Giuliana Perco

Class presentations are a crucial part of any language course, since they offer the students the opportunity to present a topic that interests them and to do so by using the foreign language that they are studying.  Very often, such presentations take the form of Powerpoint slide-shows about some cultural aspect of the country where the target language is spoken; some other times they might be creative role-playing scenes of various nature.

In the first case, after  a couple of semesters, for many language teachers this translates in viewing over and over (and over!) the same presentation on the same trite and popular topics. For instance, Italian teachers are subjected to endless blurring presentations on Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, food, opera, and so on. Sometimes they cringe, when for instance students translate into Italian terms that were not supposed to be translated at all (“Signora Farfalla” for “Madame Butterfly”, for instance: I’m not making this up, it really happened in one of my classes).

Personally, I prefer the second kind of class presentations, in which students are asked to use their creativity, rather than being forced to pass inconsequential information that they copied from wikipedia to their peers, who, on the other hand, get extremely bored watching such presentations.

I did not want my students to be bored, moreover, I did not want them to waste time looking up superficial details about some great Italian person from the past just to regurgitate it later in bad Italian. Instead, I wanted them to have fun, to discover new things, to play with the language, and to learn from their work.  I also wanted them to use SL. Of course, this also meant that  their presentations involved a lot of work on their part (!)

Because of this, I wanted to help them to accomplish their task from the technological point of view. The guidelines for the presentation that I prepared were very specific, but let students quite free in their choice of topic, provided that it had something to do with the idea of virtual environments. The presentation was also broken down into several smaller tasks, so that I could follow their work step by step and help them, in case of need.

The first step was of course choosing a topic. In the guidelines, I had given them some ideas, but I had also told them that those were only tips and that they could choose something else.

After choosing their topics, my students had to write an annotated outline of their project, which I read and approved while giving suggestions on how to structure the final presentation.  A couple of weeks later, they had to turn in a “script” for their presentation, so that I had a better idea of what they were doing and could correct the grammar and give tips on the vocabulary to use.  The last thing they had to do before the actual presentation was to write a notecard  briefly introducing their presentation in Italian and giving landmarks to places that we would all be visiting during the presentation itself.

In the end, the big days arrived. Actually, I ended up postponing the presentations to the very last possible moment, in order to give students more time to complete the task. Two students decided to go first and to present during the last Friday class, the rest presented on Sunday night, when we met in SL for a very long session (a bit over two straight hours).

Among my initial tips for the presentation, I had suggested “virtual tourism”: with this I meant a “trip” to a sim that had something to do with some part of Italian culture and/or history. The two  students who decided to present on Friday had been impressed by the virtual Sistine Chapel and decided to focus their presentation on it, talking also about the significance that, in their opinion, the virtual reconstruction in SL had for a student of Italian. They presentation was interesting and engaging and had all our avatars flying up   towards the ceiling of the Chapel at one point or another. They also had found interesting information on the virtual replica made at Vassar College sim.

Gabi’s and Meghan’s notecard on the virtual Sistine Chapel

On Sunday, we had a tour de force session and listened to/watched  three very different and equally interesting presentations. The first was also the longest. Chiara and Isabella initially wanted to make a series of interviews to native speakers in the Florence sim. When I told them that every time I had visited the area  I had only met Spanish speaking avatars, they were very disappointed, but I was thrilled by their idea: they wanted to interview a series of Italian avatars for their presentation; this meant that my assignment on interviews with native speakers had been even better received than I had thought.

In the end, they decided to re-visit Siena, one of the very first sim we had visited together. I suggested to them to look up the story of the Palio, to compare the virtual Siena with pictures of the real one, and so on. What they did was a bit different, but it made me very proud. I guess that, emboldened by their positive experience when interviewing Italian avatars for the previous assignment, once they got on the Siena sim, they basically  began to talk in Italian to the avatars they met. In this way, they  encountered a community of Italian avatars who role-play in Siena. I am not into role-playing myself and I am therefore very ignorant in this respect, but I was soon to learn quite a bit about it.

