Met with my advisor

Dear blog,
I met with my advisor, Peter Leong, in world in Second Life today to discuss the goals our 690 class. I told him my main goals was to publish more in order to become a more viable candidate for hire after I graduate. Currently, I only have 3 on my CV and I would like to add more to that number.

What was funny was that our talk eventually segway-ed into talk about my GA job as well. However, for the 690 class, I presented Peter with 3 ideas I had in regards to articles that I could write with him. These ideas included articles about

• What Sam and I did last semester in regards to weekly meetings in Second Life.What we accomplished and how we set it up: the island’s code of conduct, monthly get-togethers, workshops, etc…
• The process of designing an island.Either co-write an article with Peter on how we implemented the design process OR create a literature review article on how other academic institutions designed their island.Possible problem: there may not be enough literature on it, so I would have to interview island designers themselves or visit the other islands and take note of their design myself.
• Other issues in Second Life, not necessarily related to my dissertation, but are mentioned in other articles I am using for my dissertation. These include the process of designing 3D environments for immersion, interaction, and integration; how environment design differs among different subject areas; or strategies for teaching virtual environments (I already wrote a lit review in Marie Iding’s class on this, I could possibly expand on this in an article).

After talking with Peter, we agreed that the first idea I could possibly do on my own with Sam. The next 2 I could do with Peter, but he did mention that I needed to focus on some other items first. These included....

• Analyzing the results of my survey that I distributed at the end of the summer last year to the students of the ETEC 648 class. I could possibly turn this into an article for publication and use it as a pilot test for my research to include in my methodology. The write up would feature an analysis of survey at the end of class within an extended abstract 750-1000 words only, a look at the initial research questions, quick analysis of what I discovered. In other words what did the research questions answer as well as NOT answer.
• Finding similar literature on environment design. In other words, designing spaces in the virtual world that would promote interaction, socialization...

As for my GA job. Here's what I need to do.

• Collate resources from our summer 648 class including the students' annotated bibliography,
  
• Train COE faculty on how to use Second Life
• Finish up transcription work.
• Organizing another round COE recruitment mid to end of semester
• Clarify with Sam about how we will distribute prims once both islands are connected (we will probably have our own prims to ourselves, but just needed to clarify)
• Set up initial advisory board meeting. Find people who would want to be part of our committee. Maybe post an announcement on the COE Facebook or Twitter.
• For the board meeting, I need to visit other University sims and take screen captures of these sims and provide a brief description of how they are designed. I need to put these screen captures and descriptions in our virtual design blog.