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!

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…..

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…..

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.

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?

Last semester I asked my students to read an article on the New York Times discussing 3D art works in SL. Therefore, I also asked them to watch a video by Robbie Dingo (SL name) of his 3D reconstruction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in SL. The video turned out to be quite popular among my students last Spring, so I decided to re-use the assignment also this semester, though it was not really linked to any actual field trip to SL and even less to Italian.

Since I wanted to focus on 3D immersive art works in SL this semester, I decided to add two other videos to the assignment: AM Radio’s The Far Away and  Bogon Flux . I then asked students to visit Dreamworld (the only one of the three 3D installations still available in SL) and then to write a blog about their thoughts on the article, the videos, and their visit.

What is the purpose of this assignment in a language class? Basically, it’s just a preparation to the first “field trip” to the 3D exhibition to celebrate the 100 years since the publication of the Futurist Manifesto. A quite interesting exhibit indeed.

It’s also a preparation in what, it seems, will be the theme of this semester: art in a virtual world. I had to find other sources for content, since last semester’s sims have disappeared and art seems a good topic. 

I changed job over the summer. I left the university in the south, where I worked   for two years, and began teaching at a small liberal arts college in the north east.

Everything is new and at times confusing: new job,  new  town, new climate (colder), new colleagues. Adapting to  the new environment and  learning basic things, like where to find edible bread (still have to find  such a place) or how to get from one building to the next, is still a challenge.

Despite all the new things, I hoped that, at least, for my intermediate course, I could re-use or recycle the lesson plans that I created for my classes in SL. No such luck. As reported earlier, several “Italian” sims have disappeared over the past few months, taking with them all the assignments  I had created around them. Sigh! This means that  I’ve to begin from scratch once more, of course.

An additional difficulty is the size of my intermediate class: ten students, not really the crowd of 14 I had last year, during my very first teaching experiment in SL, but still, a big group, especially since a couple of them are really resisting the idea of language instruction through SL. They they perceive  it  as boring and/or scary and, so far, I haven’t been able to make them change their minds.

The first encounter with SL, just like the previous semesters, was during an in-class workshop, led by me with the assistance of the Director of the Language Learning Center at the college.  I taught students the very basic skills they need to master in order to function in SL. Moving around, communicating, interaction, ecc. Moreover, this time I managed to have a “safe place” fin SL or my students, i.e. the college’s virtual sim. We ended our orientation there and, after over a month of virtual explorations, I know from their blogs that my students usually begin and end their trips from that site. It’s quiet and not crowded, some of its buildings look like the real ones on campus and somehow  this seems to make them feel  “safe” there.

Here classes are shorter, 50 versus the 60 minutes I had gotten used to in the other university. Ten minutes  are a lot, especially when using in SL, where almost every time there is some technical glitch. I thus had  the feeling that my workshop was somehow rushed.

After my in-class workshop, just like last semester, I sent my students to different orientation islands to learn what I had had no time to teach them.  Remembering my Spring students’ comments on the orientation sims they visited, I wanted to re-check  Hyde Park Orientation in advance, before assigning it to a group of  students. I could not,  however, since the orientation area is now off limits for “older” avatars like Cvetka!

Banishing “older” avatars from orientation areas is a trend that Viki had already described last year after her visit on Pondessa, an Australian orientation island. The trend has spread, it seems. I do understand why the creators/owners of those sims took such decisions, but it is an inconvenience for teachers like me who want to see whether the information on those sims are useful or not. In the end, since I could not visit “Hyde Park” and since my previous students had described it as  a tedious sim, I decided not to use it this time.

I instead sent my students (in groups of twos or threes) to four different sims: NMC, Virtual Ability, Calendon Oxbridge,  and Dublin Virtually Live. The first two were orientation island I used last semester as well, the latter two were new. Like last semester, my students had to follow the whole orientation path, experiment with the new skills they had acquired and, finally, take a snapshot of themselves. The purpose of the last requirement is not to ask for  a proof that they have indeed completed the assignment, but a way to make them use the camera controls, the zoom option and to move around the virtual space more confidently.

