"Third Life"

In many cases of CMC, we see people striving from a virtual conversation to face-to-face conversations. People feel that they have learned as much as they can from the person by using CMC and want to meet the person they have been interacting with, so much online, in person. Usually this applies to two people conversing either as friends or something more. But now, it seems to be the case that, entire virtual communities are convening in order to meet people and learn more about the virtual community they are involved in. Second life has conventions across the nation where real people involved in the game get together to discuss the new technologies of Second Life among other topics.

In this article, Second Life Avatars Hold Real-World Convention, it talks about a convention that occurred in Chicago where 800 people attended. At this convention work shops were set up along with seminars all concerning the inner workings of the game Second Life. People were considering it a “third life” meaning that “real people, who have virtual alter egos in Second Life, get together in a real-life convention to celebrate their alternate existences”.

We have seen this trend of virtual communities going out into the real world before. In Rheingold’s book, The Virtual Community, which we have been reading select chapters out of; we see, in his first chapter, that the virtual community he was involved would annually meet and have picnics together. This is also becoming the apparent trend for other online communities. Not only Second Life, which I found the appropriate one to discuss since it has been the discussion of class, but many other virtual communities meet in person. Right beside the Second Life convention in Chicago was an ESPN fantasy league convention. With this trend of virtual communities expanding in to the real world my question is; does this make them a more tightly knit community? In my opinion this significantly strengths the virtual community since they are now meeting in different venues of communication and seeing both people’s online and actual personality. But your opinion may be different.

CMT; Helper of the Blue Collar Worker

As it is fall break this week, I had the pleasure of, once again, conversing with my family for more than five minutes at a time. My father and I were able to talk for a couple minutes before he was rushing out the door to his job. In this time he was able to convey to me how CMT has helped him. He has written a book and, for awhile, has been looking for a publisher, illustrator, etc. With the recent boost in technology, he has been able to find all of these using CMT.

CMT is now helping out the common, average-working man achieve their dreams that they thought may never come true. My dad has always wanted this book published and CMT has helped him. He has been sending emails to this guy back and forth for awhile. This man has agreed to create the cover of the book along with creating a website for my dad; all for a reasonable fee, of course. Before CMT was available my dad would have been going through phonebooks, calling people up, traveling all over in an attempt to have his dream come true. Now people can just send out an email. If they say “no”, well, move on to the next person. It makes life a little be easier. On the internet you can virtually find any type of person that you may need for the particular project that you are doing.

CMT truly has helped advanced the dreams of the blue-collar worker. Using CMT technology people can attempt to find a publisher for a book they have written as my dad did, attend online courses in order to get a degree to make their life better as we semi-experienced last week, or just get their resume on a website such as monster.com in an attempt to get a better job. Oh, and just as an afterthought, my dad is planning on having a message board on his website to discuss the book or ask him questions. I just found it interesting how something created by CMT communication can lead, and often does, to more intricate CMT communication.

Pros and cons of online classes

This week the entire class was done online allowing for an interesting experience. In some ways I found the online class much easier than regular class and, during other times, I found certain aspects of it more difficult. So for this blog I decided to go look up the pros and cons of online learning. I found many benefits for online learning along with many cons.

In an article entitled, “Why Do Students Like Online Learning?” fifteen benefits were given for online learning. Now I will not go into all of them; only the ones that I experienced during this past week of classes. The first benefit was “students can ‘attend’ a course at anytime, anywhere.” Usually I would take a nap after my 8:10 class and wake up for this class at 10:20. With the course being online I could sleep until whenever and then “attend” class once I was awake. The seventh reason was “participating online is much less intimidating than ‘in the classroom.’” I found that the anonymity presented by an online course allowed me to say what I wanted without the fear of seeing “looks” from other classmates. This is only a few of the benefits that I received from having the course online this week.

Now moving on to the cons of having a course online; in an article entitled, “The Pros and Cons of Online College”, a few cons were mentioned about taking courses online. One mentioned, that I found very true this past week, was “self-discipline is a must.” It was extremely easy this past week to go to the discussion, briefly look at it, and then sign out telling myself I would do it later. I had to self-discipline myself to do the assignments given. It was much harder to do this without a teacher reminding me to do it. Another one I found true this past week was “no immediate feedback”. In a classroom you can just raise your hand and the teacher will call on you and hopefully be able to answer your question right away. While in an online course you would have to email your teacher and wait until he or she had time to answer you back. There were a couple other cons that were also important but the two just mentioned were the only ones I found prevalent to the past week.

So looking reflectively an online course, like any other thing, has pros and cons to it. It really just depends on your style of learning and what kind of person you are whether or not you should enroll in an online class. Even so this past week of experimentation with an online class, in my opinion, was a valuable learning experience.