Cvetka's Blog

Giuliana Perco – Cvetka Nacht

Interviews with native speakers were among the most successful assignments I had my students do last semester. Therefore, naturally, I decided to repeat the experience this semester as well. Indeed,  it was precisely the success of this assignment last semester that pushed me to continue using SL in my language classes despite  the intense time commitment and all the other drawbacks.

Due to the technical difficulties we had had, though, the schedule for the interviews was much tighter that I had anticipated. Last semester I gave students a few weeks to prepare, to contact their interviewees, to conduct the interview, and to write about it. This time everything had to be much faster, since once we finally could go back to SL as a class, the semester was quickly coming to an end.

Alaine talking to Anna Begonia in Edunation

The interviews went smoothly, except in two cases: in the first, a student misunderstood the SLT time and did not show up to the appointment with her interviewee and her classmate, so a second appointment and a second interview was necessary (thanks a lot again to Anna Begonia, who was so patient to answer to more or less the same questions twice!).

Alessia and SarahElizabeth’s little robot interviewing Lisa Tebaldi

Margherita and Leah interviewing Ideag Destiny at Bryn Mawr Campus sim

In the second case, the interviewee had some technical issue and could not log to SL at the time appointed; unfortunately, since this happened right before the Thanksgiving holiday, that group of students had to postpone the interview for a week and then rush to prepare the final presentation, since this time interviews with native speakers were indeed essential to the presentations.

Why? Well, the technical difficulties of the previous weeks  had caused  my students to miss one full month of SL training and of in-world tasks and trips. As a result, they could not develop the basic (and extremely useful) technical skills my previous students had used during their presentations (for instance, creating and distributing a notecard with landmarks in it, using a slide projector, etc.) Hence,  I had to simplify the terms for the final presentation. For instance, I could not ask students to explore SL on their own following their personal interests, I could not ask them to research how certain topics (science, sports, human rights, art, etc. ) were presented in SL, and so on. There was no time for any of this!

At the same time, I did not want to go back to the simple in-world “role-playing” from the previous year, when I was still trying to understand what the elements of good/effective  SL assignments were.  Several of the “role-playing” my first guinea-pig students created were choppy, sloppy, and not very interesting. More than anything, they were scenes/dialogues that could have very easily be enacted in class, we did not need SL for them, quite the opposite.

I thus decided to exploit the knowledge about SL that the kind people who had accepted to be interviewed by my students could share. After having given a series of guidelines to my students on how to conduct their interviews, I therefore also instructed them, among other things, to ask for three places in SL that their interviewees would recommend. Students then had to thoroughly visit those sims, assess them, choose which one to show  during the two-hour long presentation session, and finally prepare a tour to that sim for the rest of the class.

Predictably, a couple of interviewees suggested sims that we had already visited (Assisi, for instance) or that, alas, did not exist any longer (Virtual Verona), but each group luckily managed to have at least one “new” sim to which the rest of us could be brought. Not all of the places we visited were “Italian”, nor related to Italy, but that was perfectly fine.

In the end, despite all my worries and the rush, the presentations went well enough.  We managed to fit all the presentations in another long two-hour session the day after the official end of the semester (but before the final exam). We visited a variety of sims, from Antique Rome to  the 3D reproduction of the core of a volcano in (appropriately so) Vulcano, to a beach with an attached underwater area full of fish at Imparafacile.

Kathleen and the Lion in Ancient Rome

Unfortunately, technology again played its tricks and I had tremendous lag during the whole session. I got lost in Ancient Rome and could only follow what my students were saying thanks to the group chat. I actually did not even notice that snow covered “Rome” until I saw my students’ snapshots: on my screen everything was grayish and I could not see many details.

Our last stop was my choice and had nothing whatsoever to do with Italian, it was just a fun place I wanted to show my students: Greenies. They seemed to like it, especially the black cat … at least, so they said in their final blog!

At Greenies

The last SL assignment that my students had for the semester was a  short composition about their SL experience and the class presentations. The composition was part of their final exam: they had to use the past tenses correctly in it.

I have mixed feelings about my SL teaching experience this semester, for many different reasons, but I am too tired to write about them  now: maybe in a couple of days…..