do I have time for a second life?

After going to the presentation yesterday, I felt very enthusiastic about the potential of Second Life as a tool for teaching and learning. So finally, against all the odds, I have got myself an avatar and have spent my first evening exploring. First I went to a 'mall' where newbies like myself were meant to be able to find more out - but quite how one went about this was not clear. I read a bit about changing my appearance and tweaked it a bit - taller, slimmer - as I would like in my first life. Hot places to visit were not particularly interesting and not many people were around. All a bit lonely and boring really. So I decided to visit ucreative island - also empty. There was an 'interactive whiteboard' so I tried to interact with it and ended up losing control of my avatar to a little blue blob for no apparent reason other than to move it up, down, left and right!! What was that all about? Very disappointing, but I was probably missing something - what? There was also no instructions about how to get my movements back to normal which impeded my explorations for the rest of the evening and resulted in me flying sideways through a rainforest!! Great graphics but they crashed my computer.

The Uni is thinking about starting a new degree in computer gaming and it is possible that I would be asked to teach on this course - so I feel I should persevere with this in an attempt to carve out a relevant area of expertise. Reckon I'll have to ask my son to help me with the basics as I can't see how I will have time to complete the learning curve in tutorials. I don't particularly want to start building and so on, but I am very interested in Second Life's potential to pilot new methods of teaching, communicating with students and colleagues at other campuses, showing student work, disseminating research and so on. Coincidentally the Guardian Education ran a short piece about this today.

return to blogging

I have been too busy to think about blogging recently: finishing one project with the students and starting another, trying to put together Ikea storage and so on. Since September my daughter has been at school for half days only, but now she has finally started full days. Hopefully I have a decent span of time to collect my thoughts, get involved with projects and finish things off that I've started.

A few notable things are in the offing... I am about to lead a digital photography project at my children's school. I volunteered to help out for a half day each week thinking I would listen to reading, but was asked to do something arty. 'my school' will involve working with each KS2 class for a period of 6 weeks from January through to the summer. There will be small interim exhibitions within the school and, hopefully, a final one for parents and public. I'm trying to get UCA involved but being passed around from one department to another. The new University has a remit to get involved in the community so I have every confidence someone will be supportive eventually. At the very least, I hope to get some student volunteers from Digital Film and Screen Arts (our newly named BA!!) to help my out as professional practice.

On Friday 21st November Grace Lau and I are finally meeting the Womens' Art Library to show them the Exposures archive. They are travelling to Hampstead to meet us so must have a serious interest. There are some complicated copyright issues that we have to settle as we are not able to contact all the workshop participants now so much time has elapsed, but hopefully we can sort something out in relation to this.

What else? Oh yes. I've been spending quite a lot of time using PhotoShop CS3 with raw files as D60s are available for the students to use. Still haven't got my Mac but managing to get by with a student one for the time being. Will work more on 'High Gabble' once my computer arrives. Lastly, I'm looking forward to learning a bit more about Second Life and how it can be used for eductional purposes next Monday. Also hope to meet up with Home Interaction Cluster soon to figure out whether my interests and research fit with the other members in any useful way.