Manon of Second Life: Teaching in the Virtual World
It was a dark and stormy night. As the wind howled outside my window, I put on my bright magenta suit and stiletto heels. Soon I was striding down an empty two-lane highway. I saw no one, until I returned home to find a scruffy-looking, bearded man leaning against a short stone wall. I approached him with my best conversational opener. “Do you hang out here often?” “Sometimes,” he answered. After about twenty minutes of chit-chat I learned he lived not far away and had earned his MBA from the university where I teach. With tension niggling at my stomach, I quickly did the math to see if I might have had him in class. I typed furiously. “Did you ever take MGMT 462?” His reply was a typical student’s. “What class was that?” Another lesson learned: virtual or real, it’s a small world. Flying around Second Life (www.secondlife.com), where more than ten million people from around the world may come and go at all hours of the day, my alter ego had managed to meet someone from down the road who, thankfully, was not one of my former students.{1} But truth be told, I was there precisely because I had conducted a course in Second Life (SL), in a experiential exploration of virtual communication to see how three-dimensional web interaction lived up to its hype.
What do first-year students do in a virtual classroom? They build motorcycles and go-karts and speed across the landscape. They cause trees to sprout from tables, chairs, and teaching stations, as conversations careen out of control. Our efforts to discuss the day’s readings collapsed under the weight of simultaneously typed comments that could not possibly carry forward a conversational thread, as all the while spinning cylinders, the sudden appearance of tall grasses, and nonsensical interruptions distracted us.
Second Life is the new darling of the media and of tech enthusiasts, a virtual, 3-D graphical world where people adopt avatars that may or may not resemble their real-life personas. Corporations as well as educational and cultural institutions are setting up shop there, hoping to attract customers and serve patrons and students in a hip, twenty-first-century kind of way. On the Saturday night before my encounter with my shaggy new friend, in the company of a group of people from around the world, I had attended a live digital simulcast in Second Life of a concert performed by Red {an orchestra}, a Cleveland-based classical ensemble.{2} Many people, including Philip Rosedale, its founder, are quick to say that Second Life is not a game, like the popular World of Warcraft, although gaming communities do exist in Second Life.{3} Rather, it is a virtual environment inhabited by all kinds of people, from staid professors such as myself to (more typically) people in their twenties and thirties who were born to the virtual life. Second Life distinguishes itself from other virtual worlds by its economy, where Linden dollars (named after Second Life’s developer, the Linden Lab) convert to real U.S. dollars. (As I write this, the exchange rate is about L$265 to US$1.) Enterprising Second Life residents have been known to earn as much as a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year selling virtual real estate, clothing, cars, hairdos, and other representations of consumer society.{4}
All of this can be gleaned from the dozens of articles that pepper newspapers and the Internet each time a major corporation sets up a hotel (Starwood’s Aloft Hotel), a car dealership (Pontiac, Mercedes Benz), or a news bureau (Reuters) in Second Life. In March 2007, a violent virtual attack (using exploding pig grenades) against the virtual political offices there of the extremist French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen rated a front-page story in the Washington Post.{5} Universities have been experimenting with classroom and other activities in Second Life. Distance-learning instructors report that the graphical virtual classroom can create a community for learners, bridging the gap between asynchronous online-course participation and the experience of a real-life classroom. Institutions with islands in Second Life include Case Western Reserve University (where I work), Harvard, Ball State University, Pepperdine, and New York University.{6} The Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Case Western Reserve has started inviting admitted and prospective students to a virtual campus that includes representations of the library, a local diner, and the residential village, and I recently gave a presentation with a colleague at a university-sponsored information technology fair that was streamed live into Second Life.
My first experience with a virtual classroom took place in fall 2001, when I taught an undergraduate seminar called “Culture and Computers.” The class met once a week for two and a half hours, with the first half of each session taking place in the university’s virtual environment, known then as the CWRU MOO. (MOO stands for MUD—Object Oriented, and MUD for multi-user domain.) The MOO was essentially a text-based real-time chat room that functioned much like Second Life does, but without the graphics and avatars. The students adopted pseudonyms and described themselves with words rather than images, although they could attach small icons to their names if they chose. In discussions, lines of text quickly filled the computer screen and often scrolled almost too fast to follow. This excerpt from an outside-class evening discussion is a good example of how discussions moved along, demonstrating the informal mix of on- and off-topic dialogue.
