One of the exciting aspects of the web eight or ten years ago was it seemed you could find anything. One of the disadvantages was that you would find anything. There were a lot of conversations about what you could find and very little about what you could do. The web evolved when it became a space where we could do stuff and not just find it.
There is an analogy here with the current, early stage of exploiting virtual worlds for education. Yes, it’s true that mostly educationists are discussing ‘doing’ rather than ‘finding’ in Second Life (perhaps
because there isn’t a lot to find?), but the sheer range of what it is possible to do makes it hard to know where to start. And that debate is so interesting, it can be hard to drag yourself away from it.
Which is where the artist’s commission comes in: either being told to paint this person or setting themselves the challenge of capturing that sunset was the grit in the oyster which ultimately produced the artistic pearl.
Here at Languagelab, our ‘commission’ was as follows:
- we wanted a place where people can learn languages that captures the best of the classroom and the advantages of immersion but
- the classroom is real world convention which we should be wary of recreating in a virtual world especially
- because we are talking about learning language which is a skill and not a piece of knowledge to be passed across (languages are learnt, not taught)
- second life is mainly a social, people space so what we do has to take account of less structured, informal learning not to mention the purely social element
- there is no point in doing this without voice. We had a Vivox system more than a year ago which provided many early insights into the paths to follow
- so where there is a role for teacher mediated group experiences i.e. classes (and there certainly is), it has to be done in a way which builds on the best communicative and task based approaches but
does them in Second Life appropriate ways - virtual worlds paradoxically have a better chance of addressing real life learning needs so let’s do that in fun, relevant and memorable ways
- We won’t so much teach languages as support their learning. We will nurture a community of learners around any of the languages we support which means introducing you to people who share the same learning objectives as well as people who already know the language but maybe want to learn something from you.
It took more than six months of thinking and trialing before we felt able to summarise our approach as follows: Life based learning
The teachers also need to learn through doing and indeed we have only been able to get this far through doing. We’ll keep doing and use this blog as one channel to share some of those learning points with you. And buried amongst these lessons, there should be a pearl or three for us all.
Talk to you soon
We welcome your comments either individually to me here or respond directly to this blog.
