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!

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

Last October 5, I brought my students to SL to visit a 3D exhibit to celebrate the centennial of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto.  Before our visit, we read the Manifesto in class, discussed it, looked at some reproductions of futurist paintings (Giacomo Balla’s “Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio” was particularly appreciated by my students) and sculptures, and discussed how they represented  the tenets of the Manifesto.

The exhibit is at Experience Italy , but I am not sure for how long it will still be up, especially given the trend of sims that disappear into nothingness.  In the exhibition, some of the words and sentences of the Manifesto, in 3D, become part of the landscape that we had to cross. Key futurists words (speed, courage, etc.) were whirling around us while we were walking into the exhibition’s tunnel, other words shouted their imperative commands from above and all around us.

Unfortunately, the series of little trains that were supposed to  bring us throughout the exhibition did not work, so we had to walk. In the end, this proved to be better than riding the train, since we could stop at certain areas and discuss what we were seeing.

Because of scheduling conflicts, I had to bring two different groups of students to SL, the first in the morning and the second in the late afternoon. During the morning visit I  logged on from my office and discovered with my dismay that I could not use the mic from the Mac mini. So our whole interaction was in text (and I am a terrible typist, especially when I type quickly!) Luckily in the afternoon I was at my computer and could use voice without problems.

In the evening, two friends/colleagues joined me: Anna Begonia (who kindly also filmed the whole session) and Su Nacht. Both teach Italian at universities abroad, Anna in Spain, Su in Ireland. Anna and I attended MUVEnation together and she helped me last semester by being one of the native speakers that my students had to  interview.  At times, I attend her excellent classes of Italian in SL and I am always amazed by her creative ideas for those classes.

The trip was divided in three parts, after the first (the exhibit), we went to a different area of the same sim which hosts a gigantic 3D reproduction of Fortunato Depero’s “New York” (1930).  It was possible to walk into the painting (up to a certain point).

The last stop was at a virtual shop that sold futurist clothes. Of course, we bought none, but my students seem suddenly revitalized once we got there and they spent a while looking with interest at different clothes: I was a bit amazed by this, but I guess that fashion is still fashion, even when it’s virtual.

All in all it went well, even though  it was very tiring for me to lead two different groups over the same path on the same day. I basically repeated the same things both times of course, but the two groups reacted in different way. In the morning students were more talkative and participated much more. In the afternoon, I had the feeling that I was the one talking all the time, while they remained silent for most of the trip.  Was it because I did not use voice in the morning and students did not fell the pressure to understand my spoken words? Or maybe because the two groups included students with different personalities?