Week Four: Class in Second Life

At SLCC 2007, Philip Linden (RL: Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs) got a big laugh from the crowd by whipping open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with "missing image." He also commented about how the real world is not shut down for repairs on Wednesdays.

So naturally my class was assigned to Wednesdays 6-8pm (3-5 pm SLT), as this is just the way my luck has been running this semester; and on our first day of class in Second Life which had been scheduled a month in advance on our calendar and which the students (some of them anyway) had started preparing for in advance, Linden Labs took the grid offline for a major upgrade/fix which caused everyone to have lots of difficulty and delay in logging in. In fact, our main guest speaker from Clearwater Public Library did not arrive until after our class had already left for our next destination. [BTW, looks like something about 'rotation' broke in this upgrade, causing problems with 'sit' scripts.]

Some students also had not been reading emails or class discussion board postings or paying attention to the information given out in class - as expected - and so had failed to post up or email me with their SL names, which meant that I could not add them to our class group or give them landmarks in advance for our SL destinations; this inattention, however, backfired on them when they found themselves unprepared, lost, and not receiving instant messages that everyone in the class group was receiving. I spent a fair amount of my time in the first part of class teleporting in students as they fought their way through the upgrade and into SL, which probably looked to the rest of the class like the professor gazing off into space or putting hands on hips and staring at the ground, followed by strange avatars dropping from the sky, sometimes even landing on top of another avatar's head. Then when we all teleported via landmarks to the next destination, the students who had not emailed or posted their SL names were left behind and had to be individually teleported.

So one problem I note about SL for educational uses: everything in Second Life is built around the idea of consent; you choose to give out your SL name or not, and if you don't give your name, I can't "find" you to offer friendship or group membership; if you give your name, you still must choose to login and accept a 'friend' request or 'group' membership offered to you or not; likewise I can offer you a teleport, but you have to accept it when I offer; so everything requires active participation, and my observation was that inattentive students who didn't actively participate and pay attention to class ultimately had a more difficult experience with SL than those who did. Now you can argue that's a choice that they made for themselves - and I agree - but it still impacts the rest of the class as it means the professor has to be spending extra time solving problems that should not exist, which detracts from teaching the other students. You could get around this by having a "stationary" class - have all students go to one place and stay there for the duration. The tradeoff though is that you're not taking advantage of one of the main affordances of SL ... to move, to travel, to see more than just one 20m space.

So that was one of my observations about teaching in SL this week; the other was that it's much like teaching in live text chat (which I already had much practice in as it's one of the things I was interested in learning upon arriving here; FSU's College of Information professors are very skilled at teaching live online in text chat.) I had it all prepared just as I would for a text chat class session, except with the added functionalities in SL of being able to throw a Powerpoint (texture) up on a giant whiteboard for everyone to see, and being able to also demo it myself live. We did a building exercise, walked over to see a gadget for building, lined up together to take a class picture (and how cool is that, distance students scattered all over the world being able to 'meet' and take a class picture together), and then everyone also got to meet in their groups. Meanwhile I walked around paying all the students $20 in Lindens, since they have free basic accounts and it takes $10L for project work they might need to do such as upload a texture. Amy got in my favorite line of the day, as I walked by and paid her: "Finally, a class that pays off!" I had to laugh. $20L is not quite as exciting as it may sound though, since the exchange rate is about $260L to $1 US dollar. But, $10L to upload sounds, animations, and images, and a lot of stuff can either be found for free or bought for $1L; the students received plenty of free stuff in class as well, along with landmarks to freebie places.

Next class: Rachelville, and we're very lucky to be able to hear from a guest speaker. Also, Mike Galloway from IPL came in today and did a training in collections for the Banned Books group (Collections team), which was recorded in Elluminate so everyone can replay it. (At the moment I am posting this, there is a marker for the place where the recording will appear, but not a working link yet.) The training has Hypatia and collections info; when it becomes available, see the Ellu-Archives link.