Bullox and Kotori share a sunset 

Never Light all the Candles! 

Same Game, Same Job - New News for You

Several things have been happening since my last post - most of which are good news. Yay!

JOB News:

• I got a letter stating that if the budget remains the same I'll still have a place to work at the University of West Georgia. Woo!
• I finally got that laptop I'd won. The department bought and installed Dreamweaver for me. It is software that is great for webpage design. I plan on requiring students to use it to make their webpages in that new class in the Fall. I'm also helping out with the new Speech Communication website we'll post for the University. When it gets published I'll let you know. Now they're investigating purchasing some RAM for the laptop as currently it is extremely slow in running the applications I need for the class.
• I got invited to the University of Illinois to present a project I'd done a few years ago. I created a Virtual Forest to represent a communication social network. This was done inside ALICE (Adaptive Laboratory of Immersive Cognitive Experiments) for a interdepartmental project class funded by the National Science Foundation. Many thanks to Noshir Contractor, Michael Twidale, and Narendra Ahuja, the three professors of that course I so fondly remember. Here you can read about ---> ALICE.

GAME News:

• I was in the alpha test (a time for friends and family of employees to play a game in order to find problems with it and to make suggestions for changes and/or new ideas to the game) and beta test (for a larger group of gaming enthusiasts than just friends and family of the employees) for a combined period of just over a year for a game called World of Warcraft.
• World of Warcraft, or WoW, is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). If you'd like to read about MMORPG's, you can do that here on a page I created for another project.
• WoW is a game that allows players to create a character to control inside a virtual world. This virtual world looks very similar to earth in that it has forests, cities, swamps, and many of the same natural features of a civilized planet. The characters you can create can be of different races (if you've seen Lord of the Rings, imagine making a dwarf, elf, orc, or human), and different classes (this determines the characters function in the world - warriors can take damage, priests can only wear cloth armor but are powerful healers, etc.).
• Now that this game has been released, both Nattsu and I play it very often. My main character is Bullox the warrior, and Nattsu plays Kotori the priest. We group up with the characters some friends have made and go adventuring together. This allows us to stay in contact with people we know from Albany, Atlanta, and Urbana-Champaign now that both we and they have moved.
• I have several other characters I play. Below you'll see a screenshot from inside the game of my warlock named Andirak. Yes, he is a gnome, and yes, I chose green hair for him. In this game you can learn different professions such as leatherworking, tailoring, and blacksmithing. It's no surprise that Andirak is an engineer. :) /wave Rick - hehe

This is my gnome warlock Andirak, in WoW. WoW stands for World of Warcraft which is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). 

On my way to class...

Wow, I have a lot to catch you up on but it will have to wait for now. Rest assured I'll fill you all in soon. Right now I'm getting ready to go listen to my students' first round of speeches. So far the speeches are decent - a few wonderfully mastered marvels and a few that lack insight and/or preparation. There's always some of each level in every bunch. We'll see how today's go. :)

I also have my students rank each other using a "rank order" system - on a scale of one to five, with five being the best (just like a 5-star restaurant or 5-star hotel). They rank each other on:

• Delivery (eye contact, posture, gestures, and fluency), and
• Content (main pts in into/body/conc, Attention-getter, Final thought, also on Audience adaptations, source citations, and a descriptive passage).

So on their papers they write: Name, Thesis topic, D #, C # (for each person)

Then at the end of each day's speeches they circle the best speech of the day. At the end of the entire round (I call the speeches Rounds like in a boxing match), they vote for whom they think did the best job. Winners get prizes! Wheeee! :)

Amazing how time creeps up - it is almost time to go to class. More to come later.