Blog #9

My partner for this exercise was Daniel Barbosa. We both chose to use the question method for our introduction paragraph part of our essay. Each of us helped one another by giving feed back. I remember that my question was very broad and had to be more descriptive for my introductionI helped Daniel with the organization of his introduction. I gave him feed back that he needs more information and points in his introduction.

I enjoyed the exercise. It was very helpful to get another point of view rather than my own on my essay. The exercise was useful, because my partner gave me feed back that otherwise I would of never thought about. Although I wish we would of had more time to work together. In order to develop a better introduction. However thanks to this exercise my introduction is stronger than it would be without the exercise.

blog #8

Reflection
In Second Life I went to Democracy Island. Democracy Island is a really interesting place, because users can go there and set a booth. In these booths people can talk or present about any topic they so choose. This island was created so people could express their thoughts about the present day issues or topics. The island was not created to persuade avatars, but on the contrary it was created to inform viewers about any certain topic. Democracy Island is set up like a town hall where avatars can meet and socialize with other avatars.
On the island there were many different pages that consumers could click on. One of the things I quickly clicked on a screen that said “info” and it was a fundraiser requesting money for cancer patients. The fundraiser was through the American Cancer Society and the organization gave some basic information about how much money they raised although the statistics where from 2005. After the fundraiser webpage I went to the future salon. The future salon is where a lot of the discussion takes place about any topic that is posted. When I went there was really nobody on the island so there was not a topic posted to discuss. The “info box explained how the future salon is for monthly discussion and topics can vary from new technology to political debate.
Some interesting facts about the island include the architecture. One building of the island was built to be a court house. The court room in the court house was set up exactly like how a court would look like in the real world. Something strange that happened, however was a lot of these spiny things started spawning from the ground. At first they started spawning in one area then it moved all around. There were so many of them that I had to move from that area of the island.

Blog #7

Presentation Evaluation

Our team is team number one and we presented about commerce in Second Life. The presentation started out with Dean, the team captain, informing the audience about the major corporations investing into the Second Life market. Then after Dean, I presented. I was very nervous and I think that is why I did a poor job on my aspect of the presentation. I did have well documented information, but I was unprepared to present. The reason I was unprepared is because I usually practice before a presentation, but I did not for this presentation. I spoke about an interview with the chief financial accountant.

There were a lot of positive things about our presentation that overcame the negative parts of the presentation. The positives were, our group did bring the proper information. Our group also used all of the time for the presentation. One negative about our presentation is that we did not ask a lot of question to help the class discussion. Another negative is not everybody was ready to present, because we did not meet as a group before the presentation. Since we were the first group to present, our group really did not know what to expect.

Overall, for the first group to go we did well. For the next group presentation however, our group needs to be better prepared. We can accomplish this by meeting outside of class before the presentation. We can also come up with specific topics about the general subject we are talking about in order to get organized. There was definitely a high point of our presentation, which was at the beginning. As the presentation went on the energy of the presentation seemed to go down, which is some thing our group needs to work on.