Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Richmond Island

Where do you begin to focus the wayward attention of first-year college students in a writing class making heavy use of Second Life®?

I have the luxury, as my school’s writing program director, to do pretty much what I please in my section of first-year writing.  My only mandate, beyond a minimum number of words and a few assignments that require outside sources, will be to meet the program’s goal of assisting new college students make the transition from high-school notions of writing to discourse appropriate to the professorate at a selective liberal-arts university.

And if possible, I’ll keep senior administrators visiting class from seeing students play SL™ golf while dressed in banana-avatar suits.

Actually, my biggest challenge is as old as the coming of written argument to Western culture. Socrates decried this new technology when it began to appear among young scholars in Athens nearly 2500 years ago.  He feared that no one would be able to recall facts, make logical connections, or communicate gracefully once writing replaced the spoken discourse of the Agora.

Guess what? He was correct. 

Writing formally is alien to most college students.  The very process can make thinking sloppy, so my largest task every year is to get writers to untangle their thinking before they type.  Surprisingly, the metaverse, as subject-matter and new medium for embodied communication, doesn’t complicate this process too much.  Whatever the course or content, students face the same difficulties when writing.

Having taught with SL twice before, I can confidently state a few principles educators need to consider.

1) Provide a Good Orientation Experience.  As New World Notes readers know well, the first hour in-world can make or break SL engagement. For my students’ first hour, I will offer one-on-one conferences so they can set up an avatar, log in with me nearby, and get my help IRL or in-world.  My avatar is a Linden Lab volunteer mentor, so Iggy can teleport to the Orientation and Help Islands.

2) Assign Discrete Tasks. My first class merely wandered about the metaverse. What a rotten idea! Free-form exploration is good for later tasks, but at first my group of writers will analyze why they chose a particular default avatar. I will require them to post successes, failures, and questions to a discussion board integrated into our class wiki.

3) Focus on Academic Content. Students quickly discover SL’s adult content on their own. Beyond a general warning, I won’t dwell on this part of SL. Each editing group will get a dossier of in-world tasks to complete, along with SLURLs to places such as Svarga, The International Spaceflight Museum, even the Cave of Doom funhouse!

4) Track and Connect the Work. Each assignment must, for this Millennial Generation, involve documenting changes observed since the last visit, new tasks learned in-world, and reflections on the writer’s perceptions of the invented world of SL.  This will get my students past the aimlessness that marked earlier classes’ exploration of the metaverse.

My four principles work in service of a big question: what role will virtual worlds play as communications tools for business, research, education, and entertainment? Future installments of “Iggy’s Syllabus” will follow my students and me in-world as we try to provide some answers.

And, of course, answer another hot question: where can I get a banana avatar?

Photo courtesy of Hennessy Harbour, virtual golf-pro and tasty source of potassium.

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