The holy fishboy has entered.
Serena says, “i agree, the article was so dull and could have been summarized”
Gray arrives from Mather House
MoMan says, “yes”
MollyB says, “Monk, then how would you paraphrase it in a short sentence?”
MollyB says, “Hi holy fishboy”
The_Monk says, “Computers are a tool, they could have been used to cause a revolution, but instead became tools of the establishment due to elitism.”
fishboy says, “hey, i just got back from 2 hrs of basketball so i might not say much while i recover”
Except in the case of these extra-help evening meetings in the MOO (students referred to the activity as “mooing”), we did not connect from remote locations. Instead, we mooed together in a computer lab located in the Kelvin Smith Library. In hindsight, remote connections would have been a more instructive experience—sometimes in frustration we resorted to talking to each other—but because we were all very new to this, it helped a great deal to meet in the lab. After a short break, we would reconvene in a library seminar room to discuss the day’s topic face-to-face, the goal being to compare and learn from the different methods of communication and discussion, to both learn about and experience computer culture. One of the students in the class, Jared Bendis, worked in the library’s New Media Studio and had been responsible for introducing me to our experimental online community. He was enormously helpful, particularly when our virtual world crashed around us, as it occasionally did.
I rostered the course in early May, after students had left for the long summer break, and so the course enrolled fifteen students, twelve of them freshman boys, most of whom planned to major in computer science or electrical engineering. I always imagined that, when registering for their first semester’s classes, they saw the word “computer” and ignored the word “culture.” We read books such as Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen, Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish, and William J. Mitchell’s e-topia: “Urban life, Jim—but not as we know it”.{7} Early conversations in the MOO were like the wild West—students getting completely off-track, typing cryptic lines about the virtues of various hardware and software, making jokes, holding conversations an eighth-inch deep. Even though we were in the same room, we did not necessarily know to whom the adopted names belonged, and that anonymity encouraged a heightened degree of informality. Eventually things settled down. There was a striking transition when we regrouped in the seminar room, an instantaneous reversion to the more typical respectful atmosphere of a traditional classroom. Students addressed me as Professor Berger, rather than MollyB. I found the semester a little traumatizing, the culminating experience being the day in the computer lab when students talked about their “handles” and BinaryBoy revealed that he had his name tattooed on his back in binary code. Driven by a chorus of disbelieving taunts, he ripped his shirt off to reveal that, indeed, he did. Throughout the four years these students were on campus they would yell “TUR-R-R-KLE” when they saw me, in homage to Life on the Screen, which had caused them so much emotional stress.
It was five years before I thought I could attempt the course again. With every passing year the idea of offering it became more daunting, as both the literature and the technology developed exponentially. During this period the university adopted a new general education curriculum, known as Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship, or SAGES. It begins with first-year seminars, limited to seventeen students, and is designed to launch new students coherently into the common enterprise of a research university. These courses serve as vehicles for teaching first-year students a variety of skills, including college-level written and oral communication, “seminaring” (as we’ve begun to call the necessary skills for engaging in intellectual discussions), and what it means to pursue a “life of the mind.” This approach allows faculty to teach creative topics that might not otherwise address disciplinary curricular needs, and it provided a perfect opportunity for me to retool Culture and Computers. In the meantime, Jared had earned his degree and entered and completed a master’s program, all the while continuing to work for various iterations of the media office. He is currently the creative director of new media in the Kelvin Smith Library’s Freedman Center, a cutting-edge multimedia service center. We saw each other frequently and often talked about the course and when I would teach it again. In the spring of 2006, he began telling me about Second Life and how the university was investing in an island there to support virtual classroom activities, similar to what I had done in the MOO. He had been in discussions with a colleague in the Department of Theater and Dance about the possibilities of building a theater. I decided to redesign Culture and Computers into a first seminar—it had functioned in much the same way the first time around—using Second Life as the virtual classroom. And so the adventure began.
