When Walker breathlessly blogged the appearance of a whiteboard made by AngryBeth Shortbread in Second Life, even titling the story, "Getting Better Business Efficiencies," I certaintly raised an eyebrow.
I was stunned that in the week the that Lindens unveiled the new, reformed group tools, a revolution for collaboration and organization in SL, Walker chose to utterly ignore that story, and focus on this "whiteboarding" story. I chalked it up both to him not really "getting" groups in SL and their importance, and also to the numerous wonky wiki discussions people have had about whiteboarding, sometimes begging the Lindens to do it, and how important this is to tekkies, who imagine themselves endlessly having chalk talks somewhere in the Metaverse, I guess, writing formulas across a board with mad, scientific abandon -- but of course, whiteboarding, signifying the ability to say stuff to other people, and have all of you edit it together -- is important to everyone else, too.
Even being a big admirer of AngryBeth and frequent visitor to her shop, I was naturally skeptical because getting a REAL whiteboard in SL is very elusive, as I have come to understand through many a trek and long hours examining different products for the purpose. A whiteboard and shared texting or wordprocessing is something I wanted since the very first month I spent in Second Life, asking in vain as a clueless newbie why someone couldn't help me make some really efficient Yellow Pages.
AngryBeth makes her whiteboard available for $1; the hardened world-flyer like myself frequently notes ascerbically to tenants who get TVs or furniture for $0 or $1: "Hey, you get what you paid for: $1 worth of stuff." That may seem unkind, especially given the 50 hours that AngryBeth put into this product -- no mean feat, given the laggy, crashy, fiddly, annoying HARD work of trying to make something -- anything, even a motel -- in Second Life. So she deserves a breathless blog or two or five, but then, after spending two hours on trying to unpack the invention, I get to do a more sanguine blog, too.
Tekkie-wikis in SL could sure use another layer between themselves and the general user public. The absence of that thick, robust, common-sense layer is what is missing in Second Life, big time.
What makes this tree comic so funny is the depiction of the technical solution as the one where an elaborately looped item, very elegant in appearance, actually puts the swing on the ground, no longer up in the air, and no longer a swing.
The one thing they all do is make assumptions about understanding how to use things, and the one thing many do is put web guides up on the web, in lieu of putting even the simplest "Quick Start for Dummies" INSIDE the product itself. I strenuously try to notify them to put the notecard inside -- in the product, inworld, where we are using it. Forcing people to tab down their game -- something not every game weathers so well; forcing them to take focus out of the world, loss of immersion, etc. is something that people just don't want to do. And it's frustrating when you can't open a notecard that tells you "get started quick this way". Some, like Timeless Graffiti, have learned to do this, though their cards still have way too many commands -- something all of these products suffer from is the need to first make channels, like "/413" or "/1" then type various commands -- instead of having pushable buttons.
In time, one imagines the interface will spring up between tekkiw world-item-inventors and people like me. I actually have a pretty good deal of facility with these things, having logged in months of person-hours on them in SL. And here's the big problem with this "whiteboard" -- it's not a whiteboard in the fullest sense of the word. In fact, it's more of a blackboard, or a kind of communal um...tekkie wiki -- a fetishistic item that will help a tribe have an identifying tool/symbol rather than actually use the tool to accomplish actual free collaboration.
It has space for only 24 letters on it. 24 -- yes.
See, that's the problem no one has been able to beat yet, and AngryBeth in fact takes a step very far backward on this -- a step cloaked by all the other bells and whistles she has -- and doesn't even provide as much letter-writing spaces as Timeless, who has about 242 I believe, or Leboard's, a lesser-known board which has 192 and more attractive prims to house them in, or Foolish Frost's, which also reaches whatever that known limit is, that was established years ago by Xylor Bayclef and never beaten -- because the number of letters has to do with the number of prims I believe or something, and thus has to do with linkage and sim capacity and script capacity -- or you'll be forced to upload $10 page after $10 page of pre-set, Gutenberg-type press trays of text you typed in word or notepad and put into Paint or PSP and copied as a jpeg into the game.
OK, so AngryBeth's improvement is that you can move this text around up and down using the arrow keys, and also overlay it on some background like a world map. Still, with only 24 letters, you have a label or a sentence, not collaboration on text.
First off, I should have said that rezzing the ABS whiteboard takes some smarts -- she provides 4 items in her folder of N, W, E, S for a *reason* which is that the thing doesn't work if not pointing the right way. Now, you'd think, if you avatar points his face north, and north is the mini-map or large map north of SL, that you pick "north" from the 4 choices. Wrong. You pick "west" because...well...I don't why, I suppose because the flat back of the thing isn't what is facing north, nor its flat face, but it's lefthand, thin edge. Whatever.
What ABS's whiteboard does have, and which made Walker all tingly no doubt (if he in fact ever attempted to use it, can't tell) is that it has shapes, shapes that you can put on with a tool and manipulate -- and also various other tools like pointer, cross-hair, etc.
