Team Tut: Ideas for Assignments

Location: Rezzable Kings Region, Second Life

Tuxedo Ninetails and I toured of a good bit of the Nile section of Rezzable's build in Second Life. We clowned around, striking poses while enjoying the stunning vista of the virtual Nile and the hippos that, luckily, did not live up to the ferocity of their real-life counterparts.

The ideas that follow are Tux's; I'm just doing my best, like Thoth, to act as scribe!

An Engineering Problem on the Nile

Tux first suggested that some sort of puzzle might enliven the granary area pictured just below. She thought that were the activity timed, with a penalty for not repairing a working mill from materials on-site. Thus students would learn about Egyptian technology and how the Nile was the "breadbasket" of the ancient world.


A later tour of the OpenSim Nile area with Viv Trafalgar led to us speculating about visitors doing the bidding of one of Pharaoh's ministers, who is trying to avert famine by getting a new mill into operation. The minister might lose favor in court if his servants--the visitors--could not repair the mill in time.

Plans for Tourism and Hospitality Students and Faculty

I stupidly deleted Tux's and my chat log, but she sent along these remarks after our tour. I have only edited them slightly.

Something else that makes sense to me as an authentic use of the Tut exhibit for those training for the tourism and hospitality industries:

• Plan tours and role-play virtual historical tour guide and museum docent roles. This might be very simple stuff, or they might have to plan and research a whole bunch of things like how to move groups of people around in virtual spaces, how to keep them interested, planning little activities for them so they aren’t just looking at stuff.
• Using the existing audio texts as models, write, record and upload further scripts to add to areas or objects that don’t currently have them, such as many of the objects in the museum and cosmic gallery.
• Add these audio texts to builds undertaken by class members, such as the granaries area we toured.
  

If Rezzable can’t see themselves having student work incorporated permanently into their build, then maybe learners could ‘buy’ copies of some of the artifacts, and add audio to their own copies. Maybe each school could have its own gallery where they have augmented versions of the objects on display with the students’ voice-overs attached. Rezzable might run competitions for visitors to develop commentaries for different objects, and include the best ones into the exhibit.

Media-Creation by Visitors

Learners could:

• Set up a ‘postcards from Kings Rezzable’ business, collecting (or creating) a bunch of good poses and animations so that people could get really good photos of their visits rather than the normal not very good ones that most of us tend to take. Learners could also make a video documentary about the site, using stills with voice-overs and nice transitions in MovieMaker or IMovie.
• Make a machinima documentary about the site, a la Kenneth Clark in ‘Civilisation.'
• Write a play and perform it, using the Tut build as the location. The performance could either move around the sim, or scenes could be rezzed in a holodeck setting so the audience didn’t have to go anywhere. The performance could be promoted across SL the same way the SL Shakespeare Company does.

Closing note by Iggy: I hope that several of these assignments, and more developed by Team Tut, can be fleshed out in a wiki so Rezzable can link to them from an Educational Kiosk on the SL and OpenSim sites.