The Real Bubble of Virtual Worlds.

With the world economy recovering from the greatest financial crisis in modern times, researching its effect on the virtual economies that people playfully or laboriously engage with in online worlds would be interesting, relevant and difficult. The supposed correlation between real world economy and virtual economies in/between online worlds could be a good starting point to investigate the promises virtual worlds and virtual economies did or did not quite live up to.

Poised to be the next big thing, virtual worlds received press, academic interest, and were generally firmly occupying popular debate on new media and web 2.0 in 2005, 2006 and 2007, just before the onset of the economic crisis. Before 2008 we could luxuriate in elaborate philosophical questions pondering the implications of the very notion of virtual currency and exclaim how every stage of production has drifted into the farthest corners of abstraction.

It is only three years ago that Madison avenue was pumping millions of dollars into expanding brand names in virtual world like Second Life, making sure they would not miss out. Given the current financial turmoil in most of the Western world these investments could very well use a critical assessment. Not only from a purely economic point of view but also pertaining to the social and cultural aspects that helped create a climate in which investing currency, the paper kind, in frivolous pixels and polygons was believed to be profitable.

The most prominent virtual worlds have already been examined for signs of post credit crunch stress. At the beginning of this year Bruce Sterling reported for Wired.com that: ‘The Second Life real-estate bubble is holding just fine’ explaining that user to user transactions had increased up to 65% in 2009. This summer however layoffs at Linden lab instilled a lack of confidence in the future of Second Life which resulted in a drastic devaluation of the Linden dollar. Self contained as this incident might seem, the real life working conditions of the facilitators obviously influence the strength of virtual economies.

Working from a humanities perspective would mean to shift focus from the macroeconomic perspective to the perspective and experience of the users. In describing the changing regard for virtual economies in light of the recent recession one could attempt to dissect the individual user and user communities at the receiving end (?) of corporate investments. Do users still have an opportunity to create and sell items? What happens to copyright after brands have invaded, claimed and perhaps abandoned virtual spaces?

Julian Dibbel showcased an in-depth account of his participatory observation of those players who managed to make a living out of virtual loot in his 2006 book Play Money[1]. He submerged himself in the subculture of the hardworking merchants of MMORPG items, he quit his job and committed himself to a fiscal year of trying to make millions trading virtual loot. The end result is predictably not the money, but rather the blog he kept and the story he published. His research is not a moneymaking guide, it is a careful study of play and how play and work have merged, a philosophical interrogation on how abundance and scarcity relate in environments where these concepts should be meaningless.

Steven Shaviro, in turn, used Dibbels’ work[1] from two very distinct cyberspace ages to contrast the definition and reception of the virtual. The early nineties virtual as described in My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World[2], and the post dot-com crash virtual as portrayed in Dibbels’ last book Play Money. If quitting your day job in order to fully understand the subculture at hand seems slightly too committed, this comparing of analyses can result in newly contextualized conclusions that the initial research could not have foreseen.

Whether participating or not, with these very general questions and objects of study as multifaceted as MMORPGs and their position in past and current mediascapes, the answer might not even include the recession. Other developments (increasing use of smartphones for example) and changes over the past three years also need to be described and considered.

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[1]Dibbel, Julian. Play Money. Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

[2] In Shaviro, Steven. ‘Money for Nothing: Virtual Worlds and Virtual Economies. 2007. Available at http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/MMOs.pdf

[3] Dibbel, Julian. My Tiny life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1999.

How to repair your 4870x2 using an oven.

When my 4870x2 died (artifacts in BIOS and OS) and I figured out I had no warranty to rely on, I decided to use the oven trick. I know it sounds like a great hoax, but this really works. The entire 8800 series are being revived like this but the procedure for the ATI cards differs slightly, that's why I thought a guide would be useful.

This method of repairing is used to refix the solder connecting the mem to the board, over time small fractures can cause the card to fail, this trick helps to undo those fractures by melting the solder back into place.

Obviously this is a last resort measure, make sure you double check with your supplier and manufacturer whether you might be eligible for warranty on your card. If not, proceed as follows:

1 Remove the heatsink















2 Remove the backplate






























3 Remove the thermalpaste (using q tips and 96% alcohol or pads





















4 Don't worry about the DVI ports and 6-pins connectors, they can stand the heat.
5 Place the card on balls of aluminium foil, make sure they are level when resting the card on them.
















6 Preheat the oven to 220 (218.3 if you can :) degrees or 425 Fahrenheit.
7 Put the card in the oven (seriously) Wrap the tray up as well if you plan to do baking with this oven anytime soon
















8 Take the card out after 7 minutes
















9 Let cool for about two hours, best to do this in the oven with the door open, don't move the card around.
10 Open a window

After two hours simply replace the pads or thermal paste, mount the heatsink and fans and you are ready to go!

