{"id":791,"date":"2008-11-07T10:00:47","date_gmt":"2008-11-07T15:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=791"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:38:16","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:38:16","slug":"virtual-forbidden-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2008\/11\/virtual-forbidden-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual Forbidden City"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagethief<\/a> has been discussing the Virtual Forbidden City<\/a>. Basically this is something that looks a lot like a Second Life<\/a> site but you have to download the whole thing. You get a little avatar and you can bop around the Great Within and look at stuff. Imagetheif’s readers seem to mostly be divided on whether or not lack of crowds is a good thing or a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Frankly I think it is a pretty bad thing, in the sense that visiting the Virtual Forbidden City is simply not a substitute of any sort for visiting the real Forbidden City, reading a book<\/a> about the Forbidden City, or even looking at some photos<\/a> of the Forbidden City (hereafter FC).<\/p>\n

This is not something that all of my colleagues would agree with. Some of them are real big on the value of new technology like Second Life for teaching<\/a>. Oddly enough, despite the fact that I have one of those blog <\/a>things, I am not sold on this. Virtual Forbidden City (hereafter VFC) is a good example of the weaknesses of all this gab<\/a> about new paradigms of virtual learning.<\/p>\n

First, VFC is not at all the same thing as actually visiting. This should go without saying. You get a bit of the sense of space you get at the real FC, but almost all of the details are washed out or just not there. Like almost all of the Second Life historical sites I have seen (which is not many) none of the VFC views are as detailed as a reasonable postcard, and like postcards it focuses on the big set-piece shots. Visiting a virtual site is like being an incurious person in a tour group. All you get to see is what everyone else wants to see. VFC is a good example of this because all they have re-created are the main postcard views. Very few interiors, and those very poor. Most of the rabbit warren of passages and courtyards that make up the FC has not been rendered, and probably never\u00a0 will be.\u00a0 My most vivid memory of the real FC was not looking at things that looked like postcards, but roaming around the rest of the place looking at odd views.1<\/a><\/sup> What you can get from VFC you could get better from a decent photo-essay on the place. Virtual sites may improve somewhat as we get more bandwith, but the basic problem that you only see what someone goes to a great deal of effort to put there will remain the same.<\/p>\n

On the other hand who cares if it’s not the same as actually visiting? It’s not like the options are “take your class to Beijing” or “log into the virtual forbidden city”. VFC may not be as good as the real thing, but it has to be good for something, yes? Not really. I suppose visiting VFC will teach students more about China than having them play Mario Party<\/a>, but it will not teach them as much as reading (anything) or watching a bad documentary or listening to me talk. Actually, the only real educational value I can see from a second-life-y type of thing is that it -might- be helpful for students to create a site like this, which would force them to think a bit about what the essential aspects of a site are. Creating a good virtual site is like writing a term paper. Visiting one is like reading old term papers from semesters gone by.<\/p>\n

  1. actually, the first time I was there was an ungodly cold February day and I spent a lot of time wondering what life was like as a eunuch in the FC  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Imagethief has been discussing the Virtual Forbidden City. Basically this is something that looks a lot like a Second Life site but you have to download the whole thing. You get a little avatar and you can bop around the Great Within and look at stuff. Imagetheif’s readers seem to mostly be divided on whether…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,119,163,83,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-english","category-teaching","category-visual-culture","category-web-sites-and-resources"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-cL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4764,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/4764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}