My portfolio in the Office of the Dean included oversight of a grant to train faculty to integrate service learning into their classes. I had gone through the training myself and incorporated it into a course I taught on technology in America. Though I had been dissatisfied with the results that time around, I decided to include a service component in my new Culture and Computers seminar, to temper the whiz-bang fun of Second Life. I had worked before with the Ashbury Avenue Senior Computing and Community Center (ASC-3), a neighborhood computer center where low-income, underserved seniors could learn various computer skills. I required my new seminar students to volunteer six times during the semester as teaching aides for ASC-3’s computer classes. The center is within walking distance of the first year dormitories, so this activity fulfilled another of SAGES’s goals, to introduce entering students to the city that will be their home for the next four years. Thus, in effect, our class would be meeting in three different classrooms: a state-of-the-art seminar room, the Second Life SAGES classroom built by Jared and his colleagues, and the computer labs of the Ashbury Center.
The course enrolled fifteen students, ten of whom were young men and most of whom planned to study engineering. Déjà vu? The first thing we learned is that Second Life is not aggravation free. Real life conspired against us in the very first meeting, as between a balky wireless network, a computer battery failure, and the wrong AV connector, we were unable to log in. Jared was finally able to remotely log in to his own computer, access Second Life, and project it on the screen, but the whole experience left the students unimpressed.
Still, everyone went home, set up accounts, fussed with their avatars, practiced navigating, and did a little exploring. My own first experiences of SL, prior to the beginning of the semester, had included an invitation to tour someone’s virtual home, which featured a seductive little setting for “entertaining.” I suspected that my new friend did not know I was a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother and would not have been happy to learn of it. Although, who knows? He might have also been a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother. I excused myself politely and teleported away home, where I quickly added a disclaimer to the course syllabus: “The instructors do not promote, advocate, or bear responsibility for student activity in other areas of Second Life. Students are urged to use caution and take appropriate measures for safety if they choose to explore other areas of Second Life.” I am certain this disclaimer would not hold up in a court of law, but even my brief moments getting to know SL had made its underside apparent. My SL classroom required that participants have an invitation to teleport in, so I was not worried about random visitors, but the students’ membership in SL allowed them to roam the virtual world at will.
On the day of our first scheduled meeting in Second Life, about ten of us gathered in our real-life classroom to access the virtual classroom together; the remaining students joined us from remote locations. Giddily we logged on over the wireless network. The virtual classroom had been built with a teaching station—not unlike our real-life ones—facing theater-style rows of seats. A large three-screen video display served as a backdrop. Except for the fact that the classroom had no walls and was “out-of-doors” on the virtual shores of Lake Erie, the Second Life SAGES classroom closely resembled a typical university one. Many of the young men’s avatars arrived wearing the generic James Dean jeans and white t-shirt that male SL avatars are “born” with, but a few of the more savvy students arrived in terrific outfits—one came as a dragon, another as a robot constructed of white boxes. I was still in my default jeans and sweater for that first meeting, but decided afterwards to give myself more professorial clothes (the aforementioned magenta suit) because the jeans just added to the informality that our virtuality encouraged. As I gazed out at my class, their names hovering in the air above their heads, they seemed expectant. But it quickly became clear that, for our first meeting, chaos would reign.
What do first-year students do in a virtual classroom? They build motorcycles and go-karts and speed across the landscape. They cause trees to sprout from tables, chairs, and teaching stations, as conversations careen out of control. Our efforts to discuss the day’s readings collapsed under the weight of simultaneously typed comments that could not possibly carry forward a conversational thread, as all the while spinning cylinders, the sudden appearance of tall grasses, and nonsensical interruptions distracted us. Even the act of typing—slow for some, fast for others—hampered what a person could say with any intelligence. The following excerpt from a discussion of a number of articles about the gendering of computer games is fairly representative of that first day’s conversation:
[9:45] Manon Bouchard: what does it mean to be “an object”
[9:45] Andie Ziemia: inhuman
[9:45] Rich Ellis: if people got to do what they wanted to thats what they would do
[9:45] Seriah Ringgold: To be looked at as less human
[9:45] Mikey Eddy: the sole purpose of
[9:45] Mike Hwasung: something one can or wishes to own/possess
[9:45] Manon Bouchard: so, how are women objectified in games?