Chiara and Isabella politely asked permission to bring our group to virtual Siena for their presentation to the owners of the sim. The group owning the virtual land uses it to role play and all of  its members were very extremely kind to us. Not only did they welcome us to their sim, but, after the presentation, they brought us to a long tour of the sim, explaining their  role-playing activity. The tour was perhaps a bit too long and involved also climbings spiral staircases and running through winding tunnels (I have always had huge difficulties moving in restricted spaces in SL), but what thrilled me was the ability that  my students had shown in making friendship with Italian native speakers by using the voice chatand speaking only in Italian.  I was proud of them!

The other two students both decided to work on their presentation individually and not with a classmate. They also decided to put their own personal interests/passions at the centre of their presentation in SL.  Thus Karl, led by his passion for soccer,  set on a quest for a virtual soccer stadium in SL. He eventually managed not only to find one, but also to speak with the owner of the land, a soccer fan herself. His presentation  was on the culture of soccer in SL, which, to my surprise,  turned out to be quite interesting.

Snapshots above are courtesy of Karl Mavinelli

The final presentation was different. Colomba  first explored and then brought us to islands focusing on science, especially medicine, biology and geology, fields in which he was interested. He found them all by himself, without my help, I should add. They were all extremely fascinating. Moreover,  his presentation was engaged and enthusiastic, especially when he brought us to visit a virtual eco-biological experiment at Second Nature 3 and an “astrobiologic” sim at Living in the Universe. Both were excellent sites that, however, unfortunately do not exist any longer!

“Home of the Eco” sim – Snapshots courtesy of Chiara Giordano

All in all, this time I did not get bored for even a second listening to my students’ presentations. On the contrary,  I sincerely enjoyed all the presentations developed by my students at all their stages.  I enjoyed watching they plan their projects step by step;  I enjoyed even more to see those project take shape in SL little by little. I enjoyed to observe the dedication with which my students, each in his or her way, shaped their work and, more than once during the long process, I felt proud of their work and of their linguistic achievements.

My students  worked a lot before and during their presentations, they learned new things and, since they had to use the voice chat, they all got to speak  in Italian for a considerable amount of time, both while delivering their presentations and during the Q&A sessions after each individual presentation.

Though it was by no means an easy assignment I suspect that in the end  they also had fun, at least, I hope so… I did!

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On the first day of the presentations, we met in SL and since only one group was presenting, we finished earlier and had some extra time (over half hour, actually) .  At the end of their presentation on the Sistine Chapel in SL, my students had mentioned also other “educational” sims, and, among them, Foul Whisperings Strange Matters (Macbeth 48, 50, 54). I thus decided to take advantage of the extra time and to go there together, to show them the sim and to discuss with them their reactions and their opinions on what could be done in SL educationally, beside improving one’s foreign language’s skills by speaking with native speakers.

I had not planned the visit and my decision to go to the sim with my students was taken on the spur of the moment. This meant that I did not really remember all the paths to follow on the sim in order to avoid getting lost (we had a limited amount of time for our visit). After  getting a bit lost initially and trying not to make it too evident to my students, I finally remembered how to reach the throne room. There were issues with one student who could not teleport there for a while, but in the end all seemed interested by the whole set up of the room, by the “ghosts”, the voices, everything.

Something odd and embarrassing happened a bit later, when we entered the “Chamber of blood”. All of a sudden I lost control of my avatar, who extracted a dagger and began fighting the ghosts of the witches. I was surprised and my students were perplexed as well and kept asking me in chat what  had happened. I had no idea, but felt terribly embarrassed. I could not stop my avatar, I had absolutely no control over it. In the end, one of my students came to my rescue by teleporting me somewhere else on the sim.

A couple of minutes later, though, when we entered the last room of the labyrinth, my avatar literally lost her head, which fell on her back as if it had been a hood. It was disquieting, since the previous times I had visited the sim I had not had this experience and because my avatar was the only one to be affected. Only after the class was over did I remember that, on a previous visit to the sim, I had put on a HUD received when I entered the land. It was obviously the HUD that added those animations to my avatar.

Morale: it might be dangerous to bring students to visit a complex sim like Foul Whispering  Strange Matters without previous very careful and thorough preparation…….

Overall, strange animations aside, my students were extremely positively impressed by the sim (probably also because they all knew Shakespeare’s Macbeth) and a couple of them said that they would have come back again when they would have had more time . I explained to them that I wanted to do something similar (albeit much more simple) with an Italian text. I am not sure what they thought of their teacher at this point, though a couple agreed that it would be a very good idea.