I must confess, though, that I want them to be able to help me document our virtual journey. When I teach in SL I am always so busy that I regularly forget to take snapshots. Asking students to do it in my stead is a great compromise

After our workshop I  created a “ning” for my class: in the past I had used Blackboard t collect all materials related to SL. Blackboard has thowever he disadvantage of disappearing at the end of the semester, or at the end of a teaching contract, and I would like to keep not only the material that I develop for this class, but also the blogs of my students.  A ning was the best thing I could think of. A moodle might have been a possibility as well, but it would have  required more skills from me and right now I have my hands full with my new position.

So ning it is! 

This post is not about my students, at least, not directly. It’s about me and my first RL conference presentation about my work in SL. But first a short preamble…..

My students’ presentations were their last “in-world” task; after all, we only had two days of class left at that point. They still had to write their final blog post (in Italian, of course) documenting and reflecting on their experience in SL, though. I told them that what interested me was to know their actual experiences while learning/practicing a foreign language in a virtual environment and that they could be also completely negative. I confess that I  was worried when I went to read the blogs, but they were all positive, the two main complains were about technical issues and the fact that using SL is extremely time-consuming and I can subscribe to both. Other than this, they enjoyed the experience (or so they wrote…)

I want to think that it is true, especially since a few days later I presented the results of my teaching experience (including all the data that I gathered from their blog posts) at a day-long “showcase” organized by  my university (or so it was then, I’ve changed institution since the showcase) about faculty teaching projects involving the use of various Web 2.0 technologies.

When I was invited to present at the CIT (Center for Instructional Technology) annual showcase I felt immediately flattered. Yes, true, many of those who got a grant from the CIT to develop  teaching strategies involving technology are invited to the showcase, but I felt extremely honored because I had been invited to the morning presentations. Differently from the afternoon ones, which only last 20 minutes, the morning presentations are 40 minutes long and, at least from what I had seen the previous year, they are usually the most interesting ones.

I therefore felt honored that the CIT thought that my work in SL was deserving a special place at the showcase. I was, of course,  also extremely nervous precisely because I was afraid that I would not be  be up to the occasion.

In my mind, I worked on this presentation for months, changing idea every couple of days.

In the end, I think that my best idea  was that of asking my students to be part of the presentation. To my surprise, they immediately agreed, even if, when I asked them, I had no idea of how I wanted them to participate. Incredibly, also a couple of students from the previous semester (my poor first guinea pigs in SL), immediately accepted to participate to my presentation, when I accidentally ran into them and told them about the showcase. I did not contact them again, but I was touched that they were willing to help me.

Initially I had envisioned my students coming to the actual presentation to give their own point of view on the experience and to answer questions from the audience. Then, while talking with them, I realized that there was no point having them to participate in RL, that we could give  a live demo of SL to the audience.  So, while one student actually came to the presentation, the others patiently waited for me in SL, on my MUVEnation platform, so that, once I finished the actual presentation, I connected with them and brought them on the huge presentation screen behind me. Of course, there were technical glitches! But we survived.

I must say that I was immensely moved by the willingness to help me that my students showed. Coming to the presentation, answering to the audience’s questions while in SL was not a task linked with class requirements, they were not getting bonus point for this;  it was something that they did because they felt like doing, for me. Not only that: the day before the presentation they even invited me to lunch at the Faculty Commons on campus and reassured me that everything would go well at the showcase. In itself, this relationship of trust and collaboration that we had built together, thanks also to our shared SL experience, was the best reward that I could ever had.  Actually, it was the best reward I could have ever imagined.

I know that only one of my students went back to SL after my presentation and even so, he only went there just a couple of times more.  They might not visit SL ever again, not even to find an Italian native speaker with whom to talk. Still, they worked a lot during the semester,  they learned a lot as well, and they also gave me a lot.

I hope that our SL journey was, for them at least half as good as it was for me. I enjoyed it a lot and I miss them all!

PS: by the way, my presentation was apparently a success, I do not really know, I was too nervous to be able to tell, but if it was, the merit was also my students’.  If anybody is interested, a PDF of my presentation (no audio, sorry!) is available here: http://tinyurl.com/pef329

A couple of weeks later, I gave a slightly different presentation at the annual AAIS (American Association for Italian Studies)  conference in New York, though, unfortunately, I had not my students’ back-up there.  

fine

fine

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!

