SecondLife Blog

 This week was focused on the team project we have due at the end of this semester. My team and I have met last a few weeks ago to discuss what topic each of us will do, I offered to do sustainability. My team and I have not met in Second Life since, but we have been very active in the group chat on Whatsapp about our individual processes and keeping each other updated. I put a message in the chat on Wednesday the 24th of March to clarify what I have to do on my behalf of this project. This week I began my sustainability presentation and finished over three days as I am currently drowning in other assignments this semester. However, I did complete it and I am quite happy with it. I began by looking at a text that our lecturer John has on Brightspace called "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice" an article signed by thousands of scientists from 184 countries. This article addresses the serious level of risk our planet is at with our current way of living

 In last week's class we discussed the idea of online personas and our consciousness. This topic was very interesting to look at in detail. Although it is something that I have been in conversations about before, it was interesting to read about it and talk about it with someone like John who is very educated in it. My online persona would probably exist mostly on Instagram as I don't have Facebook or Twitter. On Instagram, online personas are created through the images you share and what captions you put with them. Online personas are also given through direct messages with people.  In terms of my personal online persona, I would say I don't change much to how I am in real life. I don't post a whole lot on Instagram about myself, to be honest it's mainly my dog that I post. So in a way, my online persona may be a crazy dog lover! I also like to share music from time to time on Instagram so people may perceive me by my music taste which would be hard to do as I have

 The topic of discussion this week is online communities and relationships.  I am going to share my framework for how I engage and interact in online communities using lectures as an example, specifically the Virtual Environment lecture. When interacting online, it is all about the elements of digital citizen ship and I incorporate a number of them in my framework. Due to COVID-19 all of my classes are online so unfortunately, Virtual Environments is nothing majorly new to me except the fact that I have an avatar that I have to control. But besides that, my framework for participating in the classes are pretty much the same.  When I have a class, I set up the app and get prepared to log on about 10 minutes before the class to make sure I have time for any issues. I most specifically do this with Second Life because I always seem to come across some sort of issue when logging in and sometimes have to re-download the app. It can be very unpredictable as to when it won't let me log in

This week in class, we discussed Marshall McLuhan and his ideology about media and the medium of the message. McLuhan's theory was quite hard to understand at the beginning after reading and watching the videos provided for this week, but after the discussion in class, I had a better understanding of what it meant. McLuhan was a philosopher who's work was centred around media theory. He published a book called 'Understanding Media' where he developed his concept of "the medium is the message". We looked at McLuhan's idea in relation to understanding tools and how they effect our behaviours and how they effect the wider society. What helped me to get a better comprehension of McLuhan's theory was the YouTube video by BBC Radio 4 "The Medium is the Message". In this video, Gillian Anderson states "McLuhan's genius was to focus on the medium itself....the technology that transfers the messages changes us and changes society, the individ

On Tuesday the 2nd of March, my team and I discussed in our Whatsapp group-chat when to meet to discuss out project. We decided some time on Wednesday the 3rd would suit us all best. I have just got a new laptop this week so I needed to re-download the Second Life app in time to join this group meeting. On Wednesday, we all agreed to meet at 2.15. We met in Second Life and gathered in the TUD classroom. We noticed we were missing Storm again, he wasn't in the group chat so he did not know about the plan for our group call. He is in my course class so I had his number and added him to our project Whatsapp group-chat. Unfortunately he wasn't available but we kept him updates in our group-chat. We began the meeting slow, talking about the project brief and taking another look at the chosen topic we decided on last week.  This was the concept of in the future workplace, people won't be going back to work in the office, they will use virtual reality head pieces to join a virtual