English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for the Second Life group. We met the Friday prior to break (March 9) and began scripting our machinima. We spent the afternoon drinking wine, eating cheese and writing clever and witty lines for our avatars. We scripted the first couple of scenes word-for-word and outlined the rest. Then Mark, our dear transcriber for the day, emailed a copy of the script to each of us and we are each working on the script individually and have plans to meet again and finalize the script. I've created a rough storyboard of our film to give us some visual guidance when we begin filming.

I've also been working extensively on the website. I've registered and procured hosting for studentavatar.com. Over break I spent entirely too long learning WordPress, creating a theme for our site and compiling useful plugins only to realize that Drupal was better suited for the project. So, I downloaded the latest version of Drupal and installed it on our server. This was also unexpectedly time-consuming for two reasons: 1. I am familiar with cPanel and am accustomed to my own webhost, which is different from Netfirms (host of our site) and 2. I was unaware of the fairly significant changes made to Drupal 5.1. Basically, I didn't realize that I didn't need to install the tables and alter the settings.php script. Once I (ahem) read the release notes for Drupal 5.1 everything went smoothly. The site is up and running at www.studentavatar.com/drupal. I've created very basic About pages with contact information. I've also set up email addresses for each of us using the site POP email accounts. I tried to load the integrated mail module so that we could access the webmail from within the Drupal interface but it seems to have some problems. I'm playing around with the code now to see if I can isolate the problem. It would be convenient to access the email from the site but if I'm not able to make it work, we'll obviously be able to access the email through the Netfirms webmail or by configuring our email clients. I think that using these separate addresses will be helpful for continued site maintenance, particularly when we move to other institutions.

Here is a list of plans for the site that I emailed my group members previously:

1. A database using bibliotex standards that will allow folks to contribute sources via a standardized form that I've worked out. We would use Mark's current bibliography as a starting point and one (or more) of us would moderate the entries, verifying their credibility, accuracy, and relevance before the entries would be accessible publicly. This way we have the opportunity to take advantage of web collaboration while maintaining a site ethos.
2. A forums section that would allow site visitors to contribute questions, suggestions, etc.
3. RSS feeds of second life blogs (including intellagirl)
4. A book review module (I've used this in the past and have been making some tweaks to spruce it up a bit and make it more useful) which we would use to create reviews of texts relevant to SL, virtual learning or similar. I can set it up to include the book image and to link up with either the publisher or amazon.
5. A currently reading module (similar to above, but without the in-depth reviewing) for each of us
6. An individual "about page"/blog for each of us, featuring our bio info and our second life identity. I can design the pages so that our SL avatars appear on the pages.
7. A system for submitting classroom instructional materials related to second life
8. and for students to submit work as well (all of which will be licensed under Creative Commons to allow adaptation and usage)
9. I may also be able to create a Drupal module that will indicate our online status in SL. I've been playing around with the code of a WP widget that does this for AIM.

Update: I've installed the book review module and currently reading. I've also set up a module that will allow contributors to specify how they would like to copyright their work. This will allow individual posts and pages to be governed by copyright according to the author's wishes. Right now it provides the choices available through Creative Commons. I think that this will make instructors and students more comfortable submitting their work to the site. I really like the idea of being able to choose copyright on a work-by-work basis. I'm still not sure about the online status in SL idea, but I'm working on it.

And I'm sure that I'm forgetting something (it's been a busy week. I didn't realize how rusty my php skills had become:)) but that's all for now, folks.