Hi Gilly from a very cold Hong Kong! :-)
I was talking with a teacher in SL the other day who is very experienced in teaching interactively using a learning tasks/activities approach and talked about the challenges for her in teaching in virtual worlds. I was struck in the conversation about how similar this sounded to conversations with beginning EFL, physical classroom-based teachers. The cognitive load that a beginning teacher has to deal with. And here was an experience classroom and online practitioner talking of all these challenges for synchronous online learning in a virtual world.
It seems that there might be considerable differences and adaptations needed for people coming from differing practitioner backgrounds and familiarity with being in 3D virtual worlds:
- new to online teaching and learning in any form
- experienced online teaching and learning practitioner in asynch modes
- experienced online teaching and learning practitioner in synch modes
- experienced online teaching and learning practitioner in text-based virtual worlds
- experienced online teaching and learning practitioner in 2D virtual worlds (e.g. Palace, Tapped In)
- experienced in being in 3D virtual worlds - the user interfaces with spaces like Active Worlds and Second Life can be quite a learning curve in themselves, esp getting proficient in operating them in real time while interacting with a group of participants!
.. combinations of these and no doubt there are examples I've missed here.
oops meeting and gotta run, but wanted to put this idea in there at least.
Looking forward to the summary!
I wonder if people familiar with online teaching in asynchronous and/or synchronous text based formats, find teaching in 3D virtual worlds even more of a struggle than people who have not yet taught online. What do you and others here think? What have the learning curves been like?
I took quite a lot of time exploring SL and learning about it (through great orientation activities like the teleportation trail created by an SL resident - not a 'teacher') before I then went on to start thinking about where the learning potential was of such environments.
I took quite a lot of time exploring SL and learning about it (through great orientation activities like the teleportation trail created by an SL resident - not a 'teacher') before I then went on to start thinking about where the learning potential was of such environments.
Hi Nick
(I'm spending my sabbatical in spain...its warmer here than Uk (and HK!)
thanks very much for pointing this out- of course it depends on what they've done before (well?)
I'll build that into dvpt
thanks Gilly