***********———-

———-

Today, Monday September 7th, while preparing for an intro workshop on SL for my new students, I discovered that several of the sims and/or lands that I had used during the past two semesters for my classes do not exist any longer. In January I was already distressed by the disappearance of “Ecopolis” which, during the previous semester, had offered a “virtual base” for my students.

But now many other lands have dissolved into nothingness:  the OIPA site,  Venice,  Piazza del Campo in virtual Siena (only the Duomo and the role-playing section of the sim still exist), Sicily, part of Rome, even Lipari!

Aside from being very sorry, sad, and upset for their disappearance, now I am also worried for my workshop…where will I bring my students  in just two days?

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.

]]> http://cvetka.edublogs.org/2009/09/07/inverness/feed/ 0 http://cvetka.edublogs.org/2009/07/23/interviews/ http://cvetka.edublogs.org/2009/07/23/interviews/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:00:44 +0000 cvetka http://cvetka.edublogs.org/?p=33 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…..

Giuliana Perco

One of the challenging tasks of Module 2 was to create an educational scene in SL and to “pack it” using either the spiffy Holodeck that we got from Loki Clifton, or the Builder’s Buddy scripts. I was all set to use the Holodeck, especially after the enlightening workshop that Paz gave us on the topic. After all, I knew how Builder’s Buddy worked….I had even given a hands-on workshop on it!  It was time to try something new.

This activity immediately posed a big problem, though: for a while it was hard  to think of a scene I wanted to build. I did not want to create the usual classroom scene, also because (as one of my students put it in her blog on her SL experience) if we are going to go to SL just to sit in a replica of a classroom, we might as well meet face to face and avoid all technical problems. I also did not want to rely too much on educational tools, like presenters, HUDs, and so on, I wanted the scene to be “mine”, so to speak.

In the end, I luckily came up with an idea that I really liked and for the past month I have been working hard trying to create a scene that would be related to the Second Life teaching typology in which I am interested, that is “immersive literature”.

In other words, I had the ambitious idea of creating a scene related to a work of literature, a 3D scene that could be “immersive” in the sense that people could walk into it and (perhaps) interact with it. Since the previous examples of “immersive literature” were quite impressive and elaborate and did not limit themselves to a single scene, but often included a whole sim, at the beginning the task was daunting. An additional issue was also to find a literary work that could be suited to SL, that was simple enough for me to follow while creating my scene with my scarce building skills and without a mouse (!), and that could be interesting.

My first and very ambitious idea was to build a virtual 3D version of the labyrinthic library of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa). However, aside from the fact that I would have needed a really huge space to re-create the library, I doubt that I could have done it in time and without using 5000 and more prims. So I eventually thought about Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) in which several impossible and imaginary cities are described in detail through individual, short chapters.  These stories are told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, who wants to know what Marco Polo saw during his long journey to China. Since the chapters of the book are not only narrative, but also very descriptive, I thought that I could perhaps find a city that would work for me. Easier said than done.

Building most of those cities would have required skills that I do not possess and an imagination/creativity that would surpass mine. Several cities required some movement, others were descriptions of ideas and not of physical places. It was hard.  In the end, I chose “Armilla”. What is Armilla?  This is how Calvino’s Marco Polo begins to describe it:

“Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.” (trans. by William Weaver)

Armilla seemed almost perfect for my purpose, so I began working on it, enthusiastically beginning with lots of shiny and skinny cylinders that I would then convert into pipes.  Creating a three-dimensional network of pipes is not that easy in SL. For instance, I wanted all the pipes to look different, some rusty, some new and shiny, some moldy. That required a lot of time choosing and adapting textures. Also, the pipes had to be different in width, length, height. Some of them had to be curved.

I also needed faucets, taps, showers, a bathtub, etc.  I managed to make a realistic shower-head, a pretty good bathtub and sink, an acceptable boiler and a heating unit. But I must confess that the super detailed and almost perfect faucets and spouts in Armilla are not mine, but they are Alpha Lorgsval’s creations: he generously gave me one and I modified it a bit in colour and texture, but the structure is his and his only! Thanks a lot Alpha!!!!

