Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Day 10 - Only two days left on-site

In some ways the past two weeks have been very long and yet paradoxically very short. Today we had a guest speaker who talked about her candidacy paper. I am still too early into the course work stage to be really focused on the expectations at the candidacy stage of the program but it was interesting to hear how she organized her thoughts and about some of the personal issues she had at the time. She did it and that is inspiring!

The Geo-everything presentation was quite good. I learned about geo-caching and augmented reality. The benefits of these kinds of sessions is that it is really hard to keep up on all the "stuff" that is out there so having peers with different areas of expertise is great.

We also attended a presentation in Second Life. I continue to be underwhelmed (with the environment and not the presenter). I think this environment has great potential for some fields like Engineering and Bio-sciences as well as language but I just find it cumbersome. At this stage, the user needs a lengthy orientation before being able to really embrace "in world" life and maneuvers. Mostly I find myself trying to catch up to others and then wondering why I bothered. Anyway, it is an evolving technology so improvements and greater familiarity will come in time.

G.

No comments:

Post a Comment