Interactive Drama . . . a good start . . .

You folks did well today during the interactive drama activity. Congratulations!

Here is a peek at one of the photos:

The rest of the photos can be found online in the Interacitve Drama Gallery (the galleries are in reverse chronological order so the newer ones are towards the top). If you look around, you will also notice several albums from previous ETMA classes.

I have emailed the scenario we played to the class list . . . this is to let you see how a piece is put together. Please do NOT use this scenario with your students . . . I like to use it. You may, of course, use it as a model to build your own pieces.

It is possible to create scenarios for your students - I suggest that you have a number of characters that may be male or female so you can re-use a scenario over the years without having to re-write it each year.

There are a great many example scenarios, including pieces by students as well as professional interactive dramatists, at the Interactive Drama Archive and you can find many useful articles on interactive drama there and in the Taipei Interactive Theatre Society which is a local group in Taipei that I am founder of. The articles range from history of interactive drama to theory to how to write scenarios. I also have a category for interactive drama on my Life of Brian blog which you might find useful. Obviously, I love interactive dramas (my doctoral dissertation at National Taiwan University was on interactive drama and I've been a role playing game fan since 1978. I am also the editor of the Journal of Interactive Drama.

If any of you are interested in more interactive drama for fun . . . feel free to contact me about joining the Taipei Interactice Theatre Society as we would love to have you join us!

ASSIGNMENT:

Notice . . . as I have posted this notice . . . I have used a number of links to outside webpages as well as an illustrative photograph. Your assignment for this week is:

1. Post a response to the assigned articles on roleplay and whodunit with our classroom activities in mind. Specifically, your response should be on ways that these type of activities can be adapted to your own classroom to best advantage - taking in the limitations of space, fluency, and the like.
2. Your post should have one (only one) illustrative photograph of your own (you may use the blogger photo upload tool or link to your own online gallery that allows photos to be posted to forums or blogs - there are a number of limited free services such as Flickr or Fotki available for such things (these can also usually be upgraded to pro status for more options). My Fotki gallery is here while my free level Flickr is here (obviously, I use the Fotki for most of my online photos).
3. Your post should also have at least one link to an outside webpage (such as your blog).
4. You should also edit the "links" section in your blogger blog to have a link to the ETMA Matters blog. You should also change the "edit-me" links in the Blogger template for your blog to actual links . . . perhaps to your own online photo pages, webpages, or your school or class pages or simply to useful links or places you have found on the web. You can do this by going into your Blogger Dashboard at http://www.blogger.com and opening the "settings" for your blog. Under template you can directly edit the settings. If you don't know what you're doing, don't change things other than searching for a heading category called "Links" that has some "edit me" links which don't go to anything. These are placeholders for you to edit and change with your own information. Notice for the ETMA Matters blog, I have placed teacher links first followed by a link to all of the student blogs. My personal Life of Brian blog has many more categories for posts as well as complicated link sets but that's a bit more complicated than our needs here. Our purpose is simply to make sure folks have some of the basic skills to setup a classroom or personal blog . . . and to have fun doing it while we share impressions, knowledge, experience, and ideas . . . and perhaps a smile or few.

Please continue to respond to one another's post both here at ETMA Matters and on their personal blogs. Feel free to expand your discussion here to include your responses to activities, readings, both in this course as well as others. You may wish to discuss ideas on how to best adapt or use material you are being exposed to in your own classrooms . . . or, perhaps, discuss other matters related to classroom management and the like . . . you are strongly encouraged to expand your personal blog to include more of your views on teaching, education, learning . . . and LIFE . . . life is always worthwhile, the personal touch. Some folks like to have a purely professional blog or multiple blogs for different purposes, but I find the ones that are a hodge podge of variety to be the more enjoyable - albeit, not always so. If you wish to have both a professional and a personal blog, feel free. Do let us know the URLs for both though.

All the best,
Dr. Phillips

Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH
http://www.briandavidphillips.com

SIGN UP for the COMPREHENSIVE IAETS EXPERIENTIAL HYPNOSIS COURSE in Taipei . . . Aug. 29 to Sept. 9, 2005 . . . limited seating