It kinda reminds me of the Play Shapes Capt. Kangaroo used to have on his show, later adapted by Blues Clues.
I find the concept of putting shapes up on a board irksome. That may be an idiosyncratic response, due to having synaesthesia, whereby I already have coloured shapes for every concept already visible in my mind's eye.
But there's also something phony about the concept. In RL, at least in my RL, which many not be saying much, I don't see people manipulating shapes on whiteboards at various conferences, seminars, workshops, of which I've been to zillions.
That is, what most people do that I see nowadays is bring Power Point slides. They fuss over the projecting of them endlessly, often cutting into their talk time as their laptop or the beam isn't working. The Power Point, unlike the elaborate diagramming of sentences or outlining of essays that we were taught by the good Sisters of St. Joseph as aids to thinking more rigouressly and clarifying thought, in fact diminishes and dumbs down the mind and its coherent thought processes, and substitutes them with pablum -- the kind that sticks on the wall and is hard to get off.
The whole idea of mind-mapping I find pretentious and annoying, and I'm surprised not to see any criticism of the concept, which is right up with there with Wikipedia, Power Point, Google, and other "social software" -- turning the minds of this and the next generation into jello.
I was hoping the otherwise very astute Fool Quest would have something ascerbic to say about this mind-grabbing under the ruse of mere "description" ("predictive descriptedness")-- but he proved to be the same, drooling and blithering idiot on the subject as many others, claiming that all sorts of magic and super-powerful stuff happens with mind-maps to make people brainstorm, access their right-brain thinking, and collaborate -- as if these things were not mere theories and memes of their own -- scientifically tested here and there, to be sure, but of course distorted in silly and unproductive ways once they reach the level of mass popularity as memes.
Someone making a mind map going into a conference is actually inflicting a kind of violent act on the thinking of others there (and Fool Quest has outlined some of those brain-storming killers as the stifling of "unfounded conjecture" -- he quotes Popper on how important it is to tolerate that form of Socratic dialectic in debate). Someone making a "mind-map" often intends for others to follow -- lead by interpretation.
By the same token, whoever wields the mind-map program (and the original programmers of the mind-map software themselves have these social-engineering aspirations as well) wishes *control over others' thinking*. The "collective" is put forth as "the absolute good" and the "compromise for the sake of collaboration" in reaching the glorious end-product mind-map is sanctified as the most glorious goal (all of these technologies lately are triumphs of form over function). But of course, as we've seen from my previous discussions and links on democracy and groups, all that's happening is that one or a few people with an agenda are trying to get the others to fall into place. The mind-map sticks; it's the meme; it's saved and duplicated and goes on shaping. That tree always only had 3 possible forks coming out of it; that relationship that showed 6 versions of possible outcomes could never be restricted to the practical 3 because, well, the mind map *made it so*.
Recently, I went to an all-day conference for RL work that had one of those annoying mind-mapsters nattering away in the background, with roughly 80 percent of the people there completely unaware that there was even a thing called "mindmapping" being trotted out by frequent-flyers on the conference circuit. Like Robbie Dingo's wierd whisperer thing, which makes Deridda hash out of chat and pitches up words heard repeatedly to a drum-beat, this conference facilitator I saw, who had no doubt been at some paid-for-by-work seminar in some resort locale, and had obviously learned stuff like this rather uncritically, took words out of our previous emails suggesting topics or raising concerns and threw them up on a flow chart sort of construction on a "whiteboard" (which, as so often happens in these cases, was really a blackboard, i.e. one person, with the power, pushing the message, with the tool, not a true collaboration -- just because it's white doesn't mean it isn't black). None of us at this conference got to go up and move or change the 'whiteboard's" memes -- there it was, set in stone by someone who had mastered the flow-charting at some seminar, was now inflicting it on our sub-conscious, and who hadn't even put time or a procedure in place for the rest of us to *go up and contribute or even edit/replace parts of the 'whiteboarded' text*.
The concepts were jumbled and marched along in a progression that she felt would represent harmony, resolution of conflict, and happiness for all concerned, but like most complex and messy issues, required more a management of such conflict and recognition of it, than a false wiping away of conflict, in the radical "clean slate" mode which Fool Quest very rightly illustrates, quoting Karl Popper, as the fascist impulse -- society is always to be "made new," or contradictions are always to be "resolved," and there is always to be triumph of some aesthetic and of course a new world order emerging from the ashes.
And that's just the problem -- one senses with these inventions that they are driven not by RL or SL exigencies, but just by the act of invention itself. I have no idea whatsoever how many inworld or outworld conferences and seminars ABS attended, perhaps loads. After all, this is supposed to be an "educators' tool" and not any sort of rough-and-ready socializing board as I'd like to use it for in the infohub, to enable people to post jobs or personals or how-tos or whatever.
A particularly exciting (at first) prospect on the ABS whiteboard was a background that had YES, NO, MAYBE and ABSTAIN (put as outside the circle -- a good example of how visuals and mindmaps make people seem "beyond the pale" simply for refusing to participate in something that may feel rigged).
