Monday, March 29, 2010

I barely have time for one life...

...let alone a second life.


I find the virtual world such as second life fascinating and kind of crazy at the same time, however, I don't understand how someone can have enough time to do such things as second life when I find that I barely have time for what is going on in my real life. I have never been one for things such as avatars, wiki's, etc so it seems a bit hard for me to get into something such as second life. The only reason I am able to check facebook lately is becasue it's available on my phone. If it weren't for my iPhone I'd probably never use the internet or check my email.

I do find things such as avatars and games such as The Sims to be pretty neat, I just don't have time for them. It seems kinda of that you can create another character or yourself or a character or whoever you want and create a life for that character, it's like a sense of fairytale that you can control. Being able to do and create such things and use them to communicate with people around the world shows how far we have come with technology, it's unreal sometimes. I find that this would be a good and different educational method. I find that since we have the ability to let people communicate with others everywhere we should take advantage of that, especially in the classroom. It teaches are kids to be much more open minded to people "different" then they are, it might be a great way to introduce and teach topics on race and gender biases. I also found that this orientation was a bit much and very loaded. This might be something a student in junior high or high school finds a bit more simple however, it might not be visable for my 2nd graders.

This orientation video was rather boring too. It continuely talked about how there is just too much information people need to be informed of before proceeding in second life, so much information to the point if I actually had time to do something like second life I would not want to sit through countless directions just to learn how it works. Things like this are difficlult for me because I HATE listening to directions, call me stubborn but I like to figure things out like this for myself and just play with things until I have figured out what I need to know. I would probably learn things like this much faster if I were to watch/listen to directions but I can't seem to do it. I found this video hard to focus on and the voices were very monotone which reminded me of my 9th grade History teacher that never really sounded excited about anything.

3 comments:

  1. I agree with your blog post. I don't know how some people have time to have a second life. I am right there with you I can barely keep up with the one life I do have.

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  2. Sorry you found the audio monotone and not exciting. You'll have to try creating a twenty minute video at some point on an instructional topic-- it's usually surprising to people how challenging this is.

    The main point of this was to raise awareness of how virtual worlds are and can be used for learning. I think these capabilities are just going to keep getting better in the years ahead.

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