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…..

Giuliana Perco – Cvetka Nacht

Two more virtual trips.  On a Sunday. Each over 90 minutes long. With two different groups of students. I was *so* tired afterwards!

I wanted to make up for the time lost, at least in terms of the virtual trips to SL sims I wanted my students to see.  So I brought them to San Francesco’s Basilica in virtual Assisi, to Vassar College’s virtual Sistine Chapel, and, finally, to something completely different, but still  related to art: the exhibit “Ecce femina” created by Lisa Tebaldi.

Whenever I have brought students to   SL,   both Assisi Basilica and Vassar’s Sistine Chapel have been  sure hits. Whether students  have or have not visited either place in RL, they are aware of their existence,  some might have seen pictures of the frescoes.  Sometimes, they have even visited the real churches in the past and can make comparisons. This time was no different. With the exception of one student who hated SL even before creating an account, and who still hates it and considers all activities there as a waste of time, students  of both groups liked both sims, and how couldn’t they?

While looking at Giotto’s paintings, we talked a little about San Francesco. Most of the students knew who he was, one even told everybody the story of the  Gubbio’s wolf  (though the sequence of the events was a bit confused),  but none knew that San Francesco’s “Cantico delle creature” is the first documented example of poetry in Italian. Therefore, we read the poem  in class two days later and discussed a bit about its meaning and of how the language changed since the Middle Ages.

After wandering  through the lower Basilica, climbing down to the crypt, then up to the upper Basilica and finally happily flying for a close up of Michelangelo’s “Giudizio universale”, it was time for the last leg of our trip.

Finally, we went to  Geo island to visit “Ecce femina”.  I did not tell students anything about the exhibit beforehand, but, once there, I let them walk around on their own through the three floors of the exhibit.

Unfortunately, there was a strange, repetitive, and disquieting music (like a lullaby) in the background and after a little while the students began to complain, turning off the streaming media did not help, so I had to tell them to turn off the volume. The music went away, but that also meant that we could not talk in voice!  I was a bit puzzled, the music had not been there when I had visited the island before….

When I came back to the island with the second group of students, the same thing happened, but luckily I managed to find the source of  the music (a revolving heart shaped sculpture: if touched, it could begin to play) and was able to turn it off.

A view of “Ecce femina” through SarahElizabeth’s avatar’s perspective.
SarahElizabeth has the absolutely cutest avatar of the whole group 

What is “Ecce femina”? It’s an exhibit comprising pictures, texts,  and prim sculptures focusing on the representation of the woman across the centuries and in different media; it also photographs the still current and sad situation of many women around the world.

After the visit, as homework, my students had to come back to the exhibit, peruse it better (we were at the very end of our time in SL when we got there, in both trips) and write a blog about their thoughts on it.

PS: I’m getting sloppy in my class descriptions, but I am also very tired. Teaching in SL has really been a chore this semester, nothing to do with the fun I had  during the previous term. I am seriously thinking that it might be better for me not to pursue teaching in SL  next semester, given the amount of work it requires and the already huge teaching duties in RL that I have lined up.  The problem is that if I do not use SL in the spring, I will have to wait till January 2011 to get back to it with a class and it might be way too long…..

Giuliana Perco – Cvetka Nacht

After our class explorations of the exhibit on Futurism, I wanted my students to see other ways in which art is present in SL. Since they seemed to enjoy entering  the 3D Depero’s painting, I sent them to visit a fantastic art gallery that collects 3D versions of famous paintings: Primtings.

Their task was to visit the Primtings virtual museum and discuss it in their blogs. Additionally, they had to re-think to their reading of the futurist Manifesto in view of their visit to the exhibit. Also for this they had to write a blog entry.

Unfortunately, one of the pitfalls of using a virtual environment, or, for that matter, any “cutting-edge” technology, is that the “cutting edge” in question sometimes is so sharp that it creates issues that might become impossible to bypass…..

At the beginning of October, a new and absolutely required update of the Second Life viewer was issued. It was impossible to log on to SL without the new viewer.  “Well, what’s the problem?” One might think: downloading the viewer and updating the computer takes just a few minutes….. Right, it does…on YOUR own computer.

At least half of my students log on to SL via the campus computer lab and only the technicians who take care of the software on those computer are authorized to install updates for any software. It took them over three weeks to do so and in the meantime I could not give my students more assignments, could not plan other “field trips”. For a month we were stuck.I got very angry with the technicians, who, aside from not updating the software, did not communicate with me at all.

When the update was finally installed, I could not possibly continue with the lessons in SL as I had planned, but had to change our meetings in-world and, above all, the assignments in/on SL since my students could not practice all the skills necessary to create a creative presentations like my students in the Spring.