Alas, I tried to use the “snap to the grid” trick that Paz taught us to align my pipes perfectly, but I could not do it, so actually some of my pipes are a bit skewed, I am afraid. In any case, since this was my first attempt, I must say that I am pretty proud of the result.  The free particles scripts for dripping water and water sprays that I got at the “Particle Lab” and modified to suit my purposes were particularly helpful and improved the whole structure a lot.

Once the structure was finished, the real problems arose when I had to put it all into the holodeck. First, I had to insert the holodeck script into all the many, many pieces of virtual plumbing, then I had to insert them into the holodeck.  In other words, quite a time-consuming task.  Second, and most problematic, initially the holodeck was not positioned correctly relatively to the pipe structure (my fault) and so when I created the new crate, only a portion of the construction was recorded. I managed to correct this. But when I tried to place the scene in the holodeck again….. pooof, my whole city disappeared!!!

Unfortunately, though I had saved each single piece in my inventory, I had not recorded their individual positions, so basically what I had was a bunch of scattered 3D puzzle pieces that had to be put together again.

I was very sad

I rebuilt Armilla with a lot of effort: initially I wanted to make it exactly the way it was before, but in the end it was easier to change it a little, so now it looks a bit different from the first version. When the time came  to put the scene into the holodeck again, I stopped though: could I risk it? I had recorded the position of each piece this time, true, but still… if the whole thing disappeared once more, it would have meant a lot of work for me again……

So….instead of the holodeck, I decided to rely on my dear Builder’s Buddy and….it worked

You can visit Armilla on my MUVEnation platform. Next to my SL version of Armilla there is  a very tall board with the initial paragraph of the story in both English and Italian: by clicking on it, one gets a notecard with the whole story, in both languages.

PS: The absolutely best example of immersive literature that I know is called Foul Whisperings Strange Matters (Macbeth 48, 50, 54): as the sim’s name indicates, it’s about William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and it’s  really a great experience to walk into it.

Webheads in Action Online Convergence 2009

Saturday May 23rd 2009 – 2:00am SLT
LLL3D island
Creating A Flexible Learning Environment with Builder’s Buddy

The Webheads in Action Online Convergence 2009 (WiAOC) ran from May 22 to May 24.
Due to the positive outcome of our presentation at the VWBPE conference a couple of months earlier, our group decided to present its hands-on workshop on Builder’s Buddy again. After all, we thought, everything  was already prepared: it was just a question of rehearsing things a bit.

Well, not exactly.

The first glitch was not technical, but related to the fact that we all had been very busy and did not manage to agree on a date and time for the presentation. When we finally did, the slot we had painfully selected had already been taken, alas.  The only other time still available was on Saturday at 2:00am SLT, which was 4:00am for jennifer and 5:00am for me. Marga and Jaime could sleep more, yes, but the workshop also came in the middle of their morning, causing problems. But, it was the only available time and we took it.

Jaime quickly fixed the few technical gliches that we discovered when we began to rehearse. So everything seemed fine when RL interfered and at the last moment Jennifer could not participate. Jennifer had been our spokesperson at the previous workshop: she had used voice chat and the Speakeasy HUD to deliver the workshop, she had also managed the slides on the Metapresenter, while Jaime and I helped on the side. Her absence was a disaster, especially for me, who had to take her place and deliver the presentation.

I am quite shy and do not really like to use the voice chat, but there was no other choice.  Voice chat was not the most serious problem, as I will soon discover. Making work both the Metapresenter and the Speakeasy HUD was. For some reason, they both wanted to attach themselves on the same corner of the screen and there was only space for one HUD: they mutually excluded each other. Jaime and I tried for a couple of hours to make them work, I tried to use another slide presenter but it did not work well. Eventually, after literally hours of messing up with the two HUDs, Jaime found a solution… he always does : )

I got up and was in front of my screen at 3:00am on Saturday. I was very nervous. Marga and Jaime were already working, I was sleepy, confused and worried. We spent the last two hours reviewing the text of the presentation. When the time arrived, I didn’t feel ready, my back ached, I was tired, grumpy, and I secretly hoped that nobody would come….but they did!

To my surprise, I found that using voice was not so bad. I was not as organized as Jennifer had been, I basically improvised and I know that I gave too much time to some participants who did not have enough building skills to follow. I felt responsible, since we forgot to post in our workshop announcement in the wiki that the workshop was not for beginners. I am afraid, though , that the rest of the participants got bored (though I have to say that the most impatient participants, those who asked “what next?” were those who had more problems following the workshop…very strange!).

