Virtual Journalism
The blog isn't anywhere near its final form, but I thought I should begin posting anyway.
This week, I proposed a new summer course for our school's distance education summer program. The course would be an exploration of journalism in virtual reality.
Here's the basic premise: the news business doesn't know how to deal with gamers. Gamers are "lost eyeballs" - unreachable by old and new media (as currently practiced) while engaged in gamespace. The advertising biz doesn't see it quite that way. Embedded advertising can be found in games now and will likely appear in more games in the future.
Why not experiment with embedded news?
The course would spend a short time teaching the basics of the 3D immersive environment Second Life, followed by several weeks of beat reporting within SL.
As a bonus, we would experiment with a variety of publication forms: blog, notecard and 3D "build."
If the course is accepted by my department, school and university weekend program, it would appear in June, giving me a few months to prep.
I'm open to suggestions.
This week, I proposed a new summer course for our school's distance education summer program. The course would be an exploration of journalism in virtual reality.
Here's the basic premise: the news business doesn't know how to deal with gamers. Gamers are "lost eyeballs" - unreachable by old and new media (as currently practiced) while engaged in gamespace. The advertising biz doesn't see it quite that way. Embedded advertising can be found in games now and will likely appear in more games in the future.
Why not experiment with embedded news?
The course would spend a short time teaching the basics of the 3D immersive environment Second Life, followed by several weeks of beat reporting within SL.
As a bonus, we would experiment with a variety of publication forms: blog, notecard and 3D "build."
If the course is accepted by my department, school and university weekend program, it would appear in June, giving me a few months to prep.
I'm open to suggestions.
posted by Prof. G. at
12:27 AM (permalink)
2 Comments:
I'm for doing this on the Moon Shot Theory of Learning: It's good to visit other planets, even if you don't plan to live there because the journey might provide you with technical skills that could be useful in other environments.
My one concern would be the amount of space required on the computer. If we're going to do something like this, I think we'd need plenty of advance notice of exactly what amount of memory, space or whatever would be required to make this project work on our computers. I assume this absolutely would require a high speed connection. What else?
By
Anonymous, at 3:48 PM
Hi Kathy,
Here's a link to the Second Life system requirements.
It might help if you would try loading Second Life on your computer now, just to see if it runs. If so, great. If not - well, that's something new to deal with.
Good luck!
By
Prof. G., at 4:13 PM
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