This is how you secure an interview with a busy professor. You photoshop his picture onto the gazette under the icon for ‘Interviews’. Then you send him a copy.
“Congratulations Professor Woodget! You made it to the new Caledon Oxbridge gazette cover!”
I have known for a while that RL universities send their students to Caledon Oxbridge University for orientation. We have top notch self-help material, thanks to Professor Ravelli Ormstein, who maintains what was first prepared when our campus was one of the newcomer landing points. When I saw Professor Rudolfo Woodget on our university faculty list, I remembered that he is also an RL professor (at the University of Michigan-Dearborn), and decided to interview him to get a better idea of how an RL course uses SL.
“OMG! I’m on the cover?” he cried.
“Yes so I need to interview you now.”
“Hmm. that’s a good a reason as any. Would you like to come visit. Or we can just interview in IM.”
When Professor Woodget explained that he was at the office hour for his university students, I offered to teleport so that I may see his ‘office’.
“Oh, there’s no office!”
Upon arrival I found myself in a lush outdoor setting, the virtual campus for the Dearborn University, in mainland Cass.
“Across the street is a replica of Henry Ford’s estate, on our campus. One of our campus values is being a “metropolitan university” so I felt being in the midst of things was important.”
“I believe, Professor, you have been teaching this course for a few years, at least as long as I’ve know you – so five years plus?”
He nodded. “Yes, probably.”
“Do you take your students through our campus in Caledon Oxbridge?”
“I do recommend the tutorial to them, enthusiastically. I am not sure how many take me up on it.”
“So they may not even be new to SL? Or they think they can adapt instinctively?”
“The second. There is usually one student in 25 who have been here before, though.”
Colloquy at UM Dearborn. Picture courtesy Prof. Woodget
“Some other institutions seem to take students around on a tour at COU but I suppose it depends on the class. If you assessed they are capable of getting started in SL themselves through self-help tutorials, your time is better spent elsewhere…”
“I try to find the sweet spot of — enough time here to justify the effort to get the students started,” said the professor. “But SL is an adjunct to the course, not a central part.”
“Do your students spend a full term?”
“Yes, I have them for 14 weeks It’s a second-semester writing course: argument, analysis, research. This second course is taught entirely online, using the LMS (Learning Management System) Canvas, which is used for all courses on campus. For this course, SL is a place to hold office hours — to give some of the social dimension absent from an online course, usually.”
“Yes, the social interaction. SL is a lot more personable than emails.”
“And they visit Sl location for two visual analysis assignments. My course focuses on cites (because you have to write about something). These students are mostly first-year students.It’s one of two writing courses they all take, and ideally early in their time at the University.”
“How much visual theory or background do these students have? I mean, are they looking from an artistic, sociological or anthropological perspective? Or creative writing aspect perhaps?”
“Well, we talk about cities in the course, so perhaps you could say the students analyze from an Urban Studies perspective. We use SL as a way of just poking them to try something new, see what it’s like to analyze something they’ve never experienced.
“For the first brief assignment (a blog post) I’m asking them to visit a representation of a physical city — and talk about the choices the creator has made. Perhaps more of a rhetorical perspective, actually. And I’ve suggested ten cities, of varying excellence.”
Professor Woodget rummaged through his inventory, cleared his throat and read the following:
Blog 6, visiting a city in Second Life
For this blog entry, I’d like you to visit a virtual representation of a real city in Second Life, exploring it and thinking about the choices that the creator of that virtual space has made.
I’ve asked you several times in the blog entries to identify the central elements that define a city. Here’s your chance to reflect on the choices that someone else has made. What do these elements tell us about the physical city, or this virtual city? How do those elements suggest what you might do in this virtual city?
(I’ve included the virtual Detroit site because it’s relevant to us, but please check out some others as well. The “Detroit City” region is, well, not the best representation of what Second Life can do.)
“So,” I said, “Some of them can compare the RL to the SL? Analyse the creative decisions?
“They have something to go on, yes. The next assignment will be a more formal paper — and ask them to do the same with an entirely invented city/community. Including Caledon, Steelhead, New Toulouse (or St. John).”
“Fantastic! that encourages them to see more of Caledon and the Steamlands.”
“Well, most of the gamers have a rough time. The graphics are not of the quality they are used to, and there’s nothing to ‘do’. For the assignment, I’ll also go further afield — asking them to look at both the built environment and the community it engenders.”
“For the student to analyse the community… won’t they need somehow to participate or at least talk to some townsfolk?”
“Yes… but I’ve decided, for good or ill, not to have them create here — that just seems — too big a learning curve. They can talk, if someone is there, or gather notecards, etc — what kind of community was the space created for.”
One thing to note is that Professor Woodget combines RL with SL classes with the students, which explains the anecdote he offers next.
“The gamers protest loudly… but one class period — this was all technical writers, mostly guys, all in a face-to-face class. They are clicking away, trying to figure out stuff, completely quiet. Then one guy looks at his neighbour’s screen and says, “Dude, you got a GUN!” And there are grunts of approval all around the room!”
We both laughed.
“SL is a good space to explore technical writing,” I said as Professor Woodget poured me another glass of lemonade. “I suppose they are experiencing for the amazing first time, and they have the task to describe that across to someone who hasn’t experienced it.”
“Yes, and they can write about any problems they find here, not just complain about them. They write directions on how to use SL for new users (a perspective they are close to).”
“For the students, SL’s strangeness is a learning opportunity.”
“I’m curious what you used before SL… or did you develop your course in conjunction with SL being available.”
“There was nothing else for that component before SL. So there were other memos to write, or other texts to analyse.”
“It is a bit harder trying in RL to get students to experience a completely different town…. unless you all take a field trip to Cambodia!”
“Yes.. SL offers something I couldn’t do in RL, but it’s not a crucial part of the course, if that makes sense.”
I nodded. “Yes. SL enhance the course material, but is not the core. Are you the only course that uses SL in your university?”
“No, there are a few other writing instructors who use it. Some of the foreign language classes used it at one point (not sure if they still do). And the games design professor in Computer Science has his students create things here. But it’s not really taken off like we all hoped, five years ago. The future of higher education is not in Second Life.”
I was shocked to hear such a pessimistic view of SL. “Do you mean the future of higher education is in another grid?”
“Perhaps. It’s hard for me to see. If you’re just creating an walled-off learning space, sure another grid is fine. But if you want people to go meet other people, see other sights, well, you need SL. One thing I would point to is LL’s abandonment of the education market, firing the education liaison and discontinuing the educational discount. I think SL broadly suffered from… lack of functionality at the time that media attention was greatest. Stuff not working, not as well as it does now.”
“You are right, though things seem to have improved a lot now. I hardly crash these days. And even the educational discount has been reinstated.”
At this point we were joined by the avatar of another Dearborn professor. She took an interest in the gazette and our topic of discussion, and stayed on with us for another hour of conversation about education and SL. This professor teaches writing too, but does not use SL in her course. I had the impression, though, that she thoroughly enjoys her inworld experiences.
At one point, Professor Woodget almost jumped up with excitement as he identified the Caledon Library book discussions as an example of SL at its academic best.
As I finished my glass of lemonade and said my goodbyes, I came to the conclusion that Professor Woodget’s earlier, more pessimistic comments could only have come from someone with deep fondness of this virtual world: someone who had lived through one of the lowest point in the continuing adventure that is SL.