Kathar.in

(Note: This post is slightly premature, because the third phase of the project hasn’t actually ended yet – it still has another month to run. However, I don’t feel this is likely to make much difference. WordPress screwed up and wiped the second half of the post, forcing me to rewrite it. Also, it’s rather dull, as is everything I write.) 

So, after leaving, returning, leaving, returning, leaving, and returning to/from this project, it seems that it has finally decided to die. By which I mean that all attempts to obtain funding have failed, they’re running out, and they can’t afford staff. I can’t say I’m going to miss it much. In all honesty, the project didn’t die because of a lack of funding – instead, it died due to the lack (or, more accurately, the ignorance) of a coherent vision. This is a problem for a project with the stated intent of trying to work out how to make an idea work – so far, all it has to show for it is that it doesn’t, mostly because the management over-compromise to make their vision fit in.

The third phase of the project was, apparently, formed with the purpose of discovering what happens when you add school to the mix – a mix with the slogan “not school – not home – schome.” You basically get school. In fact, that’s exactly what you get. Complete with deadlines, grades, pressure from teachers, and rushed homeworks.

The example that shall be used for the purposes of this post, simply for being the worst, is one “Noel” (real name unknown) – who apparently teaches technology at an arts school in LA. Unfortunately, it appears that she is incapable of teaching anything beyond technology – where technology appears to mean “how to browse the internet and use Second Life.” As such, her use of the resources of the Schome Park Project was for the sole purpose of teaching this. Unfortunately, the way in which she went about doing this completely missed the point. The only time Noel has shown interest in the “schome ethos,” as she calls it, was when defending herself. During this defence, she picked two phrases from it, and thus decided she had the right to do whatever he wanted, and that nobody else should have a say. Furthermore, the grades his students are worrying about have nothing to do with the “Knowledge/Information Age skills” (and both of those names suck, by the way) – they’re based on, according to Noel’s students, the quality of the buildings – and anything else is worth exactly zero. Okay, that’s all very well. Please go to the Second Life class run by Linden Lab. Come back when you have some interest in what goes on here. In another example from Noel, shortly after she joined, she set her students a homework in which they had to answer some questions. One of them asked the rest of us – which is perfectly acceptable. However, Noel objected that he hadn’t learnt how to use the wiki to find answers – in fact, given how hard it is to navigate the wiki, I’m unclear on how this is really a major failing. What Noel didn’t seem to realise that the rest did, is that asking for help was perfectly acceptable (and, indeed, is encouraged) – and he shouldn’t have set the homework in the first place. Evidently, he still hasn’t realised this.

However, Peter (who runs the project, and is responsible for its general existence) is very insistent that it’s okay. Phase 3 was, in fact, designed to, err, “discover the tensions” caused by having schools involved in something with is very explicitly not school. Or, as I would interpret it, phase 3 was designed to fail miserably, and the aim was to discover just how miserably. My answer, as given in assorted forum posts, was “catastrophically” – the only benefit from the addition of the schools was an increase in the number of people involved (which doesn’t require schools, just an easier-to-initiate signup process that doesn’t require you to write two essays read by several hundred people before they’ll even notice you wanting to take a look.) In return for this increase, the community paid the price of some of its freedom – which I don’t think was worthwhile. There are better ways (for proof, consider that nobody in the first two phases was signed up as part of a school class.)

Apart from the mess that was Noel, however, the project is slowly attempting to get things in order. There are now attempts to get something done. This attempts have, thus far, had a tendency to fail miserably, but something things do happen. For instance, the “My Schome” newsletter (was that the name?) was due to be published a while back. Due to lack of interest, it was pushed back. Once there were finally some actual articles, it appears to have been postponed indefinitely for no particular reason. This is not the only time that has happened. However, these failures are of limited consequence to the rest of the community. Whilst a project dying due to disinterest affects the person who was trying to run it, the rest of the community is unlikely to really care, or even notice the project’s demise – after all, if they were uninterested while it was alive, there’s no reason for them to care hugely after it’s fizzled out.

On the other hand, the old “strand” system has been partially revived – and where the strands have actually been run, they have been highly successful. For example, the “Time Explorers” (who look at archeology and history) have had multiple sessions, which have been attended, and evidently productive. This is in contrast to Noel’s approach of invalidating any work which was performed by the community as a whole. Right. So much for the “schome ethos” then. What’s more, in these History and Archeology sessions, the learning has been twofold – both about history and such, and also the leadership/discussion skills. This, I believe, is the idea of being in Schome Park. Not, as some people (like, say, Noel) believe, for the purpose of learning how to use Second Life. “Knowledge Age” skills come into play here in some way – as far as I am aware, “Ability to construct buildings in Second Life” is not one, whilst “ability to lead, discuss, etc.” is.

From the above, it appears that the major problems in Schome Park are all caused by bad decisions on the part of the staff. I believe there are two reasons for this: firstly, the majority of the staff rarely actually participate in Schome Park itself – which results in an interesting disconnect between what is believed to be going on and what is actually going on. This appears to be because they have noticed that, although they’ve spent a huge amount of time gathering data, they have yet to actually write any papers about Schome Park, and are thus appearing to be lazy and unproductive. So they’ve gone off to be productive. The second reason is that because Schome Park is a research project, and we’re all guinea pigs who have been made to feel otherwise, there will be frequent decisions that are not in our interests, but are made due to the need to “see what happens” – which, in some cases, means “see just how badly things go wrong,” in cases where the member of staff responsible for the decision (that is, Peter) already knew that it was a bad idea.

So, as it stands, Schome Park’s funding has almost dried up. This is, at least partly, because it stands in an interesting position whereby it’s both an educational and research project, and thus manages to exclude itself from those funding either one (but not both) of those categories. This is largely insoluble, given the Schome Park Project’s given aims.

As such, my solution is as follows:

1. Kick out all the school teachers (but leave the pupils)
2. Cease to be part of the OU
3. Provide clear and easy joining instructions on the schome.ac.uk page.
4. Less paranoia – I can fake the information and verification you demand so easily it’s not worth it to ask in the first place.
5. Fully community-oriented moderation, with the only activity of, say, one or two staff members being to help resolve disputes that are too serious or too complex to be resolved by the community.

By doing this, you can keep schome as what it is, whilst helping to drastically expand the community. Of course, having done this, the project will have lost the ability to send letters to schools requesting they get their pupils to join – but, on the other hand, they tried this, and it didn’t really work anyway.

Oh, and one last point: They had me make some stuff for them and then decided to replace it with inferior other stuffs because they couldn’t be bothered to come up with a solution that worked. This irritates me.

You have reached the end of the ramble. Well done!