New research suggests that Facebook could be detrimental to your relationship status.
“Previous research has shown that the more a person in a romantic
relationship uses Facebook, the more likely they are to monitor their
partner’s Facebook activity more stringently, which can lead to feelings
of jealousy,” Clayton said. “Facebook-induced jealousy may lead to
arguments concerning past partners. Also, our study found that excessive
Facebook users are more likely to connect or reconnect with other
Facebook users, including previous partners, which may lead to emotional
and physical cheating.” (Huffington Post, 6/6/2013) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/facebook-divorce-linked-i_n_3399727.html
The article's final caveat: "In 2012, divorce lawyers surveyed by Divorce-Online UK said that the social network was implicated in a third of all divorce filings the previous year. "
It's easy to see how a 3D immersion, whether a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) or not, could lead to even bigger troubles. Here are a few links pertaining to Second Life addiction:
On a hunch, I figured there would a "Dummies" guide to Second Life. This one is copyrighted 2008, so I suspect the $1.99 price tag might even bit a bit steep. ;-)
Reviewing the module for our 3D exploration was informative and I liked this flow chart (or spoke wheel chart...whatever you call it) very much:
"Ability to move around/explore the space" is something that pertains to my recent experience in the 3D environment. As with all things, practice makes perfect, or at least competent. I remember when I first learned to use a mouse and a Mac, way back in 1989. I thought "oh, dear. I'm NEVER going to figure this stuff out" and within a few months I couldn't remember ever not knowing how to use it. It's like that old expression, 'once you know something, you can't un-know it'.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
When would a 3D VLE, Virtual Learning Environment, have an advantage over a face-to-face or 2D learning environment?
I don't have an answer, and after aimlessly flying about in Second Life just now for 45 minutes of my real life, my answer to the question is 'not yet'.
Here's how I started my 45-60 minute journey:
That's fine. I've seen that page before. Now, I must enter into this world of Second Life.
It's a groovy place to fly about it but at this point I'm not getting the point of why this is a good learning environment. And, let me say that I'm pretty open minded....way more than most people my age.
I go in and navigate/teleport to a familiar spot: Learn It Town. I recognize this place, as Shelwyn, my instructor, has taken me here, via teleport, several time in the past 3 weeks. This is the first time I've ventured in on my own.
I like this house so somehow I've found myself in the bedroom. I fooled around with my clothing and hair for a few moments, and ended up bald at one point. The controls and settings on Second Life aren't intuitive for me....it requires more attention the the 'fine print' of the windows and drop-down menus than I'm in the mood for this evening.
Next, I go over to EduNation, which is a public place on Second Life that is well known to English learners. I have no idea what this plaza/space is supposed to be...there are many images on the wall here, like murals and I suspect that each one of them will transport you into another space on Second Life.
After visiting this place for a few moments, I venture over into something called Virtlantis, which I found by typing its name into the search bar on the left side of my screen.
I'm still fiddling around with the camera controls to see if I can rotate around enough to get a look at the place. The option of flying is always available but for some reason it's not that easy at this point. I think I'm in some kind of flying disc now and I can't remember what Shelwyn told me about them.
At this point, I've navigated my avatar, Brunellista, into some kind of outdoor space which I believe is still in Virtlantis.
My conclusions at this point are that entering Second Life on your own as an investigative experience is fine, but also irritating, time-wasting and one of those moments where you question what the hell computers are supposed to accomplish. I'm not in the mood this evening for this kind of exploratory view and suppose that many people feel this way after they enter into this 3D world unsupervised.
Remember when you were a kid around the ages of 8-12 or so and you suspected that there was a secret world of knowledge about the world, society, and nature that everyone except kids knew about? Adults held these secrets close, just out of your grimy-handed, cookie-breath reach; your fascination with what might be out there would keep your developing brain busy for minutes at a stretch. As soon as Santa Fraud was exposed you began to think "Oh boy, the ball is rolling! Any day now another big secret will be revealed. Yay!"
I can't be the only person who was preoccupied with this notion before my rational, cognitive mind developed. Here's how I envisioned the big event: these mysteries of the universe would be parceled out to me at some point and my astonishment would be off the charts initially, later subsiding into that zone where I'd share knowing glances with others in my same age bracket who were also in the club.
