Experience the Second Life

This post is dedicated to my intro to Second Life. Gaming and Playstation or online games have had a limited life with my attention span. I have tried various ones but lost interest after a few moments when things didn't load or I had to read instructions. Then - hello - secondlife.com was introduced by my Lecturer as a way to communicate with people from all over the world

You enter a virtual world where you can be whoever you want to be, look completely different and have a great time interacting with the unlimited supply of different people and creatures that are online with you.

My experience with it so far has been interesting. Quite a few different cultures have interacted with me. The language barrier can be a problem, people will just give you stuff, for example I met a goddess like creature and she gave me skin and told me "the guys love it". I suppose the learning curve is this - to communicate online in a virtual world it is easier to present a photo or some form of personalisation of yourself. People warm to it, they interact better when they have a picture in their head of who they are talking to. I had a guy from Israel ask me to be his girlfriend in Second Life which made me feel a little funny but I suppose it is a way of meeting different types of people. And it is great fun.

I have gotten some of my friends involved but as yet we have all yet to meet up in Second Life - we are all busy and working and not always online at the same time. This seems to be a common denomenator throughout the Collaborative Tech Course as well. We all post our messages but seem to miss each other when online.

I have signed up to messenger but have yet to master it. I consider myself to be Computer Savvy but haven't mastered messenger yet. Just shows that in the world of Technologies you are always behind.

Early Days Learning

Communicate, communicate, communicate this is my first impression of Collaborative Technologies. Give yourself don't hold back. I figured this might be easy. But sometimes communicating this way (online via email, fax, phone, messenger) can be impersonal. Things get misconstrued into different meanings, sensitive personalities take things the wrong way and insensitive personalities can be taken out of context.



I hope this shows me what I can get out of it. The first module was laying a bit ground work to understanding what Collaborating and Communicating mean, their differences. Communicate means simply express, share, interact, when we aren't face to face we can't gauge body language, tone, expression. If someone uses big words and elaborate sentences are they more intelligent than someone who uses everyday good "ole kiwi lingo". The words play a small part to the way they are presented.



Collaboration on the other hand means working together - effective collaboration has to include effective communication.



Also included in Module 1 was the Technologies used to do this communication and collaboration thing. The technology out there is vast and varies from using MSN Messenger to Groupware or Shareware programmes that allow companies to collaborate together through different technologies.



This gave me an idea of what this Paper is all about. I had attention difficulties I noticed when I was working through the Readings. I thought back to previous papers and realised that without diagrams and different pics and charts, my attention span drifts. I always thought that I was not disciplined enough but I think I have just learnt that I learn better visually.



Well, that's all for this Blog Post folks, next time Introducing secondlife.com.

My First Entry

This is my first official Blog Entry. I have always enjoyed writing a Journal especially when I was a teenager. This is really cool. I have just really started on the Collaborative Technologies Journey and so far I have had mixed reactions.

First being, on reading through the course content and resources - I felt excited about this paper. It is different to what I have learnt before, in a way that we are encouraged to communicate with all of the participants in the Course straight away. I have done papers in the past and felt like I was the only one doing it as well as the Tutor and actually I think I was one of two in my last paper.

We were encouraged to introduce ourselves - something I dont have a problem with. Then introduce the next person on the course. I received some really encouraging comments from my Lecturer on my posting and then I tried to communicate with some of the other students. I found a couple to be a little terse but I am probably too open sometimes, something which is not a weakness but can be a little off putting. So I shut down a little when I received some terse reactions when I tried to communicate.

I think I am an interactive person and enjoy using my beloved PC to communicate with my friends and family members and also for work. I have a friend whom I communicate regularly in the week - we end up with huge conversations by the end of the week. But I find it easier to put my feelings and thoughts onto a computer screen and believe it or not we sort out our lives putting our hearts and souls into these precious conversations via email and then when we catch up face to face we can communicate better because of it.

First post done and dusted. This is fun.