mkasahun's blog

A Struggle:

Finding cows to turn my humble garden into a farm.

An Accomplishment:

I have been building up my home and creating my own space in the Minecraft world. I know have a small sustainable garden in which I grow wheat to make bread to feed myself so I don't starve to death.

An Observation:

I noticed that another student in the class built her entire empire using glass and other tools I was not familiar with. It seemed like she had done an amazing job laying out her space in the game world and it looked something next to amazing. I was a bit envious coming from a home with a 2 layered stone wall and no roof but when I asked her in class how she was able to do it, she told me to check the wiki and she gave me other tips. When I tried that and it didn't work, I asked her if I could trade her some wheat for a cow because I couldn't find any in the world that weren't hers and she said yes. Something I mentioned in an earlier post was how lonely the game world felt. There isn't a real efficient way to communicate with someone in the game but when I saw the students' home and talked to her about it in person, she said it was totally okay to make that trade for wheat. This made me feel somehow less alone in the game world because although that vital communication factor was missing from the game, I could still interact with those personas in real life and maintain that sociality. Hopefully that makes more sense than I think it does.

A Question:

After speaking with Mr. B, the primary contact for Arise, Alice, and the rest of the group, we've been able to finally solidify some main ideas for our collaboration. In the beginning, it was evident that there needed to be some more conversations about finding a common ground between Mr B's vision for Arise and the group's vision for what we'd like to gain from the experience after the termination of the semester.

Google docs has made it easy for the group members to add, edit, or make suggestions for new ideas at the same time or during our personal time outside of class. We have also shared the document with Mr B to keep him updated on where we stand on the placement. It also gives him the opportunity to comment on our ideas which I believe will be very useful in the future.

Something that I've realized in group collaborations such as this one, it's important to have clear deadlines for nearly everything so that all participants can always be on the same page. With this in mind, we've added a "Weekly Goals" at the top of the page to add our placement homework. During conversations with Alice, Mr B revealed that he would like each of us to make a video introducing ourselves and our interests in Arise and education. We thought this was an efficient and easy way to share a bit more about ourselves, so we decided that the videos should be finished by Tuesday of next week.