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

We've made a lot of progress in the past few weeks. We met on April 1st and filmed the first scene in our machinima. We have plans to meet again this weekend to film the second scene and plan to record the audio on Monday. The website is moving along smoothly now that I've worked out a few of the kinks. The basic architecture is there and the modules have been uploaded and (fingers-crossed) correctly configured. I had to remove some modules that were causing problems. Unfortunately, there isn't a tagadelic module for the most recent (5.1) version of Drupal. I'm looking into the status of an upgrade. As far as I know, no one is currently working on one but there are some other options that would enable us to have a tag cloud. That's fairly minor, however. Overall, we should have acompleted project by some time next week!

Lo and Behold, the Second Life group actually filmed some footage, recorded some audio, and have a rough cut of our first scene basically done. Making machinima, easy right? Well, it's not brain surgery, but it is trickier than expected-- partly because we're working with Karen's husband who is a bit of a perfectionist (which only helps us in the end). Anyway, it's only a two minute scene so fa

So Cat's log detailed the devloping website and the script is being polished for filming. In other happy news, Sarah Robbins "Intellagirl" will be at Purdue the first week of April and we're gonna chill with her and talk about lofty things.

I'm pretty much throwing myself into the Second Life Online Annotated Bibliography right now. It's growing quite large, and I can say with only a bit of ego that it's already the most comphresive site of its nature out there. I've semi-publicized it on some listervs and boards, and am getting great feedback from some of the SL education community. Along with praise comes critique. One guy suggests I stop HTMl coding and use a delicious link roll. Why yes this is easier and more helpful (kinda) to a social networking community, it's not a very visually appealing option. Visual rhetoric wins! I think people will ultimately enjoy the more personal look of our bib and this will make it more successful.

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.

We are still in the research phase of our project. My responsibilities include locating educational spaces in SecondLife and choosing screen shots and content for our machinima film. I'm also responsible for the technical aspects of our website, which we intend to use to make our film accessible and to provide an educational resource for students and instructors interested in the SecondLife learning environments. So far, I have registered our domain name, studentavatar.com, and have found a web-hosting company. I'll be working on designing and publishing our site during the next two weeks. We will be meeting on Saturday, March 10 to write our script and begin filming.

Here's a link to a CBS News video/interview with David Pogue about Second Life:

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2496361n

You might also check out his funny article this week:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/an-experiment-in-virtual-livin...

Cheers,
Dave

Okay, this is a bit on the tardy side, but here's what I've been up to:

My responsibilities for the research segment of our project include locating educational resources in Second Life, assessing their value and relevance to the project, and choosing "locations" for our machinima filming. So far an extensive amount of time has gone into learning to navigate the interface without getting stuck in walls or continually running into other avatars. I've also done searches for classes currently being held in Second Life.

Here's a link to the Second Life Education Bibliography I'm working on, in case anyone is hugely interested in charting its progress.

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib

Hey gang, thought it might be helpful for us to all make an official post on either what we’ve done, or at least, what areas we’re looking at before we write the script and make el movie.

I’m basically assembling a hypertext annotated bibliography of SL specific research and musings. On the one hand, there’s not a whole lot of writings online that deal with SL education specifically. On the other hand, there is actually quite a bit of writings online that deal with SL education specifically (ha, contradictory statement!). The challenge is sifting through it to decide what is lengthy and useful enough to conclude. Many newspapers published short articles on SL education uses, but they are very surface level and hardly useful . . . not on the level of say Intellagirl who posts dissertation research notes and musings. At this point the bib is split into two sections: one for education specific and one for general. The general section is where I’m practicing the most discretion– I can’t include every mention of SL in the media, so I’m trying to weed out the “SL is cool” material and include things that seem to consider the platform in complex or, at least, intellectually considered manners.