NMC Campus Observer

Teachers Buzz Jan 22 - Composing Second Life

Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes) : Jan 23, 2007 01:32am

Today Bryan Mnemonic (aka Assoc. Prof. Bryan Carter) from the University of Central Missouri and Ali Andrews (aka Aline Click) of Northern Illinois University (NIU) told a group of SL teachers of their work with students in SL, and took us on a tour of some of the assignments and projects produces by learners in their composition classes in Second Life. Bryan has been teaching courses in SL for just over a year on the Island of Glidden, maintained by Ali. Ali also mentioned that NIU has four classes this spring using SL as part of their online supplement to face-to-face classes.

Bryan started out with a course on Cyberculture which inspired the Black Sun II build based on Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The success of this course encouraged him to try out SL further with his composition courses. The classes use SL for mini-lectures, small-group conferences, individual conferences and to display assignment and project tasks. These classes use a mix of technologies in addition to SL such as blogging, skype and their institutional LMS, Blackboard (used in part for digital assignment submission).

The first time the course was taught, students created projects within SL and Bryan is particularly proud of one student’s work which involved the creation of a Tolkien Museum.

Bryan believes that his students also found their paper topics within SL inspiring. Another student, working in the area of language acquisition, has created an apartment for English and foreign language learners which, when you click on an object, gives you the verb form in text and audio in the foreign language - in this case German.

In response to a question from the group, Bryan said that to date they had not experienced any lag issues with 25 and more people logged in simultaneously at the Black Sun location with students working from a computer lab on campus.

One of the most popular and “cool” assignments with the students is a Stargate assignment. The assignment required them to activate the Stargate outside the Black Sun and select an unknown destination. The traveled through the Stargate and on arrival had to explore it, take some pictures and then write about it on their personal blog. So far they have loved this assignment and have been taken to some quite surprising places in SL!

If you would like to see more on these assignments and the course in general, then take a trip over to the course blog at http://engl1030sl.blogspot.com/.

Recognition of Bryan and Ali’s work in SL has given rise to funding for innovative teaching methods from the university provost to maintain the SL space this year. In return, Bryan does demonstrations and presentations on campus to other faculty interested in using SL for their teaching. Bryan also has just received promotion to Associate Professor - WTG Bryan!

The feedback from students has been very positive except for 3 who had difficulties with typing (which sparked off an interesting conversation about supporting students with disabilities in SL). If you’d like to read more about this successful educational venture into Second Life. Please go to the course blog linked above and to the full transcript on the NMC Campus wiki.

Finally, Bryan told us about two funded projects in the pipeline that he’d heard about. One was a grant from the Norwegian Government for around US$48,000 to create four islands focused on computer science, humanities and teacher training. Another one involves US$15,000 funding from the National Black Programming Consortium to create a virtual Harlem during the jazz age of the 1920’s in New York and also Montmartre in Paris during the same era.

And don’t forget to come to the next NMC Campus Teachers Buzz session on Mon 5 Feb at 9AM PST on the now 30-island ! NMC campus with Joe Lambert, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling - come and find out what the opportunities could be for digital storytelling and beyond with your students within Second Life!

Story filed under: Campus Headlines, Second Life News, Teacher's Buzz, Teaching and Learning

See all stories by Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes)