Whiting First at Bat!

Our health teacher, Diane Whiting, was first in line this year to return to teaching in Second Life. She has her students for 10 week semesters and is anxious to revisit her experience with the Body Image Unit. We briefly discussed last year's experience and what perhaps we would approach differently this year. One thing that is a bit different is that the student accounts are completely unique this year. Although they will all share one of three new last names, SMSJourneyer, they will have Second Life first names generated from a list of the minor planets. This led to some lengthy but quite interesting names! As a result of this method of generating names, the students will have a greater semblance of anonymity as their teacher and I will have access to their real life identity but it will be totally up to the individual student if and when they will or will not choose to disclose their real life identity. If you have been following the blog, you will remember that last year all of the students shared the last name of Hillburn, and their real life last name became their second life first name. For this reason it was often easy to recognize an avatar in world by their name (assuming you knew their last name in real life). Whew - Did you follow that?
So why am I going into this lengthy explanation of the avatar account name creation process? Simply to set the stage before the students enter, and to acknowledge at the start that we have a greater potential for true anonymity this year- Let's see where that might take us...