I got an account and logged in during the 3d animation class I teach on Thursday to show my students another outlet for their 3D skills. I just briefly entered with the intention of going home and exploring over the weekend when I had more time. However that wasn't to be. Despite repeated (over 1o) attempts I couldn't get Second Life to open on my home mac. I downloaded everything, visited everywhere I could find beginner info, even set up a new account, but to no avail. I finally sent an email to support but have no answer yet since it's the weekend.
In any case, the brief time I explored during class was interesting and a bit frustrating. Getting around was kinda intuitive, but difficult at first. My students demanded I enter as a woman and wear the sexiest costume possible, so I obliged. They were disappointed with the nude version. This would lead me to believe most of the cute women running around in Second Life are actually guys. Can't trust any digital selves nowadays. When I did enter some cute guy tried to lead me around, but never said anything.
My students were very interested in how they could use their 3d and Photoshop skills to create outfits and objects and sell them. They guessed the real money was provided through eBay in a similar way people sell things for Everquest. Is that true?
I told them the story of an ex-student who was running what some called an "Everquest Sweatshop" in Tijuana. It was a digital maquiladora where low paid Mexican employees were playing Everquest 24/7 to get credits to buy levels, objects and weapons for players who didn't want to put the sweat equity into playing Everquest themselves. It's a strange, strange new world we live in, eh?
In any case my goal is to harness these things for the sake of education. Instead of forcing students to learn to love things like math and science, I want to use the things they love to teach them math, science and literacy. The only problem, their educational antenae are pretty sensitive. They tend to reject out of hand anything that isn't pure fun or violent as a kid game. How do we get past this anti-education defense?
2 comments:
This indeed is the question. As a Girl Scout troop leader of older girls this question comes up as well. The various levels have patches geared for the abilities of the age group. Some girls are really enthused about getting the patches, thus are motivated to do the activities, but many could not care less. Sneakiness has been the best mode so far in this venue. Showing them after an adventure of some sort what all they actually earned from this or that patch requirements in the process of having fun seems to have helped with motivation for some at least. Still not enough for others, even when confronted with "you've actually earned everything except this..." pointers. It does all come down to motivation.
Hi Diana,
Thank you for your post. For my son the Boy Scout Patches still seem to be a good motivation, especially when he sees others proudly getting them.
One thing I've been finding works in school is when you can get a student with leadership abilities interested, they have a lot of power to recruit their fellow students to do a learning activity. We also focus almost totally on project-based learning in my class. I try to find out their interests and then guide them to do something that combines that and some kind of learning activity.
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