Activity 7: Digital Making Digital Making: Youth & Learning Online

Activity 7: Digital Making Digital Making: Youth & Learning Online By: Sanya Vukas

Second Life Educational Purposes Learning Foreign Languages

Here is what I use Second Life for: • Research Purposes • Teaching Purposes • Learning Purposes • I have always been fascinated about Second Life (ever since it came out in the year 2003) and tried it for the first time in 2009. It was quite popular in the first few years, but the popularity has gone down over the years. There were quite a few controversies revolving this virtual world (virtual sex, law suites when it comes to buying and selling of land in SL, unfair business practises, gambling in SL etc.) also many technical issues. • Although Second Life has certainly received a lot of negative press throughout the years, I believe it is still a tool that needs further exploration, investigation and above all research. I believe that we need to survey the affordances and constraints of such virtual worlds, but above all question what educational value does such a virtual world have? I will address some advantages, disadvantages, affordance and constraints and will share what I have used this platform for. • Ultimately, I believe that Second Life is a tool - a platform - that if utilized properly can help teachers and students. I would like to share some of my thoughts about Second Life and how I have used it in the past for teaching and learning.

A student in Second Life The very first time I actively used Second Life was when I wanted to explore the pedagogical purposes of this virtual world (year 2009). Some of the research questions I posed: What can we learn in Second Life? Which skills do we acquire? How do we do this? What are the advantages and disadvantages of learning in a virtual world? As an experiment I decided to sign up in the Languagelab (http://www.languagelab.com/) I was a student of the Language Lab – English City community for two months. Language Lab is a world in Second Life that was tailored towards students around the world who want to learn/improve their English. Why did I choose this virtual world? As a former ESL student and also English teacher in Germany, I wanted to experience a virtual world and explore what it can offer to students. How can a virtual world improve language learning? I wanted to eventually use this with my own future students. This was my ultimate goal.

This is a screenshot of the Language Lab website. Here are some of my observations/thoughts before actually clicking the ‘sign up’ button: I found the word ‘virtual city’ very appealing. I wanted to find out what this meant. I was excited about walking through the virtual city with my avatar. and meeting other people around the world. I was exciting about finding out who teaches in Second Life and not only get to know the students but also the teachers. I also soon realized that the marketing of the website was done very well. Using such words as ‘the most effective way to learn English online’. Comments such as ‘the most effective way’ made me question by which research this was backed up. Yes this might be the most ‘effective way’ to learn English but how and why was never really addressed on the website.

‘Bringing the world of English to you’ sounded like a commercial promising a lot but never really pointing out any pitfalls, potential difficulties, disappointments, constraints of the virtual world etc. But of course we have to keep in mind that this is a virtual world that has a monthly subscription fee. So of course marketing played an important role in attracting English language students to the website and eventually into Second Life. Another phrase that irritated me was the fact that the website was promoting their teachers as ‘qualified teachers from the UK and USA’. I understand that Language Lab wanted to emphasize that the students around the world will have the chance to speak and learn with ‘native speaking English teachers’, but what about the numerous ‘non-native English teachers’ (like myself). Those were just a few observations I made from looking at the website. Nevertheless, I was determined to explore language learning in Second Life and the Language Lab was my first stop.....

Signing up • Similar to a face-face classroom language course at a Language Institute, school, University or College – in Second Life one has to pay for classes. There are several Language Schools that offer free language classes from time to time – such as: • - For German ‘Goethe Institut’ • For Spanish ‘InstitutoEspanol, Intercambio and Virtual Spain’ • For French – ‘Learn French in SL’ • In order to be teleported into Language Lab, I had to pay a monthly subscription of about $40. This gave me 8 virtual classes in a small group of students around the world that would join a class. Depending on the package one buys, as an online student one receives a schedule of classes. The classes range from ‘business English’ to ‘Casual Talk’ to ‘Talking about Fashion’ etc. A student can pick and choose the classes.

The next slide contains a video that shows a few screen captures of a virtual classroom in English City and also promotes the Language Lab. The link is also available on youtube. (In case there are technical difficulties with this slide show, please follow the following link:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hJZ2bre_FI Before you see the video, I would like to share some thoughts I have and also compare it to my experience as a student in the virtual city – English City.

‘Whenever you want’ is true. An online student has the ability to log into Second Life whenever he or she wants. But that does not always guarantee that there will be other avatars in the virtual city. There are also areas that one cannot enter or teleport to as they are locked. One has to upgrade the package – meaning pay a higher subscription fee to be able to explore those areas and really benefit from the English learning experience in SL. Being able to practice 24/7 is true, but yet again that goes back to the point I made previously, there are certain games, quizzes and videos that one has not access to as they are locked. This is quite irritating at times. If one does not want to pay a monthly subscription fee of $100, this can be a great obstacle. Those areas that are locked limits the Virtual City experience and prevents the student to harness the learning momentum.