So now my very challenging task/creative project is to create another example of “immersive literature” after Armilla! I think that I will continue to look for inspiration in Calvino’s Invisible Cities also for my next attempt at creating an immersive literary scene.

Giuliana Perco

When I told my students that I wanted them to interview native speakers in SL, I saw their eyes filling with horror. They were so shocked that they did not have the courage to say anything at all at first. When I explained  that I would find the native speakers myself , so that they did not have to stop random avatars in SL to chit chat with them, some of them relaxed a little bit, but I could tell that they all were quite worried.

Differently from the previous semester (Fall 2008), when Misy Ferraris very kindly invited me and offered hospitality to my students at her very well organized in-world Italian classes, this time my  students had not had the opportunity to meet or interact with any Italian native speaker in SL, or, really, with any other avatar, except their classmates, myself, and the school IT specialist, Amy. Chatting with a stranger, even in a virtual environment, can be tough, I knew it very well myself.

I didn’t want to add a burden of anxiety to my students’ already difficult task of speaking in Italian in SL with a native speaker, so I approached several Italians I had met in different occasions in SL. I tried to choose people who were close to my students because of their interests and/or their age.  Luckily, the people I picked were all incredibly nice and immediately accepted to be interviewed by my students. I am immensely grateful to all of them for their patience and availability. A heartfelt “thank you“ to  Anna Begonia, Tiziana  and Ideag.

What were the guidelines I gave to my students for this assignment? Well, this was an intermediate class, so finding out the name, age, or profession of the interviewees was not enough.  The interview had to last at least 30 minutes, the students had to ask engaging and “professional” questions, as if they were journalists, and they had to either turn in the printed chat-log of their conversation, or to write a summary of the interview in case they used voice chat.

I allowed them over two weeks of time in which students had to contact their interviewees, set an appointment, interview them and, in case, write a report. Of course, I also requested snapshots of the meeting.

Since I believe that SL assignments must always be somehow linked to what we do in RL classes and not detached from class activities, during this time we devoted some RL class time to prepare for the interviews. We first read one or two RL interviews about different topics. Then, students created sets of interview questions that one might ask to different kinds of people (a musician, an athlete, a businessman, etc.), so that they felt that they had some material to fall back to in case they felt lost during the interview.  All the questions were created by the students with minimal help from their instructor (me): I basically encouraged them to ask complex questions and suggested a couple of possible topics.

Isabella (centre) with Anna Begonia (upper left) and two of Anna’s friends

If my students were worried about this assignment, I was also a bit anxious.  I was afraid that this experience would turn them away from SL for good and that they would then hate me for having forced them to go through it.  I shouldn’t have worried too much, though, since this proved to be by far the most successful in-world task I had ever concocted.

To begin with, I was surprised and delighted that two students decided to use voice chat for their interviews (I had given them the choice to use text or voice chat). They both seemed to find it more immediate and less boring than typing: this is true, of course, but it also requires listening skills, it’s not easy to use voice chat in a foreign language!

Later, when I began receiving their post-interview reports, I noticed that the shortest interview had lasted about 3/4 hour (I had asked for 30 minutes) and that the longest one was over 1 hour and 1/4. The quality of their questions was also good and it resembled a real conversation that two people might have, rather than those sequences of dull questions and answers that students often produce in a language class.

I discovered that Isabella, who had to interview Anna, had also met two of Anna’s friends and had conversed with them as well (all in Italian, of course).

Finally, Karl, who, due to different time zones,  could not make an appointment with the person he was supposed to interview, went ahead and  found another Italian native speaker…he did so completely independently.

Gabi (right) and Elisa (left)  interviewing Tiziana (centre)

I felt very proud. I felt even better when, in the students’ blogs, I read how they thought that the interview was the best activity they had been assigned during the semester, how they enjoyed it and how they thought they had learned a lot while preparing it, doing it, and writing about it.

Of course, this is an activity that I will certainly reuse also in the future! How could I do otherwise? The only drawback is that I will have to find other native speakers willing to play the game…I cannot bother the same avatars over and over, I’m afraid…..