We'll look at 3 more sites today, all for pre-teens and teens.
First up, Super Secret, owned by JumpStart. www.jumpstart.com
JumpStart is a subsidiary of Knowledge Holdings, Inc. The company is privately held and based in Torrance, California. The site has a link to a pretty good blog under the 'what's new' tab on the home age. It's target audience is teenage girls, and even though it says 10-16 above, I suspect it might be a bit younger, even. 16 seems to be the new 20 these days.
The next one, Smeet, targets a bit older audience and also sets itself apart from its competition by being "a unique 3D online world in which users can style and
customize their avatar, chat in real time with other users, and play
online games." www.en.smeet.com
"Unlike other virtual life games, Smeet is completely
browser-based, so there are no downloads necessary - you can log in from
anywhere". It's a free 3D virtual world that seems kind of hipster-esque and uses that word again, 'flirt', which you see on sites for teens. http://en.smeet.com/virtualworld The name is a portmanteau, the process where two words are artificially combined into one, rather
than when two words are combined to describe a new concept or item (e.g.
Hatstand or lamppost). Think chillax, sup, guesstimate. Provide others you can think of in the comments.
Smeet = let'S MEET. But, I must confess that smut was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the name on our assignment. Also, meat is often associated with meat market, which is sometimes linked, unfairly, to dating websites.
Without looking for it, I found a comment on the next site's forum about the whole 'flirt issue'. I didn't know prior to writing this blog that it was an issue...I just had a hunch. Look:
This site, PlayTown www.playtown-game.com, seemed like a younger child's gaming website based on the graphics, name, etc... But on closer inspection I see that its developer is a multi-layered, and diverse group called Avaca Technologies, based in Athens, Greece. That might explain some of the cultural differences I noticed in the animation, the person begin put off by using 'flirt' (Greece is still somewhat conservative isn't it?) and in general the different 'vibe' of this promotional trailer:
Among the many other ventures this group Avaca is involved with, I gained a new respect for the forces behind the gaming industry by investigating this site. As part of the
sponsored by the E.U., their "KTS project aims to design, develop and validate a serious game that
will provide medical students and (novel) surgeons with innovative
ICT-based psychomotor MIS training. The KTS serious game will be based
upon previous and extensive experience in training and learning models
for surgeons." Gaming's applications go beyond entertainment in a "Serious Game" for minimally invasive surgeries:
For people familiar with gaming or the medical industry, this use of gaming technology comes as no surprise, but I was excited to see this surgery training video. http://www.avaca.eu/en/avaca-portfolio
See you tomorrow for the last installment of this project! :-)
As part of our blogging assignment, we've been given the tips on how to make screen shots to add visual interest to our blogs: command+shift+4 to select a segment, command+shift+3 to select entire screen.
In yesterday's blog, I uploaded several glorious images made with the command+shift+4 feature that's a simple feature available to our fingertips. At 11:40pm last night I was still waiting for Blogger to upload my images. The assignment was due at 11:59. I deleted the images, keeping only two very small ones, and was relieved when it uploaded immediately. Lesson learned: don't overload your blog with images because it will cost you time.
Here are the next 3 virtual environments on the list:
AE English, Trace Effects, a video game for learning American English and Culture
http://americanenglish.state.gov/trace-effects This is a site from the US Department of State's English Language Programs elprograms.org and is a government site. This lends a bit of a 'dry' and not exactly cutting-edge feel, but it's still a valid and potentially worthwhile site. I met with the people from EL Programs last semester on campus and applied for a job as a specialist. You can also apply for a fellowship position on their site. This is a good group and my guess is that they've developed a virtual site in order to engage with students in countries where classroom and DOS teachers aren't in situ.
