Blog Assignment #5 March 14, 2008

At the beginning of the quarter I had no clue about Second Life and all its wonders.  I thought it was some type of virtual video game.  It took me several weeks to figure out the concept.  I thought the creation of my avatar was really neat, and one day I spent several hours actually creating Rhonnda and I had a lot of fun with it.  After working on Second Life and learning about it in class I began to realize the potential a virtual world such as Second Life could actually have.  I especially appreciated it once we received our community partner assignment.  I realized that Second Life can be a fun social environment as well as a place to learn and stay connected.  My impression of Second Life most definitely improved over the quarter in a positive way.

  

After learning about what I know now of Second Life, I think that the potential to learn new things through it is the most appealing.  The idea that you can teleport to anywhere in the world is fascinating.  I think that in the future Second Life could be an important part of education and teaching students about different cultures.  If a class is studying the country of Italy, a teacher could go into Second Life, teleport there and walk around the streets of Rome.  As my group and I worked on our project I teleported to several different places looking for certain things to buy, and my experience doing that was great.  The only thing I found not appealing was the idea that people could change their identities on Second Life and be somebody else.

  

I found the ability to ‘chat’ and communicate in Second Life most useful.  A lot of times I worked from home on the final project.  The chat tool became useful when I needed to talk to my group.  I liked that I could still communicate and see the people in my group, although I was not physically there in real life.  I also found flying very useful because it made it easier to get around and see what our project looked like from a distance especially.

I downloaded Second Life on my computer at home so I do think I’ll drop in on Second Life from time to time to look around.  I also think I’ll use it for research and education.  I would love to see what spring quarter’s Communication & Technology students will do for their projects, so I’ll probably take a look at that.  Overall, I enjoyed this class.  We had some bumps along the way but I learned a lot and was excited to complete a project about something I had never done before.  Thanks for a great quarter!

Blog Assignment #4 March 7, 2008

 

Unfortunately, my group did not get a chance to meet with a Freedom Center representative when the community partners were in class so we were unable to get a first impression.  Instead, we met with Ron, someone from UC, who knew a little about the center but not enough to get our project started.  On Monday, February 25 we went to the Freedom Center to visit with our project representative, but yet again he did not show up.I did, however, enjoy the tour we took that day. 

I learned many new things about the Freedom center, Cincinnati, the Underground Railroad, and slavery in general.  I had been there once before, but this visit opened my eyes to things I had not realized before.  I enjoyed the video about Ripley, Ohio and how John Rankin and former slave John Parker helped slaves to freedom from Kentucky to Ohio.  I also liked the artwork in the building, the actual slave pen and the Slavery to Freedom exhibit. At the end of the tour, we realized our Freedom Center representative wasn’t going to show, so we had to come up with our own ideas for the project.  We used our experience on the tour and the inspirations we received to discuss possible themes.  We decided to incorporate a timeline of slavery in our Second Life project.  We wanted to also use the Freedom Center logo somewhere as well and create the slave pen we saw.  Although there has been little guidance thus far, I think we have some good ideas to begin with.

 The exhibits we saw included:

An Actual Slave Pen

From Slavery to Freedom

2 Videos about the Underground Railroad

Slavery Timeline Exhibit

and more..

Blog #3 February 28, 2008

We are half way done with our community partner project with The Freedom Center.  We have decided to show a timeline of slavery by putting each date on different PowerPoint slides and then placing them on blocks in Second Life.  We are in the process of putting the slides in a circle for our presentation.  We are then constructing different objects to go next to the slides and which correspond with each significant date.  Before next Monday, we still have to move our objects to our specific Freedom Center platform, create a few more objects as well as create another PowerPoint to use during our group presentation.  I’ve also been frustrated because I’ve only seen maybe five people out of ten from my group actually participate in the project.

Overall, I felt good about working with my group members in Second Life.  Although I liked working with them, it was still difficult to figure out how to do certain things.  We knew what we wanted to do, but we didn’t know how to do a lot of things, so it was hard to begin the project.  The only time I felt frustrated was when I was working from home and could not physically speak to my group members.  It was hard to just communicate through the chat to figure out what everyone was working on.  I also don’t like the chat on SL because it was hard to communicate to just one person without saying their name.

