Inspiration Island

28/10/22

Turkish Students

During our third class in Second Life, we met as a group where we got to travel to Inspiration Island and finally meat the Turkish students from Cag University.

When we arrived, there was a large circle of chairs placed in between several trees and alongside another building. We were instructed to sit on the chairs, there were plenty more students in the area, so I quickly became aware that they were the students from Turkey. Although we did not get a chance to talk to each other at that point in class, that was our first introduction.

When we settled around the circle, we got to meet several of the other module coordinators, they introduced themselves and spoke about the area we were in for a brief while.

This was the first class where our group assignment was discussed, Ginger explained to us what was expected of us and what the group presentation required of us.

Briefly after that was discussed we were split into several smaller groups. I went along with Dr. O’Connor’s group where he brought our group right beside the circle of chairs on Inspiration Island. There we sat in a smaller circle where we got to speak to one another. John asked us several casual question i.e. where we are from, what course we are doing and why we decided to do Virtual Environments. He also asked us questions regarding the metaverse and asked if we knew much about it. We all got a chance to answer individually, either by voice or chat. This exercise put me at ease when speaking to the group and made me feel more open.

Lastly, we received a task from John that required us to get up from our seats and walk around the surrounding area, either the building or the outside area and find something of interest to us. I done this and found several interesting objects, but the one thing that particularly caught my attention was the mountable horse. When I first joined Second Life, I was under the impression that the metaverse was used solely for teaching purposes, so finding something random and out of character sprung a sense of interest in me. Unfortunately, the class finished by the time I managed to figure out how to mount the horse, which was quite devastating.

We then travelled back to the TUD home base where John answered all our remaining questions.