Coming to Land

Having visited the orienation spaces a few weeks after my first experience in SL is kind of an interesting experience. I will have to consider how it was to come to land 5 weeks ago and which kind of help would have been useful.

My first impression on orientation island was positive as the information arrived just in time and in little chunks that made it easy to follow and to integrate the knowledge step by step. The amount of information was not overwhelming and let enough space for the learner to get slowly used to the virtual world.

I think in these first hours in-world that's what probably most new citizens would request, an easy introduction, that teaches you the basic steps. After that first experience I immediately got acquainted to the Muvenation environement and went only after a few weeks to some other orienation island.

One I particulary liked was NMC orientation island due to it's very explorative learning approach. The orientation environment is very well defined and represented through a series of little houses, which creates an inviting learning scenario.

The learner could go according to his own pace and curiosity to the different rooms and explore the content.

The amount of information is very well presented and organized and small modules.

Depending on the content the learner gets additional material either in form of notecards or links to external websites.

The whole environment is very creative and even the support is rather innovative. Here is an example of a video they show to explain how to use the camera control. How to use the camera control by NMC

Another orientation island that got my attention was "Virtual Ability".

Beside that fact that I went for the first time on a virtual swing I enjoyed this environment that is rather explorative.

Another positive point in this environment was the organization in different sections, one for beginners and one for "already advanced" users.

In general I think orientation island should be as explorative as possible and as guiding as necessary. By that I mean the learner should be able to learn following his own pace but also receive some guidance in terms of complexity of the learning modules in order ot avoid some cognitive overload and thus discouragement.

Professional Avatar

A professional Avatar?I think this brings us back to the whole question about identity. Should our SL avatar be somehow close to our RL person or should we rather select a radically different shape and look?This all depends on your approach to SL.
Will your SL be an extension of your RL or do you rather see it as an opportunity to experiment with a different identity?Looking at the question from this angle it would be entirely up to you to select the look of your avatar.But then remains the question, if there are already any norms established on SL that are different from RL or if we tend to reproduce a social framework that is closed what we are used in RL.So if these norms are close to RL then we could be thinking, yes there should be "professionally dressed" avatars in suits and ties for business meetings.If those norms are different, what are these norms. Are we allowed to dress differently, meaning we could wear jeans and t-shirt instead of a suit and a tie? Would we have to keep a human shape?What if we have a business meeting on SL? What do the other participants expect and what might be implicit rules?These questions are difficult to answer and only the experience with a certain target group might show some tangible results. I think the cautious way would be to start with an hypothesis about the target group and see how the "look" might actually impact the whole session.
My hypothesis would be that in general you have more freedom to select the look of your avatar than you would have in RL. But it might that in certain contexts you would still need to be compliant with a set of implicit norms. Eventually I would not call it a "professional avatar" but rather introduce some norms for the look in case you believe that is needed.

Second Steps - But with new shoes

What a nice surprise! Coming back to further explore the island, getting more and more confortable to move around I came across all kind of free stuff.

Notices, Links, Teleports AND AN ENTIRE BOX OF SHOES, CLOTHES AND HAIRSTYLES.

Absolutely Amazing! Never thought this would be possible. You take them, you try them and you adopt them! Really cool!

But without kidding, what could that possibly mean for a learning environment?

Human beings learn through interaction and adding different perspectives to the learning process help them develop schemes and adapt them to broader contexts.

It might be that with SL new and relatively unexplored perspectives could enrich the learning process and help analyze situations from a new angle.

And what seemed so far impossible will then appear as a new path for exploring and learning.

This was kind of nice discovery

From phia to PHIA

The arrival of "phia" on SL

Right after my first arrival in SL I felt that this character is not me (Girl from next door, who is that , everybody talks about her, but nobody actually knows her).
So before going any further I needed to adapt that look to something more suitable. Isn't that funny how you could immediately identify with this avatar? Seems that your avatar is probably more than the virtual representation of your look and the "want-to-have-look".
I guess going through the program I might get more answers to this hypothesis and understand For the time being I will concentrate on the actual introduction of those two avatars "Before" and "After".

So my first worries were already to adapt slighty the look of my avatar and that's how I finally managed to do my first steps on SL

phia becomes PHIA

A few days after my first experience with SL I had my first meeting in SL . Talking to my "RL" friends I got the advice to adapt my look in SL. So here you go! I did some free shopping and found great stuff.

During the actual meeting I realized that the size of my character was probably something like 1.20m in RL and I also had to adapt it.

So that's when phia became PHIA