Newbie in Second Life

Shelly Terrell very kindly arranged a tour of Second Life's EduNation for a group of relative and total newbies last night. I went along, having missed the one she and Barbara Sakamoto had arranged the week before.

The way into Second Life is to create an avatar, which most people make to look like themselves at their very best ;). To do this, go to www.secondlife.com, and you will be guided through the process. Your avatar comes with "inventory", which includes everything from the body and clothes to any external things, like a house or a boat. The inventory is stored in files which you open and attach to your avatar. But just getting your avatar sorted out can take some time, and I was frankly pretty hopeless. Once you've got your basic avatar set up, you save it and its outfit like any set of files - and then you're ready to start out. You move using the arrows on your keyboard and, as you have probably heard, you can fly. Oh, and you can teleport to locations given on a map by coordinates.

One of the slightly disconcerting things about moving around in Second Life (SLife) to me was that I was looking at the world through the eyes of my avatar, so I didn't see what she looked like from the front - and she wasn't wearing anything under her sweater... *blush*. It was only when another avatar gave "me" a once-over that I "flicked the switch" and noticed my mistake.

So I was more than relieved to be in the company of Shelly, who has been a great all-round mentor and very patiently and kindly explained things not once but again and again as needed. I can warmly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the potential of SLife to follow her on Twitter and find out when she's ready to do another one. Or perhaps one of the other teachers in this steadily growing support network will arrange one.

How did the appointment work? SLife has a messaging service integrated into the interface which allows the organizer of an event to send out invitations including the coordinates of the destination. This includes a file that automatically opens in your iCal or Outlook Calendar and asks whether you want to save it. I found this very sophisticated and nice. At the arranged time you simply open that file which includes the link to the meeting point and click on a button and boom! your avatar teleports there.

Why am I trying out SLife? Well, I'd like to understand more about the quality of the learning experience using tech tools. Second Life requires a combination of written and oral skills (you speak into a headset or your laptop microphone and send instant messages on screen), and the more you move your avatar through its paces, the more you feel that you are actually a part of the world. SLife provides a platform that you can ad lib in, be it outdoors on a (virtual) beach or in an elegant villa. You can use regular presentation tools there, too, so it seems that anything you can do in a virtual classroom you can do in SLife, with the advantage that SLife is more attractive. It has its own rules of social interaction as you move around the vitual world, but once you "get" the culture ... and stop running into people and walls ... it's pretty much like the real world: being polite, allowing personal space, taking turns, making gifts.

SLife has places for you to practice, called "sandboxes", where you can set up things like houses or presentations for a limited duration without needing any special rights. On the surface SLife may look like a free-for-all, but in dedicated spaces and on properties that belong to people there are scheduled events and of course rules of civilized behavior. But being open to the web, it's full of anarchic and archaic surprises. It's a playground for adults, too, which means that you are bound to encounter sex if you gatecrash other people's parties. But if you arrange a meeting at a house you can agree with the other residents to - um - "behave". There are also protected spaces in SLife reserved for children that adults can't get to unless they have special permission, e.g. they are teachers. Did I mention the dragon slayer and the dragon yet? Or the guy with the guns? Hey, this is the Internet. You need to relax and take it in stride.

Yesterday Shelly took us to the EduNation "sandbox" and gave us gift packages with all sorts of clothes and things. My package contained a boat, which I promptly landed on people in the middle of the beach. In real life I'd be sued by the families of the deceased. My SLife social abilities are in their infancy, so I wasn't even able to offer anyone a ride in the boat. Live and learn. While I was trying to unpack my new gifts, including an "I voted for Obama" t-shirt, people were admiring Shelly's cat and Aniya's dog, and then suddenly someone suggested we go to the pet shop. So off we went! Pets can be bought for Linden dollars, and real transactions mean real money. I forgot what a cat or a dog costs. After that our adventures included going to a beach, where Carollain (spelling?) aka Brooke gave me some great bikinis and a cocktail. I set out to try windsurfing on my own but couldn't click things into action. Perhaps I was stealing something, I really wouldn't know. So I gave up and went back to the group, where I found Shelly had got a sailboat on the water and we all set sail with her. A silent stranger from France joined us on the boat and we had a trilingual text message conversation. And then Anyia, I think it was, had the idea that we could go for a balloon ride. The balloon navigated us around on its own and gave us a tour of the entire area, with its beautiful houses. I'm surely leaving out all sorts of information here, things I couldn't really register, like where we actually were, because I was just following dumbly. But there will be more visits to come, and next time things will be easier.

I think you're not supposed to disclose people's real names in Second Life, so while I'd like to share the "link love" (so you can find the people involved) I'm going to be cautious and not drop names. Suffice it to say that yesterday's trip included a large group of teachers, including Shelly from Stuttgart, Aniya from Italy, Brooke from Illinois, Burcu from Istanbul, Tyler from Missouri, Michael from New Zealand, Pascal from Manchester and Marisa from Athens. If you want to find their blogs, just ask on Twitter. You'll find me at http://twitter.com/annehodg.

SLife is free for starters. Aniya (aka The English Teacher), also a great mentor, explained that if you do decide to wade into SLife to set up classes, you can buy or rent a property and set up a virtual school. Or you can get together with others and rent space on a property for an event or seminar. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Dogme ICT and their "Vow of Flirtiness"

Fans of the Dogme school of teaching promoted most prominently by Scott Thornbury will know that in fact it is a movement of like-minded souls/teachers who believe in working with what is there on what is relevant. The original film movement around Lars von Trier took a "Vow of Chasity" to do without the unnecessary trappings that would distract from the heart of the matter, and that has translated into the classroom, most basically, as "come as you are".

I was sitting next to a guy at IATEFL and asked him, "So what do you think Thornbury thinks of using all of those games and gadgets in class?" "Oh, that wouldn't work with Dogme, now would it?" he said

But in fact it does, and quite well. The dogmetists and the Second Lifers (there seem to be far more of those in EFL than in the world at large) have got together to found Dogme ICT (as in Dogme Information and Communication Technology). They extend the idea of "coming as you are" to "coming as you are and letting the students use the hot gadgets in their pockets". In his blog Gavin Dudeney has announced that they are taking a "Vow of Flirtiness". As for the manifesto, these are the truths they hold most dear:

• "Teaching should be done wherever possible, taking advantage of the affordances ICT offer - props and tools should be brought into the class when they encourage learners to engage in meaningful conversation with people they actually want to talk to.
• Teaching should be done using any resources that the learners find interesting and useful, and using any technologies to hand. If a particular piece of equipment is needed, ask the learners - they probably have it in their bag or coat pocket.
• Recorded listening or viewing material (podcasts, vodcasts, YouTube, etc.) should be used when the learners find the material interesting and where it has some relevance to their lives. Learners should be encouraged to produce as much as they consume.
• Temporal and geographic alienation are what you make of them. Don’t be afraid to take your learners in to Second Life to a fantasy island, or to Curitiba using Google Maps. Look for the good and useful in each location rather than writing them off piecemeal."

Much of that sounds reasonable to me. We're moving into a time when technology won't be "in the way" anymore, where we'll be savvy enough to be able to use gadgets, tools and the Internet as easily and creatively as we now use bits of paper, pins, pens, props and realia - moving into the aesthetic worlds our students inhabit and are more comfortable in. Their world is where learning should happen: Pretty much anything that captures their interest can be a vehicle for learning, can't it?

Gavin Dudeney's article is in his blog, That'SLife.