It is certainly convenient to learn from anywhere in the world at any time, even from home just to log on and enter a virtual class. But this asks for motivation and self-discipline. Motivating oneself to log onto and enter SL, also to participate in a virtual world. The body constraint is another issue. The teacher might not always be able to motivate the student to take part in the online classroom discussion. The teacher cannot see the student, mimic and gesture certainly play an important role. As teachers, we can feel when our students get tired, bored, distracted. How do we do this in an online class? Lack of body language is an important point that needs consideration when exploring and discussing virtual worlds. The point about teachers being from the USA, UK and Australia - I have addressed this previously. I want to share my own experience. Some of the teachers I encountered in the Language Lab are not native speakers of English and are located around the world. My teacher was located in Mallorca and was British. Therefore the promise of ‘native speaker teachers’ is simply part of Language Lab’s marketing , attracting students around the world to join.

Here is the video and a glimpse into English City in Second Life: (Double click on the black screen)

Some Pros and Cons of my two month Language Lab – English City Experience:

The English City Blog http://studentsblog.languagelab.com/page/2 The English City Blog is a great way to interact with other students. It also offers an opportunity to practise writing in English. Students share their virtual field trips, adventures and events. They also comment on lessons and comment about certain topics that were discussed in their virtual classes. It is a great overview and a great way to get a glimpse at what English City is about. Both teachers and students blog.

Erstad addresses an important topic and one that is often times neglected or not seen as overall important, that is ‘digital literacy’ and what it means to ‘read’ and ‘write’ as part of our cultural developments today. I can see that schools today teach and assess the way they have thirty years ago. But thirty years ago we did not have online classes, virtual worlds, blogs, communication forums and this vast digital world out there. I can see that the authors make many valid points as there is certainly a change the way we read, write, communicate, process information, find information, assess and filter information. Virtual worlds – like Second Life – learning and teaching in these worlds or generally online is different and there are different skills that learners and teachers acquire and need to have. (Erstad, 2008, p. 178)

(Erstad, 2008, p. 179) During my exploration in Second Life I can see a lot of these ‘new literacy’ skills being used. I am reading, typing, analysing, listening to other avatars and processing a lot of information – all simultaneously. It is a lot of multitasking. Erstad makes an important point that the curriculum in school does not always incorporate these skills. Online skills and the exploration in virtual and gaming worlds should be considered. We should question - what skills do we acquire?

(Erstad, 2008, p. 179) Teachers should be encouraged by their school to use technology. Let students even explore children’s virtual worlds and make them creatively write about their experience. Teachers could ask them to write an essay about their experience in a virtual world or also create a video, a presentation etc. just the same way I have been asked to reflect about my virtual world experience.

This chart summarizes ICT Literacy skills which our students show at home when they are using the computer, searching the internet and playing a game. How can we incorporate this into our teaching lesson? I think by rethinking our tasks. Instead of giving students essay like tasks to do, we should make use of tools such as twitter, blogs, virtual stories etc. I think the best approach is project and group oriented learning where children put their ides together. Rethinking out current tasks is needed. (Erstad, 2008, p. 182)

When incorporating online tasks it is important to remember that they differ from classroom tasks.... As Hampel explains, online tasks should ideally encourage learners to work together and develop skills at three levels: a) the socioaffective level, by helping learners to get to know one another; b) the sociocognitive level, by encouraging joint problem solving; and c) the organisational level, by giving learners the opportunity to plan their work jointly (Hampel, 2009, p. 44). Hampel, R. (2009). Training teachers for the multimedia age: developing teacher expertise to enhance online learner interaction and collaboration. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 3 (1), 35-50.

The use of technology today has become an every day lived experience. As teachers we need to realize this and tailor our lessons towards helping students cope with this shift and change. Enabling them to get the best and most positive learning experience from the use of technology. Encoding text is an important skill. Encoding a text can simply mean extracting the most important message. For example – wikipedia is usually said to be a reliable source as everyone is copying and editing. The teacher could discuss why wikipedia is perceived as unreliable. How can it be made reliable? What information/source do we consider reliable? (Erstad, 2008, p. 184) (Lange and Ito, 2010, p. 246)

