My SL Picture

Dear colleages,
Like I have told you on my intro I have been an SL member for more than a year. However, there were lots of things I did not know how to do that I have learned in this course. For example, I did not know how to walk around some environments and now I can do it easily. I like to explore Second Life`s multitude of environments. I go on the search tab click on "Nature" for example and teleport myself to a paradisiac island. It is great. At this point I am not trying to interact with anyone. I am just strolling around these wonderful environments.
Today I finally found the camera controls and took this photo of me in SL
BTW, my avatar is Paul Kurosawa.

Hugs

Nahiram`s 2nd visit to SL

Last Friday (Dec,5) I went again to SL for a few hours. This was a great experience.

When I logged in, my body was grey so I decided to wear new clothes. After changing colors, choosing models, etc; I saw myself wearing the previous clothes. OMG! I have to learn that.

This time I could find places by using SLurls and I visited "English Language Lab". I flew and ran around the different parts there, there were very few people. I guess because of the hour, I only met WhisperZ, nice lady, who helped me to create a landmark there. I liked it, have to go back there.
Having been around for a while, I set off to look for the ISTE workshop, but I didn't find the SLurl (They are really useful, I learnt) I can swear it was in an email from our YG. As I couldn't find it, I decided to look for Osnacantab and got to his nice place.

I got inside his house, saw his pictures, went upstairs - I could't sit in his terrace chairs, but I did on his roof.
Flying around Osnacantab's neighbours, I saw my country's flag !!! I took a pic, but it's too dark. Next time I go there, I'll take another with more light as Dennis told me how to do it.

Checking some links in our wiki I found a link to "The Sistine Chapel", and decided to go there to compare. This is what I saw...

Well, as you can see I didn't get to catch what really matters in this place :-)

Visit to Mystery Location

Yesterday I went to the mystery destination that Dennis has provided a link to. Overall, it was a great experience for me because I'd been so frustrated in past visits to SL. For the first time in trying out SL, I felt more confident knowing that I had a supportive network of other learners in case I got completely confused! The instructions that Dennis provided were most helpful. I was especially happy to use the information in the sidebar of our wiki to learn how to see my own face!

Great location, Dennis! I had to ask for help to learn how to dance and then even though I clicked the green ball repeatedly I couldn't stop! Not that I don't enjoy dancing, but I thought I would try to teleport somewhere else and didn't want to arrive dancing! I also had to ask for help to find how to hear the music. Dennis has the answer in our tutorial, but I didn't see it until later. I found one person at the location quite helpful. The others seemed deep in their own conversations.

Reflecting on how SL could be used for teaching, personally, I'm not sure I'd ever use it because of the steep learning curve. However, the net generation seems to pick up how to use tools more quickly than I do, so, maybe, there is potential. Perhaps, just the online and offline (if you are in a f2f class) exchanges between L2 students about how to do things might provide good, motivational language exchanges. A concern I would have, however, is that the students might be exposed to unfriendly or inappropriate comments by other visitors to SL. I'm sure that there must be certain "user-friendly" type places. Anybody know of any "safe" environments?

I'm going to try to continue our tutorial. My ultimate goal is to pet the cat at our mystery location.

Anciana Twine