Since the 4870x2 has quite a number of components to cool I have included a pic showing you which parts need paste or pads. So that's all the parts with blue pads in this picture and the two chips of course. Whether to use pads or paste (or both) differs per heatsink.

Schools are complicated places, they not only mirror society's obstacles and challenges but also represent our collective hopes for youth, education and knowledge. Teaching is to an extend an individual enterprise in that many teachers adopt a style of teaching suitable to their personality, interests and age. Many experience the growing attention for new media practices in education as another tyranny of the new, alongside with the general managerial urge to continually reform. With teachers and middle management resistant to being told what to do on one side and hardware manufacturers and didactic experts pushing the envelope for change and adaptation on the other, any attempt to chart new developments regarding the function of new media in education, is indeed a daunting enterprise.

There truly is no school like the old school. When studying the theoretical foundations of effective information transfer over the course of the twentieth century alone, the approaches range from behaviorist habit formation to learning as a natural subconscious process to learning through mere suggestion and relaxation. Shifts in attitude towards learning depended on more than just changes in fashionable academic interest and were also informed by local politics and conditions. However variable this notion of the old school might be, there is an overarching image of what traditional education looks like. First of all, at most schools in the Netherlands teaching is carried out according to a classical school concept. Students are taught in separate age groups, receive marks and are subjected to what is called frontal teaching. Secondly, despite acknowledgement of the changing intensity with which students process (mediated) stimuli, and despite notice of their multitasking abilities, no formal attempt has been made to utilize the digital natives' newly acquired skills or recognize their handicaps. On the contrary, teachers and parents complain about their seemingly contrasting short attention span and zombielike devotion to screens.

So how to teach digital natives? I already argued for using different interfaces in an earlier post on this blog, but as one of my colleague teachers remarked, replacing “can I have your attention please?” with the on/off switch on a PC or beamer isn’t necessarily going to lead to a more effective learning environment. How do we distinguish between engaging digital natives and hypnotizing them by adding more screens to their lives?

The use of technology in teaching makes no sense if it’s just because we think that technology is cool. It’s easy to understand how we get to this place. The thinking goes like this: It’s fun and cool to blog; lots of people are doing it; we know that kids get some information from blogs; therefore, blogging must have a place in our schools. This orientation is a mistake. We should figure out, instead, how the use of technologies can support our pedagogical goals. Blogging might or might not, be part of the approach we end up taking. The right way to look at it is to ask whether blogging can meet a need that we have in our teaching. We need to determine what our goals are, as teachers and parents, and then figure out how technology can help us, and our kids, to reach those goals.[1]

Let me give a simple example of how to frame a typical web 2.0 application in class in order to resolve conflicts between stated goals on the one hand and the "urge" for computer assisted learning on the other.

In language class, the use of a Wiki can be an efficient way to facilitate language acquisition and utilize digital natives’ skills. It can also be a complete waste of time, depending on whether the teacher takes an informed approach to this tool. This informed approach naturally starts with a theoretical outlook on learning and continues with ways of assessing digitally created content. Using webcams and broadband conversation software like Skype[2] a language teacher could facilitate a conference call between a Tokyo and Amsterdam based secondary school to start working on a shared Wiki on, for example, an upcoming student exchange. Creating pairs across numerous time zones, late Tokyo afternoons could be spent getting to know each other, discussing progress and explaining recent changes to various contributions. The meaningful and unrehearsed context of the spoken dialogue is the co-creation of a Wiki, non verbal communication, register and intonation practiced through using webcams and headsets.

Apart from the obvious communicative value of a lesson like this in language class students are also working towards a more versatile but unanticipated mode of computer assisted learning. A mode in which digital natives can create, collaborate and publish whilst participating in a new network of fellow students. These latter forms of learning, the side effects of a certain project based organization of school tasks using new media, might exactly be what teachers, parents and policy makers should pay attention to when observing digital natives. Other than reframing teaching theory into new digital environments, analyzing these new spaces and what they can teach, but also what they have already taught students, is in its own a valuable exercise. An exercise that will help us understand not only the Digital Natives better, but also an exercise in carefully dissecting those digital environments. For example, to participate in an international effort to create digital information means that students will be asked to familiarize themselves with working through different time zones. Learning how to plan conference calls, how to work with international standards and symbols and how to overcome intercultural differences for the sake of collaboration, are learning aims nowhere yet to be found in the current core objectives for secondary education.

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[1] From the chapter “learner” in: Gasser, Urs, John Palfrey. Born Digital, Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

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[2] As of 2010, a number of secondary schools in Amsterdam will partake in a 1GBps glass fiber network pilot. Information available (in Dutch) at: http://www.boa-amsterdam.nl.