Second Life Experience

Screenshot 1 -My avatar is straight ahead with pink dress

My screenshot 2--Another view--My avatar is the one in the center of the picture, with a ponytail.

I participated in a Second Life Session--SL Education Roundtable--on Tuesday, November 4th at Montclair State University. It is a session that is held every Tuesday, but because it was the first Tuesday of the month, they had a special panel of speakers. An interesting feature of the meeting was that it was voice chat, so I was able to hear the voices of the speakers. Ignatius Onomatopoeia, introduced the session and the speakers that were at the meeting. He is a faculty member at the University of Richmond. There was a person that was transcribing the meeting, which allows the transcript to be available at: http://www.virtualworldsedu.info/slroundtable/.

The guests of this meeting were: Jenaia Morane & Marty Snowpaw of the Virtual Worlds Story Project. Both of these individuals had impressive resumes, including doing work for Scholastic, HBO, CBS, Sony writer, etc. Their current project is to "develop and produce immersive, interactive, and educational Story Quests where people of all ages can embark on learning adventures." The guests began the session of the brief introduction by answering a question posed by the host.

As I listened and participated in the session, I found myself having difficulty paying attention to the conversation. Though what they were talking about was quite interesting, it was difficult for me to listen to a person, who I cannot see, speak. I guess this contributes to my learning style, which is very visually based. I learn better by seeing than I do by hearing. The transcript helped me to better focus on the conversation, but because other people (other participants of the session) were able to add their own comments, it was sometimes difficult to follow what the speakers were saying.

The speakers did discuss about how stories are so important to learning and stated that stories help people to make sense of their lives and understand others. The story that they discussed, specifically, was about a man with HIV/AIDS. By hearing a story about such a situation, it often helps people to understand and sympathize with each other on a personal level. I completely agree with this. With young and old children, storytelling is very important. It is a way to help students to relate with one another on a personal level. I use storytelling in my own classroom to build upon students' literacy and writing skills, but after participating in this session, I now see new reasons why storytelling is important to the listener and not just the writer/storyteller. The stories they talked about that relate to HIV/AIDS demonstrated the idea that stories about personal experiences helped people to understand the disease and prevance of it.

One of the aspects of this session that I was unsure of was my role as a participator. I saw people typing messages about what was being said, but I didn't know if I was expected to simply listen or to engage in the conversation. I found that if I began typing, I would quickly lose my focus on the speakers. Thus, I decided against typing in the dialogue box and simply listened to the speakers discuss their project and the importance of storytelling. I was also confused about the screen behind the speakers, that displayed different photos. When I ran my mouse over the screen, it said, "Hippo Slideshow" and that I was able to Display My Pictures--Did participants simply upload random pictures?

I am happy that I participated in a Second Life session, but I pretty sure that I won't participate in many more sessions. It is very possible that I would enjoy a session in which the communication was done through text instead of voice because of my learning preference. However, I am still not quite sure that I would enjoy that type of session more than I enjoy using others PLNs, such as reading blogs, etc. Google Reader has prevailed as my favorite means of getting information from a variety of sources regarding educational news, ideas, etc.