First Entry

Well, it finally happened...I have made a giant leap into the 21st centuary and created a blog. *sigh* it was bound to happen evntually, what with home run records being broken, hitting records being smashed, what other records have been broken lately...dunno...

Anyway, I can't say that the creation of this blog was entirely my fault-I had to do it because of a class I'm taking-EDMT (Educational media and technology) 592 at Eastern Michigan University. I plan to use the skills I learn from this course to integrate social networking into my master's project, but I'm sure I'll write more on that later. If you want to check out the EDMT 592 class, check out http://edmt592.ning.com/

So we had to meet up in Second Life. You wanna see what I look like there? check out the picture called "me in 2nd life" (well duh).


Anyway, I like 2nd life allright, It's kinda like my first-person shooter games that I like. I even got a watermelon launcher and a sword...not a bad EQ haul for one day if I do say so myself. I can see some real educational value type things in 2nd life, but what I worry about is that if we push education more and more into the technological world, the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" will widen considerably. To do 2nd life one needs a high-speed internet connection-which costs mucho dinero-a computer with a video card capable of handling it, and of course leisure time. I'm still open to the possibilites, but teaching in a very low-rent area, I see the vast difference between what I grew up with and what my students are growing up with. Only about 2/3 of them have a computer at home, and of that, only about half have high-speed internet. I couldn't possibly require a meeting or research in 2nd life for students in the school I teach at. that whole "haves and have nots" Marx talked about could have its roots in the technologicalification (yes, I made that word up) of Education...just something to think about.