Travelog - Tallahassee Beach

I went with Ben to Tallahassee Beach. The designer of this world has taken a more absurdist approach to building their space. There's nothing different about the gravitational pull, but there are several scenes of impending or already-happened disaster. Among the highlights are a shipwreck of what looks to have been a pirate ship, and an immovable train that appears to be headed straight for the ocean. There's also a large river delta and a detailed forest. I'm struck by the amount of time the designer must have spent in creating all of these elements. The educational purpose is not readily clear, and it seems that flying and teleportation must be the preferred method of transportation, as travel by foot is difficult.

Reflection after (my) first class meeting

If I'm being honest, wow, that was frustrating. I'm not good at gaming, and I realize that our skill levels range from absolute beginner up through expert. But I found the experience of meeting in person to be immensely frustrating. It seemed to me that the biggest issue was pacing. I think the pacing of instruction was a little slow, but more than that, I felt that almost everyone was doing something else at the same time they were in this class meeting. As a result, whenever anyone wasn't paying attention, they'd chime in and say, "Wait, what was that? Can you repeat that?" This seemed to happen with every step of the instruction.

I think it'd be easiest to attack this in three ways:

1. Require students to be singularly focused on the class meeting (there's no way to police this, but I'm not sure it was explicit).
2. Type out the steps in the group chat AFTER they've been said, one by one. This way, those who missed something have a reference point and don't need the speaker to chime in all the time.
3. Provide some sort of above and beyond activity for those who are moving at a quicker pace to do at the same time. I'm not sure how you could distribute this or decide who gets what, but it could work.

Week 3 Reflection

I missed class this week, but I got caught up with the Joykadia activities. I'm starting to feel more and more comfortable in Joykadia. I suspect that this is probably due to my inability to get to our class meeting, but the thing that I'm noticing is that this all feels very solitary. I realize that that is part of the reasoning behind having us come in and do some of these tasks with one another. But the truth is, even if I were doing these tasks with another person in the photo, there's very little collaboration involved (and I think it would be difficult to have it any other way with our level of gameplay). I'm sure this is different in games like WoW, but in Joykadia, it's tough to see how this could change. That, to me, is frustrating. A big part of these games is the idea that they bring people together and I don't really feel that right now.

I read, as part of this week's reading, a case on border patrol officers from O'Driscoll. What was interesting was how focused the case was on the technical issues of solving the problem. This is the sort of thing I would like to see in action with Second Life and it makes absolute sense to have students run simulations. What I only wonder is how well they could actually simulate border control issues. I understand that this is a logical exercise, designed to train people so well that when they're confronted with the issues and are reacting on emotion, their instincts are to make the logical and rational decision. But that ignores all the rest that I imagine comes with working at a border crossing. This is all to say, that while I could see this as a basis for training border officers, it hardly seems like it could function as anything more than that.