Location: Richmond Island

Something seems to be working with this group of students. Even goofing off in the freebie store Milky9 (shown) with a student has served an important pedagogical role: we are breaking some ice before the students do formal writing for the class.

Instead of beginning with all of the (now very dated) 2006 hyperbole about Second Life and warning the class about adult content, we used Robbie Dingo’s “Watch the World” and a couple of episodes of the Molotov Alva series from Cinemax.

I wanted students to see, right away, that SL is more about creating content than following a script. Alva’s journey is a form of interactive story-telling; Dingo’s masterful re-imagining of Van Gogh in 3D shows what one can do with SL’s building tools and an active imagination.

Right now it is far too early to say if these starting points, or the individual orientations for each student helped most. So far, as students compete for scavenger-hunt prizes and one of them sets up his own virtual business, I’m impressed at the lack of responses stating “this is lame” or “I don’t get it.” 

It has cost me dearly in time: 16 hours and more to orient the class one week.  Yet I would do so again, and responses from the SLED mailing list, one for teachers using SL, back up my hunch that personal orientations smooth over many of a beginner’s frustrations with basic functions in-world.

This class seems ready to explore SL meaningfully and with academic purposes in mind.  As I’ve claimed before for this Millennial generation of students, giving them discrete, structured tasks linked to course-goals helps a great deal.

More soon on their marketing analyses of real-life corporations who have set up in SL and ones that only exist in the virtual world.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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