[9:45] Andie Ziemia: incapable of doing anything in life — or in the case of a game, incapable of changing anything in the game
[9:45] Clyde Moxing: to not have that persons personal feelings being taken into account
[9:45] You: I suppose that an object has a purpose, but not a soul.
[9:45] Julia Giacomin: its to have no feelings or opinions
[9:46] Rich Ellis: just look at Tomb Raider
Fifteen minutes later, we paused to reflect on how the discussion was proceeding. (The numerous misspellings are also typical.)
[9:59] Manon Bouchard: can we take a minute to think about how this discussion is going?
[9:59] Rich Ellis: its understood that violence is not caused by video games
[9:59] Manon Bouchard: what are the advantages?
[9:59] Andy Budich: i don’t see any at all
[9:59] Manon Bouchard: of the online discussion?
[10:00] You: Everyone can speak at once.
[10:00] Seriah Ringgold: We can easily speak our minds.
[10:00] Clyde Moxing: people are more willing to participate
[10:00] You: That can be both good and bad.
[10:00] Rich Ellis: we all say a whole heck of a lot more
[10:00] Danny Shams: Do people who don’t talk in class feel more comfortable talking here?
[10:00] Wejank Sol: is thaqt an advantage?
[10:00] Manon Bouchard: is everyone joining in?
[10:00] You: YEs.
[10:00] Mikey Eddy: yeah but then we lose ionts here and there
[10:00] Andy Budich: but how much of that is productive
[10:00] Jocelyn Battery: well not really. we don’t have time to think for very long, which might make for more meaningful conversations….
[10:00] Ishmael Ortega: im talking more
[10:00] Manon Bouchard: who hasn’t said much?
[10:00] Rich Ellis: and we can ride go carts
[10:00] Amy Potvin: i dont know if there is an advantage becasue it is really hard to follow the conversation
[10:00] Andie Ziemia: pretty much none is productive
[10:00] You: You have to filter through the comments.
[10:00] Wejank Sol: I haven’t, and I usually say a lot
[10:00] Mikey Eddy: i agree
[10:00] Rich Ellis: we should find a way to take turns
[10:00] Andie Ziemia: yeah, i have no idea what is going on
[10:01] Mike Hwasung: yeah the conversation is somewhat difficult to follow
[10:01] Manon Bouchard: and the toys are distracting
[10:01] You: There are parallel conversations goiong on.
[10:01] Seriah Ringgold: One of the main disadvantages is that the class seems to have a hard time keeping focus.
[10:01] Julia Giacomin: and two different convos go at once
[10:01] Voden Liebknecht: its harder to get an idea out that is relevant ot the time
[10:01] Ishmael Ortega: i think we had 3 convos at one point
[10:01] Jocelyn Battery: i like to think, but with so many comments going on at once, i dont have time to because by then, my relevant point then has passed…
[10:01] You: I think that we got rid of teh toys.
[10:01] Manon Bouchard: do you want to establish any rules?
[10:01] Mikey Eddy: nooo mommy thats no fun
As this excerpt shows, despite the pandemonium some students found that the online environment freed them from debilitating shyness and allowed them to express themselves more comfortably than they could in the seminar room, where they often—despite what I believe was a collegial and supportive atmosphere—feared having their comments and opinions judged harshly by their peers. But by the end of that first class period everyone (especially me) was exhausted from the effort of carrying on a conversation and the fruitless attempts to reign in the playfulness. When we next met in seminar, we agreed that the first online session, while fun, had been frustrating. We needed rules. The class decided that for our next session we would divide into two groups. Each group would have a discussion leader, students would come prepared with questions, and one student would take responsibility for keeping the discussions on task. For reasons I cannot explain, this person was to be called the “lumberjack.”
