NMC Campus Observer

Not Your Ordinary English Teacher: Interview with Desideria Stockton

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jun 2, 2007 09:01pm

A few days ago I had the fortune to catch up and chat with one of the real forces in education in Second Life, the dashing Desideria Stockton, or as she prefers to be called, “Desi”. In real life, she is Beth Ritter-Guth, Women’s Studies and English Faculty at Lehigh Carbon Community College in Pennsylvania. We were able to meet up for this audio interview over in one of the studio spaces inside the Machinima Studio on NMC Campus at Learning. See below for the audio recording of our 20 minute conversation.

Desideria Stockton Interview

Her avatar is named after a poem by William Wordsworth. What we learned was that Beth has been very active in using web 2.0 technologies for a while. She had a rather disturbing first visit in Second Life that turned her away, until having a meaningful experience in Harvard’s Cyber One class.

In our interview, she gave a flavor of the kinds of activities she weaves into her classes that use Second Life (see her extensive collection of course materials) such as her recent British Literature class– e.g. while studying Beowulf, her students built in Second Life their own Grendel’s Lair.

We also got to her perspective on the wild success of last week’s Second Life Best Practice in Education Conference, and her excitement of connecting with more than 1300 other educators active or interested in Second Life. We both agreed that the media support and coverage of this event by SLCN.tv was nothing short of amazing (see the recently posted video archives).

Lastly, we got to discussing the notion of avatars and why hers is no “school marm”– including some amazing stories of some research she did iin her early exploration of Second Life.

Thanks again, Desi for spending some time talking with us.

Story filed under: Studio NMC

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)