Second Life blog

A the start of this class John talked about the group project. He went through the roles that come up in a group again such as the person who is full of energy at the start who has plenty of ideas and then fizzles out when it comes to the business end. this is compensated in an opposite personality who is good at putting the finishing touches to a project. It is important however to be able to fit into any role regardless of your personal traits. College is a good time to exercise certain muscles that you don't usually in your own life and become a more well rounded person. We also talked about the problems we could be facing such as how it is different to a professional setting and some people might not take academic project as serious. There are no financial imperatives. We then talked about privacy online and whether we are conscious of what we put online. John talked about how recently he had gone to a wedding where there was an agreement made before it that everything pu

The first thing John mentioned this week was to make sure we all have a "About me" section in our blogs so that the reader has sufficient context and can earn a greater understanding of your perspective and experiences. "My name is Ben Nagle. I am a third year Vis Com student in D.I.T. I am 22 years old and I am  writing this blog for a college module called 'Virtual Environments', an module aimed at giving us experience in virtual reality as well as engaging us with the issues of today including privacy and social media" I also checked over my previous blogs this week to make sure they are of good enough standard. I tried to put myself in the position of a stranger reading my blogs for the first time.  I wanted to make sure it was coherent and clarify the writing style I was trying to use. I am trying to achieve a happy medium between casual and academic because on the one hand it is an assignment for college but on the other hand the reader wil

This week we had class on Wednesday rather than a Thursday. When John asked on facebook if I could attend I said yes and so did the majority of the class but an appointment with someone I am doing design work for outside of college came up and I unfortunately couldn't attend. I did catch up on the class notes which were very interesting. In class, the difference of human beings as a species compared to every other on the planet was discussed which I found very interesting. The main differentiating factor being humans use of tools. the fact that we have this ability and that when we use them, they are an extension of ourselves. they are an an extension of what we can do and when we use them we are a single entity with our tools. McLuhan posits that our tools change us and therefore seeing as the tools we use as a species is changing rapidly, therefore we are changing similarly. this is very interesting as I can see a mammoth generation gap in my own family between my parents a

This week we did elevator pitches which I thought would be fun but were a bit stop-start because not many were willing to participate. They were relaxed as like most things in this module. It got off to a slow start as nobody wanted to do them. I think that the fact that they were unspecific in terms of a common theme put off a lot of people because you could literally talk about anything and ironically no one could then think of a single thing to say. One of my class mates, Peter, was asked to do one and couldn't think of what to say so John suggested he talked us through his costume which was a similar exercise as it made you talk publically. John encouraged volunteers as he didn't like calling people out. I therefore nominated myself. It was a unique experience as despite being in the safety of your own home on your own, you feel the exact same butterflies as you would in a physical setting standing in front of a group of people talking. I happened to be on my laptop in

This week we were put into groups for an upcoming group project. I am in the red group. My group is a mixture of people in my course including close friends as well as people i have never met before so it will be interesting to see how the group dynamic develops. The odd thing is that the end product as in many things in college is not the be all and end all. your ability to communicate and critically think is a main contributing factor to your result at the end.

In week 2 we were tasked with making conversations with people in second life. This was quite daunting at first because you don't know who you are going to meet and i have never talked to anyone anonymous online before. You hear about horror stories online and see people getting cat fished, honesty cannot be ensured online but you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. The first person i talked to was in social island. I visited this place as it is under the category of chat hot spots. I got talking to Eexperiment. I started by saying hello. then they said hi bro [05:05] Eexperiment: u r so cool. i said thanks so are you and they said "haha". i asked them what they're doing. they said they're changing their clothes. then they said they were making materials for experiments. I said cool then I asked him for what experiment and he disappeared so I left. Then i traveled back to Moscow to see if anyone spoke English. i asked in the public chat if an