At 7pm UK time, 12 noon US Pacific time today (25th October 2020) there is the first virtual event supported by the University of Sheffield Information School for Global Media and Information Literacy week, when an exhibit of symbolic models of "Metaliteracy" will be opened on the iSchool's island in the 3D world, Second Life. Infolit iSchool is a place which is dedicated to information literacy and learning and has been hosting events, exhibits and learning since 2007, and I am its chief curator.
This event is held under the aegis of the Association of College and Research Libraries Virtual Worlds Interest Group, and takes place at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/149/226/3479. You need a Second Life avatar (free) and the Second Life browser installed (an ordinary browser doesn't work). Contact me if you would like more information, as there are more events over the next week (see here).
The event will start by my own introduction to Global MIL week, and then I will hand over to Dr Valerie Hill. Dr Hill has recently published a book on Metaliteracy and she uses the Symbolic Modelling approach pioneered in Second Life by Niela Miller, to get people to reflect on how they think and feel about metaliteracy, information and literacy.
The new exhibition at contains some of the models created so far. As an example, the embedded video below shows Greg Perrier (Emeritus Professor, Biology at Northern Virginia Community College, USA) who is Dodge Threebeards in Second Life, talking about the model he created in ten minutes, as his response to the idea of metaliteracy. This is one quotation from the video where he's talking about his relationship with information "I'm surrounded by this stuff, constantly rotating and popping in, my phone's dinging away, and so it's, there'd be almost connections, like spiderwebs between that green [representing him], with panels rotating around it, as things are flying in to me, basically [me] dealing with it, sorting and making some sense out of it all"