We met in Second Life a total of five times during the semester. The students embraced their self-devised rules, and while they occasionally ignored the lumberjacks’ entreaties to stay on course, discussions improved, if at a much tamer level. One of my goals in using Second Life was to encourage students to think deliberately about different communications media. These experiences generated a significant awareness about their strengths, weaknesses, and appropriate use. (Most of the students agreed, for example, that you should not end a relationship online, by telephone, or—worst of all—via text message.) But, as important, their experiences communicating through their avatars and constructing personalities helped them to understand some of our readings on a more experiential level. For example, Sherry Turkle’s exploration of virtual and real identities, the mutable boundaries between them, and the ability of postmodern theory to help us consider ideas about “the instability of meanings and the lack of universal and knowable truths” raised real issues for the students as they grappled with reconciling their own and their classmates’ multiple identities.{8} Why did students who never spoke in class babble on in online discussion? Why did the one student present himself as a robot of boxes? One passage from Turkle’s book in particular captured their attention, in which she described a young adult with multiple online identities who questioned why “superior status” was granted to the self with the body when the other selves seemed to be so much more interesting and had far more intriguing and exciting experiences.{9}
One of the most compelling readings for the students to build on this idea of multiple selves was Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace,” from his book My Tiny Life.{10} Dibbell tells the story of Mr. Bungle, a persona who assaulted and raped another character in the closeknit community of the LambdaMOO, an early predecessor to worlds such as Second Life. The incident horrified the victim, witnesses, and broader community, and it initiated a firestorm of discussion about governance, behavior, and the meaning of actions in a virtual world, much of it turning on explorations of distinctions between mind and body. As it turned out, Mr. Bungle was the creation of an entire dorm floor of freshmen boys at New York University. The difficulty my students had deciding whether or not the assault was “real” stood in contrast to the ease with which they could understand the dynamics of prankish communal actions. Not quite able to concede authenticity to virtual selves, some students could not understand why the victim did not just turn off the computer and walk away. Others could not conceive of the virtual actions as being anything more than mean-spirited mischief. Only after I asked whether or not they would tell their mothers they did this (a question followed by a profound silence and pained grimaces) did they begin to comprehend the degree to which one’s virtual actions connected to one’s real self.
While the students enjoyed their classes in Second Life, especially when logging in from their dorm rooms saved them a trek across campus, they found the conversations frustrating when compared to their seminar room discussions. Evaluations confirmed that while many students had an easier time contributing to the online conversation, the quality of exchange did not rise to that of our real-life meetings. They also recognized that typing skills translated directly into ability to participate in the discussion. As Jared put it in a recent presentation: “Imagine a gregarious student talking at length whenever they desired without moderation—now imagine trying to get a word in edgewise with three such students typing at lightning speed.”{11} One student commented that “it was sometimes difficult to say something you wanted because by the time you had typed it out, the conversation had moved on to a different point.” Thus, rather than equalizing access to the conversation, the online environment tended to favor those whose fingers were one with the keyboard.
The students’ experiences in Second Life contrasted with their work at the Ashbury Center. There they met interesting older adults eager to explore the Worldwide Web, communicate with friends and grandchildren, write newsletters, and pay bills online, whose lack of basic skills—a stunning revelation for the students—left them stymied. Just learning to use a mouse was a challenge. By requiring the students to help these senior citizens acquire the basic computer skills they lacked, I hoped that they might not so much learn about the somewhat outdated notion of the “digital divide” as become aware of the extent of their own tacit knowledge about computers and online environments. Being able to recognize these as learned rather than innate skills would help them to understand more viscerally the challenges facing people who did not grow up with computers and the Internet but who do, nevertheless, still need to negotiate them, for their livelihood or just for information. Coordinated readings introduced issues of access and what the lack of it meant in terms job skills, education, and economic and neighborhood development; others acquainted the students with debates among academics and grassroots activists about how best to reach and educate underserved populations.
As the semester progressed, the class explored aspects of computer culture through films such as Office Space and eXistenZ, Facebook, computer games, readings on posthumanism, and Microserfs, Douglas Coupland’s quintessential novel about the Microsoft generation. My students developed their abilities to think critically about the digital world, and the Ashbury Center students’ skills flourished dramatically. At the beginning of the semester the Case students felt as though their task at the center was just about hopeless, but by the end of it they felt superfluous, because the Ashbury Center students had mastered most of the basic functions. We celebrated the end of the semester with a breakfast in our seminar room, where the Case students presented their final projects to a curious and appreciative audience of Ashbury Center graduates. Their experiences in Second Life and the discussions about avatars and multiple identities helped to frame critiques of such topics as online dating, artificial intelligence, social networking, and online gaming. The senior adults enjoyed seeing the smart classroom’s capabilities, and the Case students fielded a barrage of insightful questions.
