Teachers in real life often tend to dress, at least in work, a little conservatively. They're expected to by their institutions quite often, and if you teach sexually aware students dressing so as not to titillate is something that I remember a couple of young students struggling to adjust to in their early days.The SLED List has had very heavy traffic on the implications of appearance in SL, shopping for "decent clothes" and also on the up and down sides of replicating RL in SL.
On that basis, the NMC Teacher's Buzz talked about appearance for teachers - do we dress conservatively in here too?
A full transcript will be available via the NMC Teacher's Buzz later, but a number of topics that might be of interest to the business community were raised - how do people react to you based on appearance, does that first impression linger, why do people choose the appearance they have and so on.
There were large parts of the conversation where, essentially, we agreed "It all depends" but a couple of interesting bits of consensus did emerge:
- We, as teachers, may make an initial judgement based on appearance, but we quite quickly amend that based on communication with the avatar
- If we have an official presence in SL ("I am here as the representative of University of X") then we're more likely to feel obliged to dress conservatively - and perhaps have an alt for our more personal activities.