Kaneva, from their blog, claims to be "the first to integrate social networking, shared media, and
collaborative online communities into a modern-day, immersive 3D world
for the masses. Kaneva…imagine what you can do, do what you can imagine," http://blog.kaneva.com/?page_id=2
A blogger and reviewer commented: "The question I posed, why would someone prefer to spend their time in the Kaneva beta, which is extremely limited in the range of actions
available to it’s users, compared to Second Life, which has many thousands of times
of virtual space as Kaneva, a developed economy, a scripting language, etc?" https://suezannecbaskerville.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/kaneva-kicked-from-mall-for-mentioning-second-life/
Vside, https://www.vside.com/app/start
My take: Techno-hipster, 2000's club vibe, anime visuals. Good music. Seems like a rather small audience, select-group of users. While it is engaging and visually interesting, I doubt if I'd ever go here to teach a class unless I had a student who was a member and preferred meeting in this environment. I'm open to new experiences so it's possible that I could enjoy this site. It just isn't one that is at the top of my list.
Here's a screen shot of each one of today's sites. (I think I can do this!):
We'll examine three more immersive environments in today's blog. They are child-centric in their approach and all of them promise lots of fun! and the opportunity to make lots of friends!, accrue credits, points, and 'coin' (digital currency), play games, have adventures, and even learn things!
My first opportunity to observe a child using computer technology for entertainment and learning was with my three year old nephew in September, 2001. I'd only been relying on the internet myself for about 3 years at that point, and I was impressed to see how quickly he learned new things for an only moderately intelligent mass of cells.
The games were most likely fromDisney, Atari or Nintendo.....pretty old-school for today's PlayStation sophisticates. Concern over the effect all this new 'computer stuff' was having on kids began to emerge in 2001: The warnings from this August 2001 article in The Guardian that "Hi-tech maps of the mind show that computer games are damaging brain
development and could lead to children being unable to control violent
behaviour" made me laugh out loud just now. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/19/games.schools. Evil nephew-conspirator punched me later that month while his parents were away, later tattling to his mother right in front of me that 'Kathleen hit me!'
More than a decade later, news of various research studies showing how technology is changing our brains is center screen. Embedded in this 2013 article from Huffington Post, "This is How the Internet is Rewiring Your Brain" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/shocking-ways-internet-rewires-brain_n_4136942.html , is a telling slideshow entitled 'What happens in one minute on the internet'.
Whyville is a creation of Numedeon, Inc., "a company started by scientists at the California Institute of Technology's
CAPSI
(Caltech Pre-College Science Education Initiative), with the
mission of creating an engaging, inquiry-based learning platform for
children.
The first social networking site was thus born in 1999 and since
then has been part of the lives of more than 7 million children
worldwide." www.whyville.net It has the backing of an illustrious group of investors and the pedigree of a famous founder, Roy Ash. They've won National Science Foundation awards and received a grant to develop PlayMath. This site is worth the effort to explore if you want your kids to smarten up.
Club Penguin is from The Walt Disney Company. They have several links for parents, branded with this trademark:
On the homepage, a video welcomes visitors with an introduction to the site.
This site is a fun, hyper, interactive, fully developed creation. You can bet that Disney's lawyers have fashioned a site that is safe and age-appropriate. www.clubpenguin.com Habbo is a site that's difficult to review without actually playing the many games that are featured in a bold matrix on the home page. www.habbo.com The banner motto advertises it as "A Strange Place With Awesome People" which might appeal to a bit older youth. It's for ages 13 and up. "Habbo Hotel is meant for users 13 years old or above. Users under the
age of 13 are not permitted to register an account on Habbo." I've never hear of its owner, the Sulake Corporation, but that doesn't mean anything, really, as I don't teach children and I'm new to teaching with technology. I do think that parents like to see the endorsements that Habbo offers.
Habbo seems like an entry into a more sophisticated world like Second Life (see my blog from Sunday, April 19th) because it offers Avatars and the players inhabit set spaces like the 'Habbo Hotel'.
In closing, I told you that I'd report back on my Star Stable experience. www.starstable.com My horse's name is Rock Ruby and my alias is Katalin Younghill. I wasn't able to ride outside of the courtyard enclosure because I didn't pay to use the site, I only downloaded it to my Macbook Pro and didn't pay to be a 'star rider'. It's kind of cute, albeit a bit old in terms of tech; the horse isn't anatomically correct by anyone's estimation. It is available in 11 languages, most of them being horse-centric countries like the Netherlands, Germany, France and Hungary.
It's Sunday Morning. The first few moments of this video are key to my entry today.
