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Presenting Texts in Second Life

As part of an assignment for the “Second Life for Educators” course I’m taking part in, I have just posted a message outlining my ideas for presenting texts in our seminar.

Here it is:

My main challenge is the fact that our subject is heavily text-based – we’ve not only got our source texts (or passages thereof), but also background information on these texts as well as on genres, history, language, persons etc.

As far as I can see (and I’m grateful for any additional tips), there are two ways to deal with this:

  1. the integration of interactive objects and
  2. using different ways of presenting texts to achieve maximum variety.

For the first category, I have been able to come up with some ideas I think are promising:

  • installing a printing press that produces a manuscript page visitors can take away with them – I had seen an historical-looking printing press on one of the Internet marketplaces, but I cannot find it any longer, so if any of you can help me…
  • using the Trivia Treasure Chest to give a away prizes for correctly answered questions
  • offering a TourHUD giving visitors a tour through the village and some explanations
    possibly create introductions using THiNC books

    • With regard to the texts, I have collected the following possibilities so far:

  • notecards (of course) for basic knowledge
  • boards for showing short texts and graphics such as illuminated manuscript pages and short text passages or as signs placed next to the “exhibits”
  • hover text for e.g. names of historical figures or technical terms of medieval objects

    • Additionally, I’d love to record samples of Old and Middle English texts with the students and integrate those, and of course we’re going to use a blog to discuss the seminar on a meta-level as well as do some creative writing such as fictitious diary entries of time travelers from the Middle Ages finding themselves in Second Life. Wonder where they’d go first. ;-)

    So, these are my plans up to this point – I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback on this and hope very much I’ll be able to gather some additional ideas!

    Cheers

    Kirsten

    This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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