it doesn't it would have been great but how could we do it well I can give you an example I used a Wiki for the first time last year in my evidence class which was a class that's taught in the three week winter semester I had never used a Wiki before I was alone away by what happened 150 students starting from scratch the Wiki's got nothing on it and three weeks later this is a totally rich vibrant environment an amazing addition to the arsenal of tools available to a teacher I suspect that as conservative as academia is word will spread that having Wiki for your class is a terrific thing and that lots of students will find themselves introduced through it that way and it's just one of a zillion possible uses of this amazing tool of collaboration so if there was any tool I would suggest it would be that one for starters just to jump on the end of that we as Jean said are concerned with people's ability to learn to use new technologies and it is a bit of an experiment for us and that's why we're spending basically one day a week doing workshops on how to use the technologies and the law students are in a certain sense are guinea pigs with this we expect them not to be the most sophisticated technology users and we'll see how it goes with our attempts to make their entry into using these different technologies as smooth and as satisfying as possible and part of what we're doing is getting a lot of feedback from them on what works and what doesn't work but it's definitely an important part of our goal to figure out how to make it possible for people to learn to use them thank you all very much