The online teacher or tutor has to combine and adapt different roles, including those of teacher, administrator, trouble shooter, and colearner (Shield et al., 2001); have recourse to different styles of teaching (e.g., cognitive, social, etc.); and develop new e-teaching skills (Hauck and Stickler, 2006, p. 465). • Similar to the key concept of ICT literacy that Erstad mentions, (Erstad, 2008, p. 182), Warburton points out numerous important skills that are gained by letting students interact in virtual worlds: • extended or rich interactions: opportunities for social interaction between individuals and communities • visualisation and contextualisation: the production and reproduction of inaccessible content that may be historically lost, too distant, too costly, imaginary, futuristic or impossible to see by the human eye; • exposure to authentic content and culture, individual and collective identity play; simulation: reproduction of contexts that can be too costly to reproduce in real life; • community presence: promoting a sense of belonging and purpose that coheres around groups, subcultures and geography; • - content production: opportunities for creation and ownership of the learning environment and objects within it that are both individual and owned (Warburton, 2009, p. 421). Hauck, M. & Stickler, U. (2006). What Does It Take to Teach Online? CALICO Journal, 23 (3), 463-475. Warburton S. (2009). Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (3), 414–426.

Languages When we take a look at how SL is advertised for, it becomes clear that it is a multilingual place where numerous languages are spoken. This advertisement for Valentine days clearly demonstrates that any language is welcome in SL.

The German online virtual school ‘Goethe Institute’ is the one place I am very familiar with as I used to teach German to adults in this virtual world. My classes were held in the online cafe. The students would join the online cafe and I would teach them for 45 minutes. The class started out as a discussion class, but later evolved into a very creative and multilingual exchange, as the students started sharing their language learning experiences. Sometimes we would even compare how a certain word is pronounced in their mother tongue, as I had students whose mother tongue was Polish, Spanish, French and Albanian.

This teaching experience was very interesting but also challenging. As I did not have a chalkboard, it was sometimes difficult to explain a particular grammatical structure. Also not being able to see the students was a challenge, I could only see their avatars. The avatars did not really tell me whether they understood what we were talking about. I could not see their real life reactions and emotions, which made it very difficult for me to assess whether the students were comprehending the German conversation.

A very rewarding experience for both me as a teacher and the students was when we started taking virtual field trips. We took three virtual field trips. One to Cologne, the virtual city Cologne where we went into the Kӧlner Dom. This experience was a little disappointing as there were many components inside the cathedral that were missing. This made us conclude that the virtual replication of the cathedral was not complete. As a teacher I was less concerned about the exact and correct replication of the cathedral. I was more interested in getting my students to interact in German and talk about the things that were not there and how they felt about the virtual field trip.

The most disappointing part about the field trip was that the Cathedral was quite empty inside. But this made students think about what things could be found inside a cathedral and how they would have reconstructed the cathedral differently.

There are many German Educational Games.

I attended one of the Teacher Services which was organized by a teacher in Hamburg, Germany. There was a small fee involved in entering the course. The course was valuable because there was a dashboard that was used. The teacher would post important links and workshops that the Goethe Institute was organizing. The downside of such an online course was that I was not able to hear the teacher and students due to audio problems. I had to reboot the computer several times which was quite distracting and made me miss the teacher’s lecture.

The problem I saw with the virtual German hour is that the levels of the students were not assessed before the actual lesson. That could have been done by an online test. When I joined the virtual German hour, I did not participate, I was an observer. But I could see that some students were advanced speakers while other ones were pre-intermediate or even lower. This was frustrating for some students.

Just like the Goethe Institute, there are many virtual Spanish schools and opportunities for the Spanish speaking community to get together in SL. Here I am talking to a Spanish teacher in the United States, her avatar name is Olmanda.

Virtual Classrooms in Spanish can be joined at a particular time of the week. There are signs in ‘Virtual Spain’, ‘Instituto Cervantes’ or ‘Intercambio’ that inform about the lessons. This sign is from ‘InstitutoEspanol’.

This is an example of the avatars I met when I entered Virtual Spain. Virtual Spain is a very interesting linguistic community as one cannot only find signs in Spanish, but also Italian and Portuguese. This could certainly be very confusing for those students that are just beginning to learn Spanish. Or it can be an enriching experience as the learner or visitor of this virtual linguistic community can contrast and compare these three Romance Languages.

Second Life Educational Purposes Learning Foreign Languages Conclusively, I can say that Second Life offers interesting learning opportunities, especially when it comes to language learning. But we have to remember in the end it is a tool, and as teachers we need to make use of the tool to bring our message across.

Readings: Erstad, Ola (2008). Trajectories of Remixing: Digital Literacies, Media Production and Schooling. In C. Lankshear & M. Knobel (Eds.) Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices, pp. 177-202). New York: Peter Lang. Lange, Patricia G. & Ito, Mizuko (2010). Creative Production. In Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out, pp. 243-293. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Activity 7: Digital Making Digital Making: Youth & Learning Online