Languagelab.com Blog » paul

Getting INTO art

paul — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:23:00 +0000

I distinctly remember my art lessons at school They were not very exciting. Mostly, we would try to remember pictures and artists and every 2 weeks, we would go outside and draw trees! You can only guess how enthusiastic I was about art! I say “was” because last week we went to Language Lab’s art gallery in Second Life…

We began the lesson by taking a quick tour of all the exhibits. They were mostly three dimensional art like sculptures but they were incredibly detailed and very imaginative! We used camera controls to look around and inside the objects. We could even click on some objects to see inside or to give us more information. After the tour, we decided on a favorite piece of art and then we began to look at how to make a presentation.

We had to describe the object and then try to describe how we feel about the art and what it means to us. We also had to use language to try to get people involved in the presentation (“can you see..? If you click here, you will see.., can you guess what..?”) The presentations were brilliant and everybody had a great time. The expression “to get into something, usually means to begin to like something. Only this time, we really got into things! Art appreciation and learning vocabulary in 3D

Thanks to all the advanced English students for making this lesson memorable and for helping me to ‘get into’ art again.

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Your starter for 10

paul — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 18:11:02 +0000

When we were developing the Languagelab concept, one of
the “Aha!” moments was realising that we needed to create a social space with a
learning orientation rather than the other way around. How are are we going
about that? Read on.

Proud as we are of our progress
and, frankly, discoveries in the areas of teaching methodology and techiques, we
are also committed to having a social programme for learners which delivers on the social and
community potential of Second Life. Andyes, it is that old conundrum of how can something
which is educational, also be fun? An ‘event’ is ehm …
well, a coming together for something like a quiz show or gallery opening or talk / debate or
a book club or a celebration of a particular cultural aspect or .. .etc. It is hard
to pin them down beyond the fact that it is a one off event for up to 20 people and which needs no preparation in order to attend.

Last week, for example we had our
first Quiz show which clearly demonstrates some of the key elements of a good
event

it works as a stand alone event
it has a motivating end point (to
win the quiz) but the means of getting there are
fun
It has a format and formula which people can
relate to TV show / quiz or is quickly explained
small ‘c’ cultural element as it also derives from a UK
cultural past-time. In this case we were running a mix between the UK, US
and Canada phenomenon of the pub quiz.
It is about bringing people together
for fun so needs to be carefully managed

It
has atmosphere

The personality of the host or MC is essential. (Luckily
our debut event was designed and hosted by one of the founder
teachers of Languagelab SL Samuel Teacher). That said, event hosts
don’t need to be teachers so if you think you have a talent in this line,
please get in touch.

There have to be several elements which
are not possible in real
life. (You will have to attend one to find out)
It is done through the target language (in
this case English, but would work
well in Spanish, Italian etc)

It is supportive of a variety of different ability levels without detracting from the
fun or overall competitiveness

Have a look below.

Using the world map for a fun warmer

A view of the scene: three of the teams with host Samuel keeping strict order. The scoreboard is visible behind

Team 3, the “Angels” ponder their answer.

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And the result? Great fun, lots of laughs with team Angels coming out on top and people left having made new friends and asking about the repeat. Our social programme will be running for or five different events per week by the end of January. Come and have a look.

Talk to you soon

We welcome your comments either individually to me here or respond directly to this blog.

The grit in the oyster or why second life needs another education blog

paul — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:14:01 +0000

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.