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As promised, I did a lot less in this session, mainly trying to help Bunyip (probably not very well but I am not initially expecting students to build complex structures free-form so it is a skill I can practice later). I contributed a fair bit to the discussion (maybe a little too much) but then let Bunyip get on with completing the rails for the harbour. The initial discussion was useful and seeing Marlon coming to grips with post-induction skills was interesting.
I think my next step is to think about student orientation in what I'm going to call "teams" to avoid confusion with the SL term "group", i.e. there will be a SL group corresponding to the class and then the teams will have areas out of chat range for their own internal communication. Each team will have 6 students, i.e. 3 pairs, 24 students total. I will position each team at the corner of the mesa and station myself in the centre. Students will work as pairs on the tasks. In subsequrent sessions we may use the decks instead of or as well as the mesa. Sounds like the beginnings of a plan.
It sounds a bit prescriptive but I'm tempted to give the students a checklist of objectives/tasks, most of which are verifiable and maybe logged on-the-fly out-of-world so I can see if anyone is struggling. To be continued...
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3 comments:
There's an interesting balance to strike I think - there's a list of "core skills" that you need your students to acquire and if you've only got 4 sessions you need them to acquire them pretty quickly.
Although Bunyip might be out on one extreme of experiential learning, it's probably fair to say all of the Second Life core skills are best learnt through doing, although written and video material to support that, of course, is good.
That gets followed by the thought, do all the students need all the skills, or do they need all the skills between the group?
I quite like the idea of a checklist of things they must do (and would probably create a HUD to check they did it in fact) and don't have a problem with part of the course being very prescriptive to meet those needs - although making sure it does meet those needs might be the hard part.
I think the problem with being prescriptive is that it can very easily take the fun out of a situation (assuming students find SL "fun" -- my guess is that some won't). On the other hand, I have to justify the class in academic terms so there has to be learning alongside the "fun". Maybe "engagement" (in a positive sense), is a better term than "fun". Ultimately, of course, we want the engagement to be not just with the environment but with the learning.
The danger with getting students to do only a proportion of the tasks is that they are disadvantaged later if peer support does not deliver for them. I'm starting to think they will need groups at the team, class and institutional level so they can escalate requests for help through those levels. I'd probably leave teams to their own devices as far as possible and only step in if they needed to take an issue to the next level.
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