Cross posting my pictures from Second Life to my wordpress has still not worked!  I managed to get them up there without it, but it’s still very frustrating.  My BlogHUD is hard to work with, only because I’m not too experienced on any of the aspects in Second Life.  The pictures above are of me and my group members working on our project.  We are standing in front of two of the PowerPoint slides we had completed.  Hopefully, everything will turn out alright for Monday!

Blog Assignment #1 February 26, 2008

In 1966, Ralph Baer created the concept of the video game, I was obviously wasn’t born, but my father was thirteen in junior high in a small farm town in New York and the USA Medicare Act was passed to provide financial support to elderly citizens.  I found this significantly interesting because this year my dad had not even heard of a video game and when I was a teenager I had already conquered several of them!   

1972 was the production of the first video game (Magnovox Odyssey).  I was still not born, my dad was a freshman at Jamestown Community College in New York and a hit song that year was “Maggie Mae” (which my dad did have to sing to me on the phone as he remembered it).  This was a significant time in history as he recalls because President “I am not a Crook” Nixon resigned from office.  My dad was in college and still had never played a video game; he only remembers the game of pin ball, which he compared to what my generation knows as the video game.

In 1985 Nintendo was created!  The thought of me was created!  My dad had been married for five years with two children and was working in a nightclub called Christies and it was also the end of the disco era in society.  The video games my dad remembers were Pacman and Asteroids.  1985 was significant to me because when I think about my childhood, the image of hours and hours of Nintendo playing is clear in my mind.  Video games had a significant impact on my me and my family.

Skip to the year 2001 when Microsoft created Xbox.  I got my license this year and enjoyed playing tennis in high school.  My parents moved into a bigger house and their oldest daughter had moved out.  This year will always be remembered as the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.  In high school, I stopped playing video games and to this day, I am only the best at all the Super Nintendo games from my younger years (but very good I might add!) I also like Wii which was played for the fist time in 2006.I had many interesting findings as I compared technology innovations, my life, my father’s life and significant dates in history from 1966 and the concept of the video game to 2006 and its active gaming innovation.  It showed just how far not just video games have come but all technology innovations over the past 30+ years.  I am interested to see where they go from here!

Other Dates:

1989 – Game Boy was invented

            I was 3 years old, still playing with dolls

            Opened Academy Restaurant in Hamilton, OH

            George Bush sworn in as 41^st President

           

1995 – Nintendo made Nintendo Virtual Boy

            I was 9 and loved Nintendo games

            My father bought Extra Innings, sports bar

            Michael Jackson released the album Past, Present and Future

           

2000 – Sony created Playstation 2

            I was 14, surviving high school

            Enjoying fatherhood, sold Academy

            Millennium scare          

 

2003 – Second Life Created

            I was a junior in high school, MVP of tennis team

            My parents moved into a bigger house

            Mad Cow Disease scare

 

Blog Assignment #2 February 26, 2008

I learned a lot from visiting the Ivory Tower in Second Life, especially about the different building techniques important for our community partner project.  The tutorial was hard at first because I was confused even where to start.  Once I learned how to save the ‘notes’ to my inventory, I realized I could go around and collect the notes at each of the stations then have them saved for future use.  I enjoyed the Ivory Tower when I was there with my group members.  We helped each other with the different aspects of the assignment which made it easier and more fun. 

 My favorite part of the Ivory Tower was the building! (I wish we had more class time to practice this part).  My first object was a ball shape and it took me awhile to figure out to build.  Building was also more enjoyable with my group members because we could see what each other created and I could learn different techniques and building skills from them.  Above is a picture of me at the Ivory Tower as well as a picture of me looking at two of my sculptures.  On the left is a large circular ball with an American Flag themed texture/fabric.  I liked looking through the different colors and fabrics when it came to building as well as creating my own avatar clothing.  On the right is a cone shaped object with a tied-eyed pattern.  This one was also fun to make.  As simple as it looks, it took me quite a while to construct it.

It took a whole class period and time on my own to complete the tutorial at Ivory Tower.  I downloaded Second Life on my home computer and that has helped me a lot.  After the tutorial I felt more confident about my building skills on Second Life, but still very very confused about everything (especially, crossposting my pictures from secondlife to wordpress!)  I followed the steps to crosspost my pictures several times and still my pictures did not show up on wordpress, only on the bloghud website.  A lot of my classmates had this same problem so that was comforting.  I copy/pasted the pictures for now.  I look forward to more time learning about Second Life!