When I started exploring Second Life in 2007 to find out whether it had to offer something for language teaching and learning, I didn’t know anybody in SL and only made slow progress, which was very frustrating. You can read more about my first steps and experiences in these blog posts:
During an EVO sessionin 2008, we visited SL and I finally met some language teachers who were also interested in SL’s language teaching and learning potential. Although, some Webheads had met in SL for some time, there didn’t seem to be any meetings anymore. Two friends and I wanted to meet regularly to explore SL together and share our knowledge. This led to the founding of the SLExperiments group in the spring of 2008. Read about how we started and some SLExperiments activities in these posts:
We had regular weekly meetings in SL for one and a half years and learned a lot together. We have also been collecting resources on the SLExperiments wiki like links to papers, books and articles related to teaching in virtual worlds.
Meanwhile, many more language teachers have joined SL and through the SLanguages conferences I have met more teachers who had already been in SL much longer and had had experience with teaching. There were also some universities and SL “schools” offering language courses. However, most teachers seemed to work on their own.
One interesting community was Second Life English, whose founder is Kip Yellowjacket and who has an island in SL which is dedicated to language teaching and learning and a web presence. Kip has been quite successful in creating a community of teachers and learners.
Cypris Chat and English Village (which is probably the oldest community) have a similar concept and bring together teachers who want to learn teaching in SL with students who want to learn or practise their language skills.
Then, there are the two EVO sessions VWLL (2009) and TLVW (2010) which brought several hundred teachers interested in language teaching in SL together and some stayed active and even started teaching after the session. (VWLL and TLVW Nings will cease to exist soon. We will move the content to our wiki, which we will make public soon).
More organizations and universities have become interested in virtual worlds. This resulted in EUROCALL and CALICO to join forces and create a virtual presence in SL and online. Then, there are the EU-funded projects AVALON and NIFLAR. AVALON has a web presence and an island in SL. One of their aims is training teachers to teach languages in virtual worlds in a pedagogical sound way and to create a teacher community for continual support.
It is wonderful to have so many individual teachers and communities in SL now. Many of us are members in several or all of these communities. However, there is also a downside, it is impossible for many of us to be active in all of them.
So, recently, we have decided to bring the SLExperiments and AVALON members together and start having regular meetings twice a month at different times. We hope this will boost participation and help build a stronger community who can share their knowledge, test activities with peers, and share lesson plans and resources.
Both communities and their platforms will continue to exist and members can, of course, have other meetings besides the two mentioned above.
Do you know of other language teacher and learner communities in SL which should be mentioned here? Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Are you a member of a teacher community in SL? If so, can you tell us what benefits it has has for you and what kind of activities you do?
Many dismiss holodecks or Builder’s Buddy scenes (see my previous posts here and here) as tools for learning and teaching languages in Second Life thinking they are only good for role-plays (e.g. restaurant scene to practise ordering food). While I personally don’t like role-plays that much, they have their place in language teaching. However, when we started the Holodeck Challenge two months ago, we asked participants to be creative and literary think out of the box when creating scenes for language teaching and learning. And they did!! I am still amazed what they have come up with — those who built scenes and participants who were at the final event and contributed with their ideas. The final event took place on Saturday, 27th June 2009.
Here are snapshots of some of the scenes and some ideas that have come up:
1. Mary Roussel’s gardens
Mary added some free educational tools to her beautiful class spaces which can be used to brainstorm and write words collaboratively and to display notecards.
Her teaching idea:
Send students to a furnished building to collect furniture names. Then, they come back and write the words on the board, which can then be used to for further activities.
If I had been taught in such lovely class spaces, I might have liked school more.
2. Mary’s Venezuelan market
Teaching ideas:
Role-play different tourist/sales-person dialogues (not only for buying/selling souvenirs. Tourist could ask questions about the culture, city, life in Venezuela, etc).
Learn/teach the names of the objects in Spanish
Talk about Venezuela
Talk about markets and customs associated with them in different countries/cultures
Talk about traveling, holidays, souvenirs, shopping, etc.
Talk about handicraft, art, …
Mary created this Souvenir Market because there seems to be nothing about Venezuela in SL.
All participants loved this scene. It is such a lovely scene that it made me want to stay there longer and explore. It also made me want to say something. I wanted to express my feelings and ask questions about the place and objects. I think this is a very important point in language teaching. If emotions and feelings are involved, then students do want express them and they will more readily seek and accept help to formulate what they want to say in the target language.
3. Anna Begonina’s shop scenes
Anna teaches Italian in Second Life and always comes up with creative ideas. She said that although, there are a lot of shops in Second Life, shops and items are mostly named in English even in Italian places. Shops also often move or close so you can never really on using them again when you need them for a class. Also, most items in a shop cost money and are not modifiable. This is why Anna has created two different market/shop scenes in which the objects show typical Italian brands and the names of the objects are in Italian. They are modifiable so that objects can be moved, copied, renamed or retextured (e.g. for teachers who teach other languages).
