In part 1, we touched on the current state of the art for Virtual Worlds, and at least implied how challenging it is for us to understand who we are in these cloud spaces. So how do we begin to enable a working perspective on “A New Place”?
Describing, analyzing, exploring, and understanding consciousness is probably the most challenging undertaking possible… as we strive to build a new and improved way of learning, being healthy, and advancing other important parts of our lives, in the online “cloud” space. We live amidst a communications revolution, but how well do we understand what’s “going on”?
But as broad and as deep as the “field” of human consciousness is…we need to be at least partially expert…as it’s the foundation for understanding and creating best practices for online learning worlds. IOW, we can’t “teach” in the new place without knowing a great deal about the way our perceptions and consciousness are created, and that knowledge is hard to come by, and hard to synthesize into “one enabling perspective”.
To help us move forward, let’s posit a few things to get started.
- Man is a creature of his civilization and zeitgeist.
- Civilizations change as technology changes.
- History is full of examples of a “new place’ coming into existence.
- Fundamentally, humans learn by doing: maintaining current “best practices” is necessary.
- The educational practices and goals of a civilization depend greatly on the way their economy works.
- A generation “born into” a new “place” understands it, and practices it, intuitively. Others struggle to adapt.
- We need to ask, is our perception of being a person infinitely malleable? If not, what are the actual constraints we must abide by?
- Does most change flow from the current state of the extensions of man?