Student Project Example

The following is an example of a student's project in my Intro to Computers II class where students were asked to pick three emerging technologies, research the products, and then present what they found to the class. This example was written by my student A.M. and edited by E.W.

"Second Life is a 3D online community. It is comprised of over 9 million online users from around the globe, inhabiting their own virtual land and developing on it. When you think you have had enough of your virtual land, then you may sell it on the Second Life market for the virtual money, Lindon Dollars, or real American Dollars. Since last month, over a million US dollars have been traded for this virtual land. In Second Life, you can build anything you want, with highly flexible tools. You don’t have to buy any software, but membership is not free. You may sign up for a free basic account, but memberships introduce more into your virtual imagination. When you are introduced into this new world, you make your own avatar that is a cartoon image of yourself or anything else of your liking. You may make an avatar of yourself or perhaps a creature. Second Life, though, comes at a REAL price. Through research, it costs to own a virtual island, about $1,675 American dollars. But, that is not all. You also have to pay for maintenance of your particular piece of land, which comes up to around $300 American dollars per month. However, to retain this money flow, Second Life has its own economy within the system. Second Life gives you the experience of owning your own land and exploring your own creativity while exploring the virtual world and meeting others.

Blogs are journals or private diaries of the Internet. In them, you can explain your day or have your own rants about anything you want. You can even post your own pictures; give out your own Podcasts, sketches, some videos, anything you can inscribe unto your web page. Many blogs that existed in the ‘80’s still exist today, such as rec.humor.funny. Blogger is one of many popular blogs. You can access other people’s blogs with a single click and look up their blog, except if they have it so it’s not open to the public. So in reality, it can double as an actual diary.

Wikis act as mediums for connections to other websites around the Internet. They have an association of links, helpful user information, and other information about the particular site you are about to go into. Many popular Wikis are: Wikipedia and WikiWiki.com. Some Wikis have communication boards where you can chat with other people. Like with Wikipedia, it is a people’s net when you can go in and edit a page if you like to. However, this has been tampered with and many people find dishonesty in many pages, which leads many developers of Wikipedia to be more aware of what is going on in their web pages. Wikipedia wikipages are scanned over everyday to try to rid the problem.

References

Wikipedia. (2007) Picture of Wikipedia [Online]:
<http://www.pixelache.ac/2005/files/Wikipedia-logo_BWb.jpg>[September 26th, 2007]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life>
SecondLife.com. Picture of Second Life. (September 23rd, 2007)
<http://secondlife.com/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki>
Information of Blogger:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogs>
Picture from Blogger, a section of Google Mail. (September 24th, 2007)"