Learning vocabulary related to kitchen and cooking
Moving objects from one table to another (e.g. those that are needed for a certain recipe)
—> Check out Anna’s Italianiamo blog where, I am sure, she will post more ideas
5. Dennis’s Dogme garden
Dennis has created a garden which can be used as a nice place to sit together and talk about anything that comes up in a language lesson. As it is as a Dome garden, he could obviously not give specific ideas or language points that would be taught there.
One thing that is special about his garden is that the some of the textures that he used (like the walls) are from Real Life, which would well be a starting point for discussions as well as the up-side-down trees, which he wanted to “correct” but we thought he should leave as they are 🙂
6. Carolrb Roux’s garden scenes
The first one is intended as a meeting space (above).
The second one is The Owl and the Pussy Cat garden. It is a beautiful place to explore. There is music, hidden objects in the trees and the garden, a snake ladder game and many other things from the poem. Carol even recited the poem for us as a special treat because some of us didn’t know the poem.
Carol’s reading room with some books in notecard form, notecard giver and dropbox.
This is a nice room to sit together to read and talk about a book. It also makes a nice space for other kinds of meetings and discussions.
Carol also generously helped other participants to build their scenes and troubleshoot them during the two months which this challenge lasted.
Teaching ideas:
I don’t remember whether any were mentioned because I had some technical trouble at this stage but I can imagine the following:
Have students explore the garden and think what this could be about
If students had to memorize the poem, playing in the garden can help them remember the poem. They can walk from place to place and recite the lines connected to the objects.
It can also be simply a fun activity after having worked with the poem as a kind of bonus or reward.
I’m sure Carol and others have more ideas.
7. Nahiram Yakubu’s flea market street scene
Nahiram has created this beautiful flea market scene.
Teaching ideas:
I missed most of this because I had to relog but one idea nahiram mentioned when I was back is the following:
Students take out objects from their inventory and set up there stand or area. Then, they can all walk around and explore the market, ask questions about the objects on sale and haggle over the prices of the objects. If students don’t have enough freebie objects in their inventory, they can either be given different boxes full of objects by the teacher or sent freebie shopping in SL first (depending on the available time). If two students have the same object, it could be interesting because they might have different prices and would have to justify why theirs is more expensive.
Of course, their could be an activity first to learn or review the names of the objects or this could come at the end and only if necessary.
8. Shawn’s maze
Another brilliant idea and very different way of using holodecks for language teaching purposes. Shawn has built this (and other scenes) with the Horizons holodeck.
Teaching idea:
Students work in pairs. One student sits on a chair that automatically lifts them up to a certain hight where they have a good bird’s eye view of the maze. The other student stand in front of the entrance of the maze and waits for instructions. The student on the chair gives directions to the student on the ground and guides him either to certain objects that are distributed in the maze or to the exit.
I can imagine adding extra fun to this activity by having them go to certain objects in the maze to interact with them (e.g. retrieve their content, get a copy) and then find the exit. Several teams could compete with each other using IM voice/text chat so that they wouldn’t be overheard by the other teams.
We have tried this activity with some colleagues and it generated a lot of speaking (giving instructions, clarifying, asking for help, providing help, vocabulary, different tenses and structures).
The Holodeck Challenge is over but this does not mean we don’t accept more scenes 🙂
I know that others wanted to create scenes but couldn’t do so out of lack of time. Maybe some have time during the summer holidays. If so, we are happy to see more scenes and ideas here or in the wiki.
We will find a place where we will deposit the created scenes and language teachers will be able to grab a copy. Whether the creators will offer them all for free to everybody is up to them. As soon as we have agreed on how to make them available, I will post it here.
If you are interested in Holodecks, you might also want to check out what EUROCALL and CALICO are up to at their HQ in Second Life. You can contact Groovy Winkler or Randall Renoir in SL or join one of their in-world groups for more information.
While this blog is about my personal Second Life teaching experiences, explorations and experiments, there is also a SLexperiments language teachersgroup, 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.
In spring 2008, two online friends and colleagues of mine and I have created a group calles SLexperiments for language teachers who want to or already teach in Second Life. The aim is to share our knowledge, demonstrate tools, invite guest speakers, go on field trips and, of course, also socialise 🙂
We have been meeting every Friday since April 2008 and have over 70 members now, from total newbies to experts.
Here is a machinima (a video made in a virtual world) from our last meeting in which Dennis Newson, one of our early members, has taken us on a field trip to an educational island, Boracay, created by Nick Noakes. The machinima was produced by Calisto Encinal (SL name). Enjoy!
I was very happy today when I was informed that I have been accepted to the MUVEnation course ‘Teaching and learning with MUVEs’ (Massively Multi User Virtual Environments). It is a 1-year postgraduate online certificate course funded by the EU. Here is how MUVEnation describes the course:
MUVEnation will help teachers acquire the necessary competencies to integrate massively multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) into their teaching practice ; by exploring the links between : virtual worlds, learning and motivation, active learning and pedagogical approaches that include socio-constructivism, situated learning, project based learning, learning by doing, game based learning, simulations and role-playing.
I am looking very much forward to the course and will share what I learn with my colleagues in the SLexperiments group, in the EVO2009 session that I will co-moderate next year and with everybody else through my reflections that I will be posting here.
Special thanks to Cristina Costa, who informed me about the course.
