conversation groups in SecondLife

It's been awhile since I've written. Since the last posting in summer, lots has been happening. I've taken two large classes of advanced ESL Grammar & Speaking students into SecondLife once a week for speaking and writing activities related to grammar. This quarter, an experienced colleague has been helping me teach once a week in the computer lab. Weeks 1 and 2 went to getting all 22 students their SL accounts. In subsequent sessions, we taught the students how to alter their avatars' basic appearance, basic teleport skills (how to get off of Evergreen and back again), how to change their clothes, how to make friends and chat with each other.

Today was, as always, mixed successes and challenges. In SecondLife, I feel like a new teacher again as I design what I think are simple assignments and find out in class that I overlooked some steps. In the RL classroom, I have mastered my environment and can manage those kinds of episodes more easily. In the SL classroom, on-the-spot problem-solving is more challenging because I'm still a beginner (or at most low-intermediate) SL user myself.

The activity today:

Preparation:
1) I created two notecards. Before class, I sent a group notice to my class with attached notecard #1 containing the names of students in 4 groups.
2) I created 4 different landmarks in 4 comfortable group chat spots with chairs on Evergreen.

In class:
1) I asked the students to open the notice and read the attachment.
Problems:

• if there is an attached notecard, tell the students to read the notice first, then click "Open attachment." I mistakenly told students to click "OK," causing the attachment to disappear.
• I have to activate my group status for the class group before sending the group notice...otherwise they won't get it!
• Some students hadn't yet accepted the group invitation. I had to re-send the notice several times so that the latecomers would also receive it.
  

2) I selected one person in each group as a leader and sent him/her one of the landmarks. The group leader was supposed to teleport to that location, then offer groupmates a teleport.

Problems:

• The students didn't know each others' avatar names, so the leaders did not know to whom they should send the teleport offers.
• The students didn't know how to send teleport offers, so my colleague and I had to teach the leaders how to do that.

3) I sent a group notice with notecard #2 (containing the conversation topic), presuming the students had gotten into their groups inworld.

Well...we got pretty far. They never actually got to the activity because all of the time was spent in prep. That was my fault. They still left smiling for the most part, which is the beauty of SecondLife: even though the activity didn't go as planned, funny interactions between the students in English still occurred. I assigned them to make a date with one or more of the students they had friended today in class to meet and chat in SL sometime this week about the conversation topic. Then they'll do a follow-up writing on the content of their chat, using the target language.

Lessons learned:

• publish a directory of avatar names for the students after the first session
• focus more on the social interactive aspect of SL early in the quarter, rather than on mechanics of changing clothes, etc.--i.e. teach students how to friend each other right away and let them practice chatting
• create student groups early on and keep the same groups throughout the quarter
  
• don't do any activities requiring teleporting or notecards...it looks simple but requires too much technical ability
  
• keep activities to a more confined area on Evergreen so no teleport is required
  
• include repetition and scaffolding each week--don't introduce something new each week, try to create an activity that uses skills they already know

And so the question arises, why do I keep doing this? The answer might be in the students' demeanor as they left the class. They had made appointments with other students to meet in SL later this week outside of class; they looked happy. I like using SL as a context for authentic language use (and with time, hopefully I'll get less clumsy at teaching in SL so that we end up using the language more in class). And I think it will be a great social networking tool: I'll assign homework for some students to meet and have conversations using the target grammar outside of class. And if some students are frustrated or don't like to use SL, they can do an alternative assignment using English such as a survey of native speakers or another time-tested ESL activity.