While this blog is about my personal Second Life teaching experiences, explorations and experiments, there is also a SLexperiments language teachers group, which I founded together with two wonderful colleagues of mine, Alicia Barbitta and Maru del Campo. We started to meet regularly in Second Life to help each other learn SL skills, share our resources and discuss language teaching and learning in Second Life.
While there are many educator groups in Second Life, the SLexperiments group focuses specifically on language teaching and learning. This has attracted many language teachers and also some teacher trainers, scripters and researchers. We have grown to over 80 members and have met regularly every Friday at 11am SLT since spring 2008.
We have had many good discussions, helped each other acquire SL skills, gone on field trips and shared many tools and resources in-world and on our wiki.
I want to thank Alicia, Maru, Carol, Dennis, Steve, Gavin, Daf, Nelba, Graham, Ismail, James, Michael, Birgit, Minhaaj, David, Nellie, Vance and all the other members, regular and irregular participants for making the SLexperimens meetings such a pleasurable experience where we not only learned a lot together but also socialised and had lots of fun. You have all made my Second Life richer and I have learned a lot from and with you.
I wish you wonderful holidays and hope to see you all again next year.
And thank you, Nergiz. It is true that there are some wonderful people on the slexperiments list.
but everyone is brought together through your organising skills and the way you have set up the wiki which is not only a list but a rich resource for those exploring language teaching in SL. Already looking forward to our meetings in the new year.
Once more – thank you, Osnacantab Nesterov, born Dennis Newson
Thanks Nergiz – it’s been a pleasure working with you so far and I’m looking forward to more next year – keep up the great work on this blog too!
I have learned a lot from the meetings too – thanks for organsing them! I am about to put what I have learned from everyone who has already taught in SL into practice 🙂 This seems to have been a long time in coming!