Hi Erveryone
I would like to share my experience reading an interesting paper, Where the Language Worlds meet: Combing Real Life and Second Life in Classroom Material by Karina Silba and Jacob Larsen, Iowa States University. This paper discusses how to best blend Second Life material with classroom activities. It focuses on how tasks that utilize the strenghts of Second Life develop and how to implement these in classroom practice of the four skills.
This paper concludes that Second Life is a useful tool in the language classroom because it has the potential to provide learners with a more enriching learning experience than paper based materials alone. Second Life is also useful as it can help to ensure learners engaging with the subject matter in creative, productive, and meaningful ways. There different media types educators can use to create learning environments that are adapted to learners need. However, when designing activitie in Second Life, teachers need to consider both learners' Second Life skills and their language proficiency to avoid frustration and negative effects on motivating. In order to accomplish the class objective teachers should ensure that learners have ability to do the activity and perceived it as purposeful.
I think this is a usful paper discussing how to blend Second Life for teaching and learning language. However, there will be some of the challences that students and teachers might face when using second life and this paper need to do further discussion. For example, the cost and high technology requirements. In order to learn and teach a language in second life both teachers and learners need a relatively fast computer with a good graphics card and brodband internet access. This is a kind of techincal issue that I faced when I have joined languagelab.com. I could not involve for the whole activities in an event at languagelab.com because I did not have headphone when speaking causing everyone in the group echoing, so I had to leave the group early. Will be here again next week.
Sunya
I'll try and sort out the headphone issue for you Sunya. Are you trying to visit Language Lab at home or at AUT?
ReplyDeleteI am ok now and visiting languagelab from home.
DeleteI agree with your comment that the teachers need to make sure that what the students are doing is within their ability, which also would encompass making sure whatever tools they were using functioned without any problems. After all, not being able to do something leads to frustration, which would hinder positive feelings towards the learning and thus motivation overall, I think. Which leads me to my next question - in experiencing your microphone difficulties, did it change your feelings towards learning in SL? I think I'd get irritated and no longer want to continue, but that may just be me!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment.
DeleteI am a bit conservative. I feel that Second Life is not a perfect program, but it has a lot of potential particularly learning foreign language (English) which encourages me continueing learning English at LanguageLab regarding head phone matter.