anabel drought : Activity

Titles

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:54:23 GMT

1. Can our choice of avatar influence a change in real world behaviour through a virtual world experience?

original title used for essay

2. Can avatars be used to change behaviours in real life?

Snappy but I am not doing the research - i am just reflecting on others work

3. Does choice of avatar influence offline behaviour?

Like this actually, but not sure of use of offline behaviour, but i suppose it contrasts to online behaviour - but that is also an interesting topic

4. A reflection on the role of avatars in supporting real life behavioural changes?

Like the reflection bit as it tells people im not actualy doing the research. Not sure if the word behavioural is too encompassing and out of the small remit of the study

Generative writing

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:41:09 GMT

Task: Write on a specific topic,
21.27 start:
The essay i would like to transform into an article for a journal is one i wrote for IDEL in December 2011. It is about the role of avatars and how they can effect real life behaviours.
It came form an idea that i had whilst using second life, when i began to worry about the innapropriate clothing my avatr had on for the tutorial we attended. I worried that my skirt was too short and my blouse too low cut. I didn't know how to change my clothing at the time and panicked that i wouldn't be giving off the correct image of myself as a proffesional student studying at the prestigious Edinburgh University. When i arrived at the meeting place i soon found that my panick over clothing was not an issue as people turned up as robots, dogs, vampires etc and my human woman was nothing out of the ordinary. I began to reflect on the way i had assigned a character to my avatar and felt it somehow portrayed me and the type of person i must be because of my avatar. I decided to look into research on AVatars and found that the Stanford University had doen a lot of research into using lifelike avatars to change real life behaviours. I was totally amazed by this idea and wrote on this topic for mY IDEL assignment. My essay will therfore not be a new idea but a reflection on others research, i have no idea what journal would be interested in it but perhaps i could practice with re genre ing it and writing it for trashy magazines as a guide to loose weight in the first instance. I am rambling now as i have run out if ideas and i have 1 minute to go. I love the
21.37 finish

Identify key themes and start to cluster them and look for connections.
The key themes are
Choice of avatar
How an avatar represent oneself
The link between avatar and self
The role of an avatar in changes to real life

Academic Writing Summer School

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:26:59 GMT

Ahhhh feels good to be back

I feel I should have a new section or folder or something to divide up my different courses blog postings, Calvin will do!

Trial at free writing

I dont usually have a problem with the blank page - i tend to be a profuse writer and then a big deleter. I also tend to keep within the word limit and have thousands of appendicies which dont neccessarily add to the body of text but i include because i have worked on it and feel it is somehow good and slightly relevenat and that it may give me some points ( you never know) However the comments i recieve on essays tend to be

I have gone over the word limit
I need to be more critical
The appendicies are not relevent
Things in the appendicies should have been in the main text
I should have expanded on specific points

I say in my head - but i had no more space to include it in main text / expand on it / be critical of it

So from this i already see that it is my focus that is the problem - if i focused more at the early stages and i could come up with a structure / essay plan as i was shown at University and write to the focus rather than writing about everything in the area and hope to pull together a direction.

Ahhhhh - reflection

I enjoyed the experience of free writing, it gets thoughts flowing, i need to improve my typing accuracy as the interuption of words the wrong way round and i's not capitalised interrupts the flow and pauses thoughts and creativity

Trying to add pic to wallwisher

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:07:45 GMT

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:26:29 GMT

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:07:06 GMT