No doubt the virtual environment of Second Life can be useful for academic pursuits. For example, I have a colleague in speech pathology who hopes to develop a menu of speech anomalies that can be adopted by avatars, so that family members and others can experience the difficulties encountered by people with speech disorders. The director of Case Western Reserve’s Office of Instructional Technology and Academic Computing is using Second Life to teach a seminar on digital storytelling. I used it as a vehicle for helping students to think about online interaction and communities, and particularly to encourage them to think theoretically about how they portray and conduct themselves online. The experience in a virtual world also helped them to understand how wide the gap can be between those like themselves, who have been immersed in computer culture for as long as they can remember, and those who, as older teenagers or adults, only begin to learn about how to use a computer and what it can do. Perhaps more important, the experience of Second Life stood for my students as a metaphor for contemplating technology in general. How do we think about technologies critically, not just to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages but to understand how they function culturally and socially? How do digital technologies affect people across the three significant social categories of analysis—race, class, and gender?
Functioning in Second Life comes with its own set of frustrations. Linden Labs releases software updates every week, and these take a good bit of time to download. Often enough we encountered significant delay between our furious typing and the appearance of our thoughts and comments onscreen. Occasionally students had difficulty teleporting in to the classroom. If students built anything in the virtual classroom, the island’s administrator (Jared) would come along and remove it, which made them feel as though their creativity was stifled. These annoyances were, well, annoying, and in some ways compromised the experience, yet they also served as lessons about the realities of virtuality. And finally, my conservative self could not get past the fact that I had introduced a group of young people to a world that could be, for the most part, pretty seamy. Despite all of this, I was pleased that the students enjoyed their Second Life classes and that these experiences were instrumental in helping them to puzzle out questions raised in the seminar. Pedagogically, it proved satisfying.
In the years that I have been teaching, I have found popular culture to be a meaningful entry for students in helping them think about technology. It is a world they know and understand but rarely step back from to view with a sophisticated or theoretical eye. Our adventures in Second Life, protected and controlled as they were in some ways, nonetheless created an opportunity for exploring significant ideas about our digital lives.
{1} The number of Second Life residents is disputed. Commentators typically make a distinction between the number of people who have accounts and a more realistic number of people who continue to check in at least once a week after having been a member for over three months. See, for example, Henry Jenkins, “Notes from a New World: An Interview with Wagner James Au (Part Two),” <http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/interview_with_wagner_james_au_1.html> (accessed 16 January 2008); Stevenson Swanson, “Two Worlds Forge New Reality,” Chicago Tribune, 1 April, 2007, 3.
{2} The concert, That Red Guy, was sponsored in partnership with Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, and OneCommunity and the New Media Consortium of Austin, Texas. It was performed live on 14 April 2007 at Cleveland’s Masonic Auditorium and simulcast into three venues in Second Life. See <http://www.redanorchestra.org> (accessed 16 January 2008).
{3} Robert K. Elder, “1.4 Million Get a Virtual Life,” Chicago Tribune, 13 November 2006, 1.
{4} Clay Risen, “Gaming the System—Is It Time for the Real Government to Step into the Virtual World?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10 December 2006, H1.
{5} Molly Moore, “French Politics in 3-D on Fantasy Web Site,” Washington Post, 30 March 2007, A1.
{6} Christine Lagorio, “Pepperdine in a Treehouse,” New York Times, 7 January 2007.
{7} Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (New York, 1997); Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (New York, 1996); Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish (New York, 2000); William J. Mitchell, e-topia, “Urban life, Jim—but not as we know it” (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
{8} Turkle, 18.
{9} Turkle, 14.
{10} Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life (New York, 1998).
{11} Jared Bendis, “Developing Educational Virtual Worlds with Game Engines” (paper delivered to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), 8 August 2007,
Molly Berger is associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, where she also teaches in the history department. She is writing a cultural history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American hotels.
©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.