Posted in Blog posts on Nov 27th, 2010 7 Comments »
These are some ideas for learning in Second Life that I came up with as part of a tender for PFEG to teach secondary school students about personal finance, using the ‘planning a prom’ scenario as a jumping off point.
1.Students to join SL as group, construct avatars.
2.Give each student 100 Lindens.
3.Buy a prom outfit from [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 24th, 2010 No Comments »
“I suggest virtual worlds might become a site for the exploration of pedagogies concerned with the ontological (study of the nature of being, existence or reality… “ (Bayne 2010)
So, who is Simone, my Second Life avatar – does she ‘exist’? Is she ‘me’? Last year when we took part in tutorials in [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 21st, 2010 No Comments »
My secondary reading this week, like several other people’s, has revolved around Coyle and Muri, I suspect because their articles were slightly more accessible than some of the other offerings. Having said that, they were still very interesting and Muri, particularly, reassured me that my final assignment topic of the use of narrative in [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 17th, 2010 No Comments »
Of all the articles I’ve read so far on the cyborg and post human, this article is the one I have found it difficult to get a ‘handle’ on. The comparison of the role of the cyborg to the flaneur of 19th century Paris was too referential to be useful. I had to read [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 17th, 2010 No Comments »
“what we made and what we became co-evolved together”
The central idea of this second article seems to revolve around the correlation between increasingly sophisticated tools and human evolution. Are we replacing dualism with parallelism?! Hayles almost seems to suggest that this close relationship with ‘tools’ has altered human consciousness – suggesting an almost [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 12th, 2010 Comments Off
Hayles’ article had three or four key ideas which attracted me. She breaks down her ideas into three ‘stories’, the first being “how information lost its body”, or how we came to see information as something which could be separated from humans and exist independently in cyberspace. Of course if humans are simply processors [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 9th, 2010 1 Comment »
Get Your Cyborg Name
Yes, still couldn’t resist the feminising of embodiment!
Posted in Blog posts on Nov 8th, 2010 4 Comments »
Is what we are as humans defined by our environment? Haraway seems to argue that it is – that gender relations to date have been defined by nature and technology and to a lesser extent, culture, politics, geography but that cyberspace will provide a new environment where dualisms like man/woman, nature/technology, black/white cease to exist [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Oct 24th, 2010 No Comments »
This week’s readings about virtual communities and social networks have revolved around the two poles of opinion cited by Bell
“….on the one hand, and on the other those who argue that online community is damaging RL community, by encouraging a withdrawal from ‘real life’.”
If we accept that communication and interaction are vital for both establishing [...]
Posted in Blog posts on Oct 15th, 2010 No Comments »
Having just completed the reading of a range of articles on the role of visual communication and literacy in digital culture, I decided to use a set of quotes to compare articles by Mulvey, Rose, Spalter and Julier.
Rose and Spalter’s articles were largely focused on ways of analysing and interpreting images whereas Julier and Mulvey [...]