Location: Favorite Reading Chair, Cranking Nirvana and Fighting Panic

Showtime. Classes begin tomorrow.

Designing a how-to guide for Second Life® is a tricky thing. Students need to learn the basics to avoid a bad “first hour” experience.  Given my experience that Millennials want lots of guidance AND won’t read anything linear, I used a wiki for my syllabus, putting together a number of linked handouts, rich with snapshots and a few embedded videos.  It’s designed to provide just-in-time help in a segmented, hypertextual manner. I’ve also embedded Linden Dollar rewards for completing a scavenger-hunt, so the goal-oriented writing students I teach will have a game within the lesson.

Readers can now walk through the evolving draft of “Getting Started in Second Life.“ Major topics are:

—First Steps: Welcome to the Metaverse
—Your Avatar, Clothing, Equipment
—Leaving the Nest: Going to the Mainland
—Communicating
—Having Fun
—Trouble…and Avoiding it
—How to Act Like a Pro With no First Life

I will apply every lesson I’ve learned with students, and I’ll try to remain upbeat, if not perky with this third class to use SL™.  They need help seeing the “point” of this gamelike non-game.  I’m not sure I’ll succeed. My Xer cynicism sneaks in, “Nevermind” blasting while I write this. There’s so much work to do…they probably think Iggy Pop is some weird energy drink.

I ask one favor—the pbwiki software lacks a spell-check, so as I proof it please send any sentence-level corrections to iggyo-at-mac-dot-com. And if I have missed any major needs for novice avatars, please let me know.  I’ll send you virtual T-shirts featuring Iggy Pop and the “Damascus VA Moonshiners” mascot (and hound-dawg).

Tips o’ the virtual hillbilly-hat to Tenchi, Di, Cynthia, Terran, and others who contributed ideas to the wiki.

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

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