Cvetka's Blog

Giuliana Perco – Cvetka Nacht

After three consecutive semesters spent chaperoning my students into SL, I decided to take a break. No SL this semester. Why? Partly because of  the disappointment due to the extremely frustrating tech issues that my students and I experienced last semester. If I cannot rely on the fact that students have the technical possibility of using the interface, then all the efforts to make them appreciate SL is pointless.

Moreover, in order to have a useful and productive experience in SL, students need to invest a lot of time in it beyond actual class time. This is why I have always given my students homework to complete in SL, and, as much as possible, such homework was  linked with what we were doing in class.  Thus, before visiting the exhibit on futurism, we read the futurist manifesto in class and discussed it at length, for instance.

This was possible to do because the syllabus of those courses (intermediate language)  was somehow flexible. This semester, however, I am teaching a more advanced class, focused on social, historical, and cultural developments in Italy after WWII.  The textbook I chose (alas!) is more difficult that I had foreseen initially and there is a lot of material that we have to cover before the end of the semester.

None of the activities we did in SL in the past is appropriate to what my students are learning in this class and even the interviews with native speakers, unless they were closely related to the  course material, would have no real value this time.

Sure, I could find other activities and assignments, but this would require a lot of time and not knowing how reliable tech support is going to be, I really do not feel motivated enough to invest such amount of time and energy in a project that might turn into a problem, the way it did last semester.

But….I do not want to give up on SL. I had fun teaching through it,  I think that it is a great teaching and learning tool, and I certainly want to continue using it. Just not now.

I will use this break as a pause for reflection, for learning myself (for instance I want to improve my building skills and understand, finally and hopefully, the whole “snap-to-the-grid” technique, so that I can refine my Armilla and build other literary inspired scenes), and for planning future courses with a SL component.

I will thus still visit SL and participate in all fun and learning activities for myself, so that I will be better prepared next time I will use SL to teach.  For instance, at the moment I am learning a lot just observing Anna Begonia’s extremely creative cinematographic  role-playing project with her students. I even participated as an extra in a short snippet

So, from now on and for new few months, this blog will be about my experiences in SL as a learner, explorer, and (maybe) as an aspiring  builder…..well, that’s the plan, at least!