Lesley Anderson

Blog or Wiki Design

How would you design and manage content in a blog? Use your blog experiences so far?

After spending a few weeks blogging for this subject, I must say I have enjoyed the experience.
I find blogging an efficient and satisfying way to respond to tasks, organise ideas and link to others within the subject group.

The first thing I did was plot out the structure of my blog site. I have only included 2 separate pages in my blog - About and Home. About contains a short piece of information about myself and the Home page is where my recent postings appear. I have relied on categories for the major method of organisation of my posts, and find that works well for me. I have major categories organised with sub-categories as follows - Read the rest of this entry »

 Another Battle - Runescape  www.runescape.com 

After spending a few minutes on this site I can understand why the boys recommended that I had a look at it. Runescape is flashy. The graphics are excellent and the music loud and of excellent quality.  The game requires Java to run it and is “playable” straight on the screen with nothing else to download. There is a distinction between freeplay and member play as some of the “Worlds” within the game are locked to free players - I’m not sure what the difference between the games are. I suppose the site offers their 15,000 free hours and then you must subscribe.
Runescape does require some time spent to set-up.

• a profile is created - basically username, password, DOB, email address, country of residence. 
• a world is selected - this must be a free world as member worlds are locked for freeplay
• a character is designed - gender, clothing etc - could be classed as an avatar and is customisable, and changeable at certain times during the game.

• mouse options selected
  then a tutorial begins.

I worked through a fair bit of the tutorial and I actually quite enjoyed the setting up and acquiring of skills and items for use further into the game. I didn’t have to battle anything much during the tutorial, but that’s what this  game is about  too, although it is quite upmarket and sophisticated and much more than just a battle. I think that looking at Runescape and having a go at it for a while will help open up some avenues of conversation with some of my students which could be quite interesting.

The Battle for Wesnoth

I have held off posting this response as I wanted to have a few experiences with this game before I posted. I had no problems downloading the game and installing it on my computer, which was a good start with it.  Unfortunately I couldn’t seem to organise an online game with someone else so I’m not able to respond to that experience which might well have shown me something different about the game.

I am afraid I am not a “battle” game person, there is something about running around battling and killing people that just doesn’t appeal to me but I did try to go into it with an open mind. I’m sure there are many people who would find the game interesting and enthralling but frankly I found it quite boring.  Perhaps  it wasn’t fast moving enough?  It’s not that I am against computer games - I have spent many hours trying to beat my kids through the levels of Theme Hospital and my 8 year old and I are big on playing SimCity. I suppose I just enjoy a different type of game.

After discussing the Battle of Wesnoth with some of my Grade 6 boys, they suggested that I look at a game they seem to be playing a lot called Runescape - www.runescape.com  Runescape seems to be quite a popular game with them and I will have a look at it and perhaps post my response about it as well.