My Space, Second Life

Setting up a My Space account was easy and I had most fun inventing a new name for myself. To my surprise quite a few names that I had derived from German fairy tales were already taken. Finally, I found myself the name Camilla Eulenspiegel, after a medieval figure who used to play pranks on the citizens of a small town by the Saale river in what is nowadays Germany - Till Eulenspiegel and Camilla: an amazon in the Iliad. The combination of these two names was finally odd enough so nobody else could come up with it.

I recently attended a workshop about SL in libraries, and so my initial questions about why people might be interested to use such a site etc. had already subsided. This enabled me to see the SJSU SLIS video without constantly wondering about this aspect, so, I could begin to see that there is merit in SL academic instruction for remote learning programs. SL could support the learning experience by letting it come 'alive' through visual materials, and even personality, which could not be transmitted in remote learning environments thus far.

In the article I read the author mentioned that people do not understand the connection between literacy and internet gaming. Unfortunately he/she also did not offer any answer to this question which I would find rather interesting to explore. Now what is the connection. Are internet gamers more or less literate than the previous generation. I would tend to think they are less literate. On the other hand considering the vast numbers of people that are playing computer games one can probably state safely that the majority of them would never have sat down with a book and read it front to back. So, this goes back to how we define literacy. If it is about numbers of people who read a computer screen and use a keyboard, the internet and the computer games have certainly had a 'positive' effect in that people who would otherwise not have learned to read and write now had an incentive to do so.