Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

Hello, and may this day find you well and safe, two iffy constructs in these dark days for American government and public safety. But that's neither here nor there (although it may feel like everywhere).

I stumbled across this in my Dropbox whilst looking for an ancient song I had written in the mid 1970s. It is from Sharebook, a feature that appears no longer to be available at blogspot.com for bloggers to archive their work, and it begins with a post from May 7, 2007 and ends with one at February 21, 2012. The blog went on for a few posts, and featured a revival announcement in August, 2023. That last is, though, the last. The revival never was followed up upon, and will not likely be.

Still, this little online book, spreading across some 277 pages of .pdf file, is fun to explore, at least for me. Many of its links got lost in the process of publication and a cursory click-thru demonstrates that many of the links that survived take one to a polite "page not found" message.

During Oh! Second Life!'s publication online, I was teaching young kids about technologyin independent then public schools whilst helping my wife to raise our own two kids, and Second Life for education was my primary creative side hustle. My involvement with virtual worlds for learning spread and grew over decades, until upon my May, 2022 retirement I audibly brushed together my hands and for reasons I can understand better than I can explain, I turned my back on the teaching world. I will herein say that I was so done with the reshaping of schools into businesses, and the data-driven administration of them (just how accurate was that data, beginning with standardized testing results?),  that I was, like, outta there, and for good--for my own, if for no one else's.

https://bit.ly/scottsecondlife will get you there.

So. There you are. Pretty much the sum total of my educational experience over 5 years of the nearly two decades of what people called Leadership in that field. I made friends, and many of those were from other geolocations--Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Japan. Once we loosely organized, we were always just on the "about to be" side of the Bell Curve of Adoption. It may be that those still involved will always be, and will pass, in turn, their own fascination and dedication to its newbies, who will one day do the same. It may be that the experiences within virtual worlds are simply so unfathomable to the unitiated that they will never be of real use to the powers that shape "the education system." Who knows?

What I know is that these engaging fascinations, with their promising and unfulfilled possibilities, are archived palpably in the blog, which is still available on Google's blogger.com platform (possibly useful if one wants to pursue a lost link) and shared here for as long as my Dropbox footprint evades the inevitable and eradicating winds of time. 

Stay well. Stay safe. 

Be Good and Have Fun.

Okay, well, I can make it monthly :)

 Well, well, well, here it is--nearly a month after the previous post. Who would have thought I would be so busy in retirement from the education game that I would be reduced to posting so infrequently. It is a good thing, though! 

Been painting. 

I have re-upped for Charles Brindley's open studio class at Scarritt Bennett Conference Center right across the street from my workplace of 14 years, USN. This semester, instead of attending twice a week for three hours a pop, I am clearing the calendar for fishing and camping so I go once a week for 3-6 hours. Here is an abstract I call "exsanguination," which dictionary.com defines as: 

[ eks-sang-gwuh-ney-shuhn ]

noun

the act or process of draining or losing blood:

With an extreme mite infestation, up to 6% of a bird’s blood can be drained daily, causing it to become anemic or even die by exsanguination.

the act or process of bleeding to death:

The consequences can range from minor blood loss to exsanguination.

"exsanguination", acrylic on 16x20 stretched canvas, by Scott Merrick, 2023

I do enjoy me some abstract acrylic painting, because I like to play with textures and shapes. My abstracts often have layers and layers as I struggle to draw out intimated meaning potential. The name came after the painting had been completed, beginning with a coined one, "sinmagination." Funny how trains of thought can derail into meaningful connections.
I was working on a portrait of my best buddy Watson alongside the work on exsanguination. This one hopes to convey his lovely smile. I have had two sets of people tell me emphatically that he resembles Matt Damon. I see it, I see it.

"Watson", acrylics on 16x20 stretched canvas, by Scott Merrick, 2023

I will say here that I have been getting the odd notice that Google has put a warning notice in front of several posts in my "Oh! Virtual Learning!" educational blog, which is no longer being updated but did run from 2007 to 2014, with a random update after that in 2019. I leave it up as an archive to everything I and my small but driven band of merry pranksters did in our efforts to bring the Metaverse to educational use, yes we did, during that period. Those were some days, and we tried intensely and we tried with all we had. The fact that the Metaverse has experienced a flop of epic proportions in the last several years is simply testament to the steadfastness with which human beings cling to the past. Here we are, still educating the masses to be factory workers, grouping them by manufacture date, giving worksheets and tests and grades, in rooms which, even though they may be furnished with chairs arranged in ways other than rows (but often are not), are still rooms.
I have mildly revised those few posts and hit the "request review" button for Google but, really? Google, check your Community Standards and if you are going to put a post behind a firewall try specifying what the alleged offense may be, not just telling the blogger to review the guidelines and make changes. Seriously.
That's it for today. I'm off to continue working on the perfection of my "retirement." Cheerio!