Screenshots and Buffered Conversations
You will be asked to "submit proof of your participation" when turning in the paper component of your practicum project. This evidence will be uploaded or linked to from your individual page on the course wiki. You can do this by taking a series of screenshots or capturing the logs of your chat conversations.
What is a screenshot?
A "screenshot," "picture grab", or "screen capture" is an image taken by the computerto record the visible items that you see on your monitor.
A screenshot is an easy way to take a picture of something that isn't always easy or possible to capture by using File--> Print
You might want to include a screenshot with your practicum essay or paper in order to illustrate some of your points. If you are participating in a virtual community, an MMORPG or graphical chat like There.com or SecondLife, then you are required to take screenshots periodically over the course of your 15 hours of participation. You will upload these to your individual page on the course wiki.
These instructions should help you do this:
On a PC:
To take a screenshot of the whole computer screen, hit alt and PRINT SCREEN (this is on your keyboard at the top next to F12). Then open up Word or any graphics program that came with your computer and use
Edit-->Paste (or control-V) to paste the image into the word document. Then you should be able to print this out and attach it to the back of your essay.
On a Mac:
If you hit apple-shift-3 you will hear a sound that indicates a picture of your screen has been taken. Go to your desktop and you will see a file called Picture 1. You can double click to open this file and it will open in either Acrobat reader or Preview. You can print it out from either of these programs by going to File--> Print. Then you can staple this to the back of your essay.
What is a Buffered Conversation?
Some games and virtual worlds like There.com allow you to locate a log that has recorded all of the conversations that you have had while playing. Here are some tips for trying to access these buffered conversations.
SecondLife: When you are chatting with people, your conversation appears on the screen and then fades away after a few seconds. To look back at what's been said or heard, you can view the Chat History. Select Chat History from the View menu or press Ctrl-H to see a dialog that lets you scroll through alll the chat that has appeared on your screen during the current session. Copy these logs at the end of each session that you play, they may not be accessible after you log out of SecondLife. For more on playing SecondLife, see the Second Life Starter Guide.
There.com: The Chat History window contains a record of recent chats you have participated in, not including Instant Messages. To see your chat history, choose Show Chat History from the People menu on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Scroll back through your chat with the scroll bar.
To copy text from your Chat History so you can paste it into Microsoft Word, just click and drag over the text you would like to copy and press Ctrl+C. You can then paste this text into a word document.
Another method:
Open an explorer and browse to C:\Program
Files\There\ThereClient\chatlogs\. This folder (perhaps not exact, but close) contains whatever buffered chatlogs exist for that user.
If you are still having problems you can always take some screenshots, described at the top of this page.