More on Portfolios

Three New Things to Think about for Your Design Portfolios

1. NOTECARDS—As you move around Second Life, you will notice that notecards are one way to communicate a chunk of information. For example, when you arrive at the Clemson Teaching site, you usually get a note card asking you to create a note card listing your favorite sites in 2L. (Making a note card is very easy—Go into your Inventory, and click on CREATE and select NEW NOTE.) This is not an assignment to make note cards in 2L—instead I want you to think about what notecards should be made to inform people about the site you are proposing. The other class can make the actual cards, but you guys know what should be on them. SO part of your design portfolio should be to list the note cards that should be posted at your site, and write the actual text of them.

2. GUIDE FIGURES – Once these sites are built in 2L, there will be a certain amount of random traffic: people who don’t know much if anything about Woolf or Eliot. In additional to notecards, we may want to create guide avatars who can show strangers through the site. Who should be the guide avatar for your site? What would they look like? What information would they offer? What could they invite people to fo? How could they teach them more about Woolf and Eliot?


3. INTERACTIVITY – I am developing a theory that there are three levels of presenting material in 2L
a. POSTING—this s just like the web: you post information: on billboards, in notecards etc.
b. HOSTING – this is more interactive and 3-D. It involves createing actual 3D virtual sites such as the Sistine Chapel and the Globe Theater where people can roam about. Our sites were orginally convceived at this level.
c. QUESTING – this is the level where you create mini-games or quests that pull people into learning more about the concepts and history you are trying to present. The best examples of this I’ve seen are The Archetypal Cavern Site by Elioise Pasteur which sets up a quest through a cavern where youhave to read notecards in order to pass through to the next area in the cavern, and the Virtual Hallucinations site which teaches about schizophrenia by having your avatar actually experience hallucinations. Check these out and see if you can find other sites with this level of interactivity.
What I want you to do is to think creatively about what kind of interactive quests/ games etc could be invented to guide people through your site and teach them important things about it, about Eliot and Woolf, and about Modernist literary culture in general.