Location: State of Mounting Panic

The semester begins in a few weeks, and readers will see, from the fragmentary state of my syllabus, how long the road ahead will be.

While picking a rhetoric text is easy, what should I have my writing students read as an introduction to SL™?  What videos to view?

I have been reading two books on the blossoming of virtual worlds, Wagner James Au’s The Making of Second Life and Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar.  I recommend them both to educators, but neither of them quite do what I want for a class about academic writing that makes heavy use of Second Life®.  Au’s chapters “The Avatar as Entrepreneur” and “Investing in Utopia,“ however, come closest to what I need. They merit students’ attention for their close look at marketing and corporate bumbling in-world.

In crafting my online syllabus, I surprised myself by assigning videos about SL before giving the students readings.  When they do read instead of view, I want them to encounter SL as I did in late 2006: a Wired article about Mischief’s Janie Marlowe and another about Anshe Chung (read her press release from those heady days).  It was this news that real people were using “game characters” to make real money that so captivated me then (and often, now).

A few imperatives stand out:

—To orient students to SL beyond the media hyperbole that so often depicts it in a negative (and facile) way
—To provide some sense of the virtual economy (useful fodder for a later assignment on marketing in-world)
—To give goal-oriented Millennial students a coherent starting point for formal writing assignments.

With these in mind, I invite educators and other readers to have a look at my class schedule and suggest more readings.  Have at it, profs and curious readers! Post your ideas and links to anything online in the comments section.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

thank you for this

Post Your Comments:

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.