For the past couple of weeks, I have been traveling in SL and playing on WoW. Never did I think I would ever play WoW, and now that I have started getting the hang of it, I am getting hooked! At first I had no idea what I was doing. I actually thought that I was only one lost, but when we met as a group for the 2nd time, I realized that many of the other class mates were confused as well. My biggest challenge has been actually the quests of killing the enemies. They seem to be very difficult to kill, but as I learned, I need better weapons to kill them faster.
When reflecting on how WoW can be used in classrooms/teaching, I did not have a clue. That was until Jane had us brainstorm during our class meeting. It was very interesting to see what we all came up with as to how WoW can be used as a teaching tool. Its amazing that a game can actually have various learning objectives, rather than it being just used as a hobby.
This week I was able to take a tour of a Space Station, explore the Star Trek Science Museum, take a tour of Virtual Hallucination, and explore Machu Pichu. All of these places were interesting to explore because I learned so many new things. For example, in the tour of the Virtual Hallucination, I was able to experience voices, objects moving, and other things that a person suffering from schizophrenia would actually experience. Below are a couple of pictures of my adventures this week.
Lourdes, it was nice to read your thoughts on WoW. It seems like there are a lot of vastly differing opinions about WoW in our class and about its uses in education. Sometimes when I'm playing, I'll get kind of hooked and want to complete some more quests, but it's only when I'm in the game. Once I'm out of the game, I don't really have any urge to go back in. My biggest challenge has been finding things in WoW. I think I just don't have the patience to search for artifacts, so I'm always looking up where to find them online. In the beginning I thought the quests would be harder than they actually are, so I kept doing more than I needed to. It made me level up quickly so now completing the quests is not that hard.
ReplyDeleteI liked our brainstorming experience too, but I have to admit I'm still not convinced to use WoW in education. I'm excited for the VWBPE presentation on WoW and hoping to learn more from it. I want to be convinced, but so far I feel like the game is mostly about killing and gaining power and to build learning experiences from it, you have to stretch WoW pretty far. Just my thoughts so far... I wish I could just fast forward to level 60+ and see what the experience is like then. (Oh gosh, now I sound really impatient!)