Thankfully, most of the people managed to create the picnic scene. I was literally crossing my fingers when the moment to build the scene came. And then, Jaime’s computer crashed and he was not online any longer. It was almost the end, but I panicked.  Jaime’s presence reassured me enormously: I knew that he would solve any possible technical problem we might have encountered, but now I was on my own.  In a way, then, it was a relief that people were asking me questions in the end, so the last part of the workshop passed quickly and finally it was really over.

All in all, it was not the disaster I had feared, true, but I know I could have done much better….

….

Quite strangely for North Carolina, it snowed on March 2nd.

Even more strangely, since it was just a snowfall and not a snowstorm, the University decided to cancel classes (something it did not do several weeks before, on January 20th, when there had been much more snow…)

Anyway, my students and I had already decided to meet in SL for that class, so, in theory, there should not have been problems. “In theory”: right, because in reality a couple of students used the lab computers to log on to SL and not their own and they had to walk into the snow to do so.  In the end, we ended up having two SL classes, each with just three students, one on March 2nd and the “repeat” class on the following Friday afternoon.

This was again a “virtual tourism” trip. We went  to three different locations: Vassar College’s fantastic recreation of the Sistine Chapel, then virtual Venice, and we concluded the “exploration” on Vulcano sim.

Why did i pick these three locations? Well, Vassar’s Sistine Chapel is indeed a gorgeous reconstruction of the actual chapel, completed with frescoes and built respecting the real proportions of the original building.  It’s perhaps one of the most famous sims in SL and, given that it reproduces examples of Italian art, it was a great place to bring my students. The common comment they all had (and that hey shared with my students from the previous semester) upon entering the chapel and flying up to the ceiling was “wow!” – and with good reason! Indeed, both semesters a group of students decided to focus their presentation on the Sistine Chapel virtual recreation.

Virtual Venice was more a “fun” trip than anything else. In groups of two, my students went for a ride on a gondola and we then all went up the “campanile”. In Venice I could see that having created a group for my students had been a great idea. We ran into several people there and we could keep our conversations private by using the group chat: in this way, we also did not disturb anyone with our constant written and spoken chit-chat.

Virtual Venice is not as interesting as the Sistine Chapel or even as Virtual Paris or Virtual Berlin. All in all, Piazza San Marco aside, it reminds of a big virtual mall. The same is true for many sims: strangely, some people often behave in SL in the same way they would in RL and spend long hours choosing dresses and other accessories for their avatars. I never liked malls in the real world, let alone in the virtual one.

The last part of our outing was on a section of Vulcano sim that hosts a small area managed by the Italian branch of the  OIPA (International Organization for the Protection of Animals). Their area is dedicated to a humane campaign against the use of fur.  A very different sim from the other visited so far, then, but I wanted to show my students that other things are possible su SL, like campaigning for a cause or bringing forth one’s personal/political ideas.  I gave them links also for a virtual exhibit about human rights in SL, also organized by an Italian sim.  One of my hopes was that at least one of them would be interesting in using this topic as a starting point for their class presentation, but nobody did.

The assignment/task that my students had to complete after our trip was to write a blog entry (in Italian, or course), describing what, so far, was their favourite place in SL and explaining why. They had also to add a part in which they discussed their least favourite place.

Virtual Venice scored in both categories: while a student said she enjoyed the trip there, another one found it boring. As I imagined, the orientation islands were the least liked places for most of the students. To my surprise, the exhibit on Leonardo Da Vinci’s machines was mentioned by only one student and in negative terms. The student complained that it was not interactive enough, in other words, he/she would have wanted the machines to move when touched.

Another surprise, since I was so proud of it, was that our virtual classroom also got only one mention and in negative terms. I had taught that to have a base in SL would also provide an area for my students where they could experiment things, but I was obviously wrong. The student who commented on the virtual classroom described it as “pointless” since our class already meets in a real classroom every week. Maybe I should not call it “classroom”….

Predictably, on the other hand, the places that were liked by practically all my students were the virtual recreations of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi and of the  Sistine Chapel.