But...to operate the voter and make it work, you have to also first overlay, then manipulate the coloured shapes and place them on Capt. Kangaroo's Play Shape board. That means first accepting an unnerving message, "This object would like to operate on your avatar's controls, ok?" -- something newbies may be gun-shy over. I know when I got those "animate your avatar" things I thought they were malicious scripts -- instead, an ex-friend at the time who was highly tekkie told me they WERE malicious, although of course they weren't, they were just those drink-scripts that animate your avatar in clunkier ways that he can be animated in TSO by just chosing off a pie menu more smoothly.
In fact, pondering all this now, I'm realizing that the drop-down blue menu, which often is slow and laggy, causing you to click it impatiently, causing it to drop down AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN, prompting "ignore" sometimes, falling again and again on your horizon like a guillotine, is really, well...clunky. Old-fashioned. The teksters need to come up with some other thingy than this. This is whack. It's slow and in your way.
So after clicking through blue menus, you now have your entire avatar animated just in order to move this shape, and you sort of hoist it into place with the arrow keys.
But wait!
I have a better idea!
There's the Linden voter, of course, some of that Lame Linden (TM) content from the old telehubs that I put BACK into the Ross infohub mainly because some of it, like that voter thingie and the prefabs, in fact are NOT so lame.
But even Max Case's voter just...works better! His is clunky, the buttons are too big and close together (the Linden design was better) but it's easy to edit the script with a question (unlike the Linden April 2003 Votemaster). At the Memory Bazaar in Ross at the Infohub I helped to develop, built by Jessica Ornitz, I am trying it out with the question: "What should we do about the problem of clubs lagging sims?"
In short, AngryBeth's whiteboard is likely to be blogged, memed, blogged, and memed again and again and again, taking advantage of the legend around its creator, as well as the awe-inspiring mystique (erm...bullshit?) surrounding the "RL education in SL" stuff, the unfamiliarity with SL of most of the people jumping in with both feet, the desire of many earnest educatory types to aquire E-Tools for Learning and suchlike and...like the cross-country skies in Bohos in Paradise, never leave the garage shelf. It's a kind of totem, and emblem, an artifact like wearing a useless SL Telus cellphone on your belt that says, "Look at me, I am Collaborative, I am Hive Mind!" In fact, I suggest many an E-ducator will buy it and put it up like a big prop in their "virtual classrooms" and *never use it*. It will be like those abacuses you see next to the electronic cash-registers in Russia, which people REALLY use to total your purchase. In fact, I dare say Felix Frankfurter's Government-on-a-Prim, which merely contains Notecard Giver, Notecard Taker, and Hover Text, available at Pharos, is a lot more useful for more collaborative excercises in SL.
OMG! Never, never hit the little button with the arrows on the lower right-hand side of ABS's thing. It contains a screen that says "aspect ratio". I'll be honest and tell you I don't fully understand what that is, but I think it's like we like to call "sizing" in Home Economics. If you do press it, and chose 4:1, the entire thing will resize and the clickable menu itself seems to disappear no matter how many times you bang on it. So I'd recommend not bothering with it.
There's many more hours for me to spend on this, of course. And I suspect for someone else who is skilled at Useability and helping to make version 2.0.
What we need is a real whiteboard. That is, a message board that has the message visible, not tucked inside a sticky-like prim with not even a word visible, as the useful, but still frustrating "Oh, Snap" corkboard by Makaio Stygian. It needs to throw up text, and even 242 letters is ok as long as they aren't robotic space age glowing or slow to rez text, but just plain ordinary typeface easy to view and rez quickly. Such text, if you set the permissions on, should be able to be edited -- in whole or in part -- by other avatars. It should absorb multiple edits and multiple avatars.
The pictures inside it shouldn't wipe out by resetting messages under them or wipe out by moving the arrows, as Timeless' seems to do and Angrybeth's appeared to do as well-- this is the single greatest reason I don't use Timeless', it simply constantly wipes out everything and despite thoroughly reading the instructions over and over, I can't seem to find a way to hold the pictures in place and not wipe them out from page-turning (in that sense, Hiro Pendragon's old "Hiro TV" as I call it, a picture slide show that merely advances the photos inside a prim on a timer, is easier to use and easier to set up).
So if I write a text, you add a line, somebody else edits us into a paragraph, sooner or later it should be allowed to stick and stay and save if desired. Then it should be able to be attached to a picture, like caption. That picture could move, but the text stays linked. Or they all replace. Ideally, it would take a landmark inside a prim or as such tied to a picture. This was my query back a year ago when I first encountered Timeless; he erupted into irritation and fury, expressed as the put down that he was busy with custom projects into the year 2006, witheringly implying that I was too entitlement-happy by suggesting such a thing, and I commented laconically on his poor customer service.
I don't expect somebody to script for a year or for even five minutes for my benefit. I do expect them to entertain unfounded conjecture, however; that is the hallmark of an open mind and open collaboration in an open society.
