Cvetka's Blog

Giuliana Perco Cvetka Nacht

I changed job over the summer. I left the university in the south, where I worked   for two years, and began teaching at a small liberal arts college in the north east.

Everything is new and at times confusing: new job,  new  town, new climate (colder), new colleagues. Adapting to  the new environment and  learning basic things, like where to find edible bread (still have to find  such a place) or how to get from one building to the next, is still a challenge.

Despite all the new things, I hoped that, at least, for my intermediate course, I could re-use or recycle the lesson plans that I created for my classes in SL. No such luck. As reported earlier, several “Italian” sims have disappeared over the past few months, taking with them all the assignments  I had created around them. Sigh! This means that  I’ve to begin from scratch once more, of course.

An additional difficulty is the size of my intermediate class: ten students, not really the crowd of 14 I had last year, during my very first teaching experiment in SL, but still, a big group, especially since a couple of them are really resisting the idea of language instruction through SL. They they perceive  it  as boring and/or scary and, so far, I haven’t been able to make them change their minds.

The first encounter with SL, just like the previous semesters, was during an in-class workshop, led by me with the assistance of the Director of the Language Learning Center at the college.  I taught students the very basic skills they need to master in order to function in SL. Moving around, communicating, interaction, ecc. Moreover, this time I managed to have a “safe place” fin SL or my students, i.e. the college’s virtual sim. We ended our orientation there and, after over a month of virtual explorations, I know from their blogs that my students usually begin and end their trips from that site. It’s quiet and not crowded, some of its buildings look like the real ones on campus and somehow  this seems to make them feel  “safe” there.

Here classes are shorter, 50 versus the 60 minutes I had gotten used to in the other university. Ten minutes  are a lot, especially when using in SL, where almost every time there is some technical glitch. I thus had  the feeling that my workshop was somehow rushed.

After my in-class workshop, just like last semester, I sent my students to different orientation islands to learn what I had had no time to teach them.  Remembering my Spring students’ comments on the orientation sims they visited, I wanted to re-check  Hyde Park Orientation in advance, before assigning it to a group of  students. I could not,  however, since the orientation area is now off limits for “older” avatars like Cvetka!

Banishing “older” avatars from orientation areas is a trend that Viki had already described last year after her visit on Pondessa, an Australian orientation island. The trend has spread, it seems. I do understand why the creators/owners of those sims took such decisions, but it is an inconvenience for teachers like me who want to see whether the information on those sims are useful or not. In the end, since I could not visit “Hyde Park” and since my previous students had described it as  a tedious sim, I decided not to use it this time.

I instead sent my students (in groups of twos or threes) to four different sims: NMC, Virtual Ability, Calendon Oxbridge,  and Dublin Virtually Live. The first two were orientation island I used last semester as well, the latter two were new. Like last semester, my students had to follow the whole orientation path, experiment with the new skills they had acquired and, finally, take a snapshot of themselves. The purpose of the last requirement is not to ask for  a proof that they have indeed completed the assignment, but a way to make them use the camera controls, the zoom option and to move around the virtual space more confidently.

I must confess, though, that I want them to be able to help me document our virtual journey. When I teach in SL I am always so busy that I regularly forget to take snapshots. Asking students to do it in my stead is a great compromise

After our workshop I  created a “ning” for my class: in the past I had used Blackboard t collect all materials related to SL. Blackboard has thowever he disadvantage of disappearing at the end of the semester, or at the end of a teaching contract, and I would like to keep not only the material that I develop for this class, but also the blogs of my students.  A ning was the best thing I could think of. A moodle might have been a possibility as well, but it would have  required more skills from me and right now I have my hands full with my new position.

So ning it is!