What do we notice about the first few moments of this video? What is the date of this song by Maroon Five? 2003. 12 years ago. Karaoki Nikiri was an immersive environment of sorts, was it not? Not the type we're going to consider in today's blog, however.
When I started teaching ESL in Honolulu in 2001 my students were mostly from Japan, with a few from China, Taiwan and Korea in the mix.
The Japanese students were crazy for Karaoke and carried out reconnaissance missions the few clubs in Honolulu within their first week. They enjoyed singing in English and, being from a very social culture, they didn't think 5 hours in class per day was sufficient time spent with their classmates. They were eager to lure their teachers out with them, but we were all Americans and just as eager to go home at the end of the day. Our students, however, would become She-devils and Casanovas after hours with their inhibitions thrown to the wind in the Karaoke scene. It occurred to us we were missing out on a secret, immersive activity that was creating a fast bond between them. If we didn't venture out with them we wouldn't know what we missing.
Cut to 2015 and this class at USF: Digital Literacy. Our mission today is to "examine three immersive environments per day and write your
impressions. You are not required to join or enter any of these
environments...you will
do your investigation and discovery to become better informed about this
rising trend in social media worlds."
To examine 3 environments in an educational framework, I'll start with these 3: Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Google Earth.
Second Life
I'm just getting my first taste of what life is like in Second Life. I can tell there is plenty of potential there for create and engaging learning environment for students to visit. My question to our teacher yesterday was how long it will take students are are unfamiliar with it how to become proficient. I know it's taking me awhile to figure out how to get around it. The teacher will need to be proficient with the use of any site in order to help students get the most out of it.
Age appropriate: Can be
Underlying values: Relies on the teachers discretion
Hyper sexualization: A danger
Learning goals: Relies on the teacher
Ultimate goals: A very good supplemental tool, with ultimate goals needing to be clearly defined.
Strengths: Captivating environment which can fully immerse student in the target language.
Weaknesses: Slow startup time for adoption and navigation. Sexual predators might be around.
World of Warcraft
I'm not a Warcraft user but have friends who are and so I mainly basing my comments on what I've read on the Virtualworldforteens.com review of it. It is the all-time bestseller with gamers, I've heard. If the games can be played in English with the L1 in subtitles, it might be useful with beginners. For intermediate learners there might be some value if the players are already familiar with the game and can deduce what some of the dialog is, based on that familiarity. I don't really see it as a learning tool, more of an entertainment one. It is easy to use and that is one advantage it has over something like Second Life, which requires a bit more training.
"There are also various selections for what you
can become, depending upon whether you choose Alliance or Horde.
Regardless of your decisions, you have the chance to become entertained
with and even addicted to all that is offered."
Age appropriate: Can be
Underlying values: Relies on the teachers discretion
Hyper sexualization: A danger, and also includes what might be considered violence for some users.
Learning goals: Probably minimal
Ultimate goals: Entertainment, relaxation of the affective filter.
Strengths: Captivating environment which can fully immerse student in the target language.
Weaknesses: Sexual predators might be around.
Google Earth
This was one of the first amazing applications I explored when I became more computer literate. Like many people, I explored it by zooming in on my current house and then the home I grew up in. The ability to delve into our real world in a visual Smörgåsbordwas a thrill! I've never used Google Earth as a teaching tool, but if I decide to, it will be easy to figure out lessons to first do with students, and then assignments and homework for them to do on their own. The sky's the limit here. Also, it is edu-oriented in the same way that Wikipedia and National Geographic are.
Age appropriate: Yes
Underlying values: Strong informational and educational content can be made valuable.
Hyper sexualization: None
Learning goals: Relies on the teacher
Ultimate goals: A very good supplemental tool, with ultimate goals needing to be clearly defined.
Strengths: Captivating environment which can fully immerse student in the target language.
Weaknesses: Will require imaginative teachers to create substantial and solid lessons.
As a result of today's investigation, I was intrigued by an ad I saw on the Virtual Worlds for Teens website: Star Stable. www.starstable.com
I've already downloaded the application to my computer and will report on my progress in the next blog. I want to be a Star Rider and compete against all of the other little 13 year old girls who are likely to create the main demographic of the audience. I was a bit worried when I put in my age to enter that I might be considered a predator. So, I took 5 years off my age just to be safe. ;-)
