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| Jenaia Morane (Jena Ball) |
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About Us
Jenaia Morane and Marty Snowpaw are virtual world visionaries exploring how Second Life and other virtual worlds affect, enhance, and change how we see and interact with one another as unique individuals and as part of communities.
Believing the things we have in common far outweigh our differences, they work to find the Narrative Threads™ that link all our lives with a goal of creating supportive communities where the gift of each individual is shared through story.
Together Morane and Snowpaw develop and produce immersive, interactive, and educational Story Quests where people of all ages can embark on learning adventures. Both Jenaia and Marty are available to lead discussions about the importance of Questing and the role it plays in building communities of practice in Second Life. Please contact them at one of the addresses or phone numbers below for more information.
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| Marty Snowpaw (Marty Keltz) |
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Jenaia Morane (Jena Ball)
The quote below, shared with me as a postcard, has always given me a chuckle. The card shows a bemused looking stick figure crawling around on the floor of a darkened room. The only light comes from a small window in the upper right corner of the scene. The quote reads:
“I’m in search of myself. Have you seen me anywhere?”
Even as I smile, a part of me is empathizing with the stick figure’s plight. For most of my life – certainly from the moment I realized I was never going to write the next “great American novel,” or become the dentist my parents hoped I would be – I have been on a Quest to find and share those talents and abilities that make me unique, give me joy, and allow me to help others.
This kind of search is not something that is generally encouraged in our society. In fact, just the opposite is true. We are plugged into an educational assembly line that expects us all to learn and perform in the same way. Moreover, our knowledge and skills are tested in ways that measure our ability to fit into predefined roles. We’re told that this conformity is what is necessary in order to “make a living.” More often than not this results in feelings of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and depression.
My journey has taken me down many roads as I tried on and practiced a wide variety of “roles.” Eventually it dawned on me that who I am is not defined by what I do. In fact, just the opposite it true. What I “do” needs to be an expression of who I am.
This subtle but fundamental shift in perception turned my world upside down and launched a new career. If I wasn’t going to fit myself into predefined job descriptions, then what did I want to do? The answer, as clear as a single note being played over and over on a piano, was simple – stories.
Stories and storytelling are the backbone of my work and the foundation on which The Virtual World Story Project is built. The goals of this work are:
- Unearth, preserve, and share great stories
- Help individuals find and express the Narrative Threads™ of their lives
- Use Narrative Threads™ to weave communities of practice that celebrate and nurture the gifts
of each individual and help us make sense of our lives
- Use the Questing model to offer interactive, immersive, and creative tools to students and educators
- Encourage others to join us in thinking outside the box
- Have a great time doing what I love ;-)
With these goals in mind my partner (Marty Snowpaw) and I are opening dialogs with like-minded people to discover where the Narrative Threads™ will lead. We'd love to hear from you.
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Marty Snowpaw (Marty Keltz)
Three abilities have defined my work in every field I’ve tackled, whether it was teaching, print publication, or the production of groundbreaking children’s programming:
- My willingness to acknowledge that change is both inevitable and desireable
- My capacity to embrace change by staying open to new ideas and proactively pursuing those I felt had merit
- My ability to see the bigger picture – to distill complex ideas and trends into practical projects that motivated people to make clear and demonstrable contributions
As a result of these abilities I have embraced a lot of change. Back in the 1960s, I was one of the first to see the potential for media in the classroom, and introduced my students to everything from commercial broadcast television to feature films.
I was there to help birth the concept of high quality programming for children and families - producing award winning series such as The Baby-sitters Club, Goosebumps, and The Magic School Bus - and helped shepherd those programs across a variety of complementary media platforms from print to CD ROMS to Ms. Frizzle lab kits.
Understanding the tremendous impact multi-media products could have on education, I worked with companies like Microsoft to produce a wide range of products related to the science-based series, The Magic School Bus and a traveling museum that made learning science fun for kids across America.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that we are standing at yet another crossroads of change. From my perspective it is both the most exciting and potentially life changing I have ever seen. That’s because for the first time the change that’s occurring has little to do with things (although new technologies figure heavily into it) and everything to do with perception and awareness.
The change I am seeing and working very hard to embrace is a fundamental shift from seeing and valuing one another based on our ability to manipulate information and fit into “cookie cutter” roles, to one that values the individual's ability to think conceptually, actively engage in communities of practice, and make contributions that are “outside the box.”
Author Daniel Pink calls this “a whole new mind,” but I would take it one step further and call it “a whole new way of being.”
This whole new way of being means we must reassess how we approach education. If we are not turning students out on an assembly line and measuring their success or failure based on tests that require them all to conform and perform to preset standards (the antithesis of valuing the individual), then what and how will we teach them? How do we encourage and nurture the gift that is each individual in ways that benefit us all?
These are heady, even revolutionary questions, but they will not be denied. We have whole generations of young people growing up with access to digital media that encourages self-expression, social networking, and out-of-the-box thinking. They are twittering, texting, blogging, sharing their lives on Facebook, Flickr, and Linked In, and even creating Second Lives. In short, they are experimenting with, learning from, and being shaped by forms of media that most schools don’t even attempt to address.
I believe it is time we took a good hard look at these new medias and begin to put them to work for our kids, both by helping them master the skills needed to use them properly, and by helping them make sense of and integrate what they are experiencing through them.
As someone who has stood at this kind of crossroad many times before I am uniquely equipped to help your organization or institution embrace and flourish in these changing times.
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