Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

John gave a detailed briefing on the group project explaining how it should be approached and delivered. The key deliverable is a ten minute presentation but the purpose of the project is to give you a chance to experience working collaboratively online: including the difficulty of arranging to meet; the challenge of holding useful discussion; dividing the workload and so on.

While this aspect of the experience must be presented as part of the final project you are also asked to reflect on the weekly experience in your blog from now on. This will ensure that you receive a fair assessment of your contribution and will not be let down if team mates do not deliver as expected. You will be assessed on your contribution to the project, not simply the overall success of the final presentation.

The presentation in the final class should be delivered vocally (if anyone has problems with their voice in SL let me know) but should have a text backup using notecards. Second Life has a rich set of tools for including images, sound, movies and animation to support your talk. John demonstrated the most simple way of showing images by dragging them from your inventory to a ‘screen’ made from a simple panel. You can practice this in any number of public sandboxes located around SL.

THINGS TO DO BEFORE THE NEXT CLASS:

1. Write the seventh post: to your blog describing how your group might meet online regularly to develop the project. Discuss the different platforms available, their pros and cons for this work; and how comfortable you think you would be with them.
2. Meet with your team: to begin discussing your response to the project brief.