When I was creating my role, I started by deciding on a name. I knew once i had taht, some of the personality of my character would already be there. I then thought of existing characters that would fit the role of a parent who believes that Google is making us stupid. Carol Brady came to mind. She seemed the perfect fit, from what I remembered of the TV show. after I decided on playing Carol, I went out and got a picture from the Creative Commons on Flickr and put it up on the Ning. I then had to think of the language Carol would use. I didn't think that she would sound too professional, and instead made her be a happy-go-lucky mom with an edge.
Most of the arguments that I came up with revolved around Carol's many children. I was able to give examples of how the use of the internet and phone technologies had effected her children's attitudes and work ethic.
I mainly used the sites Beach posted to look at arguments until we were all making arguments on the Ning discussion board and in the chat room. I then went out and found research that either proved or disproved what people were saying. That ended up being fun - information at your fingertips is a pretty incredible thing.
My position in this role-play were different. My personal position did not change, but it was interesting looking at the situation from another point of view.
I think that the use of an online role play would be a great tool to use in the classroom. I think that there were some kinks in ours that would have to be ironed out - the feeling of being overwhelmed when we were both posting and chatting being one. I think it would be good to have the students stay out of the chat room until the forum posts were closed. Then the students would know what to focus on. Also, I wonder if it would have been better to use tappedin to have the synchronous discussion and use the wiki to have the asynchronous discussion (I didn't feel that we needed to be on at the same time to post arguments, only to reflect at the end).
No comments:
Post a Comment