As a writing instructor, the use to which I would put Second Life presented a conundrum. While it is true that communication between users was entirely text-based at the time I started considering the platform, synchronous chat did not seem to justify the use of SL, as there were several alternatives available on the World Wide Web. Further, the availability of asynchronous communication within Second Life was limited to the passing of notecards–a basic text-based tool not dissimilar to Apple’s Hypercard (without the scripting capability)–and extremely limited word-processing tools. As a result, I was hesitant to use Second Life within a traditional classroom setting, since there was no discernible advantage over other platforms. That changed, however, when moving to a new university put me in the position of not being able to use one of my most successful course plans, specifically, a collaborative project requiring that students create a museum based on some aspect of their collective cultural heritage, due to a lack of gallery space in which to construct the exhibits. Second Life, it seemed, would offer my classes the opportunity to build a museum, even if it was only a virtual one, and meet the assignment objectives of exposing students to the rigors and rewards of publication.
So it was in January 2007 that I decided to integrate Second Life into my research writing course in a significant way, so I added Second Life: The Official Guideto the list of required books for the course and updated my syllabus. The course structure was fairly straightforward and called for students to complete two major assignments. The first, an extended research project on a topic related to the student’s major, called for students to conduct in-depth research and produce a prospectus, an annotated bibliography of ten to twelve sources, and a formal research paper. The second was participation in the construction of a virtual museum as part of a collaborative effort between the two sections I was teaching of the course. The topic of the musuem was to be decided as a group, as were all aspects of its construction, including organizational activities like assigning group and individual roles. In order to provide students with the best possible experience in Second Life, class-time was set aside throughout both assignments for students to familiarize themselves with the interface through completion of a series of short exercises.
Since most of my students have limited experience with research when they enroll, one of my primary goals for the course generally is to help them develop an understanding of the requirements of rigourous, scholarly research. A great deal of time is spent in class teaching students how to access the library databases, how to choose peer reviewed sources, how to obtain copies of articles and books through interlibrary loans, how to evaluate those sources using Robert Harris’s CARS method, and ultimately, how to integrate sources into a traditional research paper. Throughout this part of the course, students were asked to visit various museums within Second Life, such as the International Spaceflight Museum and Milan Brynner’s “Virtual Starry Night”, and write a short essay about some aspect of the exhibit, such as its use of evidence, style of presentation, effectiveness of interactive displays, and so forth. These short assignments were designed to reinforce the lessons students had learned about research, and to provide them with experience using Second Life.
About a third of the way into the semester, I asked students to complete an exercise in object creation in Second Life. The task involved completion of a simple building–a small cabin constructed of three building blocks (prims) with a variety of textures applied to simulate siding, windows, rafters, and so forth. The assignment was designed so that it could be completed by an inexperienced builder in about 45 minutes (an experienced builder can complete it in about 10 minutes). Since my objective was to isolate the talented builders among my students, rather than train my class to be Second Life architects, the assignment included instructions that it was acceptable to abandon the assignment if it had not been completed within an hour. Of the twenty students enrolled in my class, only one emerged with the skills necessary to participate as a builder in the museum project.
My dreams of a virtual reconstruction of the Western Reserve squashed, I approached the middle of the semester with more reasonable expectations for the Second Life assignment. As students finished work on their annotated bibliography and began writing their research papers, we began discussing the museum project. Our first task was to decide on the subject matter of the museum. Many ideas were advanced, and some were quite ambitious. A number of students wanted to attempt construction of a virtual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and had copyright issues not been insurmountable in the alloted time (about 6 weeks) I might have permitted it. In the end, however, Northeast Ohio’s history as part of the Underground Railroad was chosen as the topic. The students envisioned visitors entering a historically accurate garden through which visitors would stroll while reading displays about the history of the Underground Railroad and Salem, Ohio’s role in that movement. The centerpiece of the museum was to be a reconstruction of a local house that had served as a post on the Underground Railroad, complete with period furnishings and a secret room. Since I had the necessary experience (and inventory on hand) to construct the garden and since our builder’s skills were up to the task of creating a small house, I approved of the idea and placed a large number of books and other materials related to the Underground Railroad on reserve in the library.
Organizationally, students opted to work in three groups: researchers, graphic artists and builder. Researchers were responsible for investigating the history of the Underground Railroad, particularly with regard to Northeast Ohio, as well as writing and editing display text based on their findings. The information was then sent to me via in-world notecards for commentary before being sent back for revisions. Once revisions were completed, the notecards were passed to members of the graphics team who transferred the information to Powerpoint slides for conversion to Targa images for upload into Second Life. The builder was asked to find a local building for recreation, obtain copyright permission for recreating the building, and the construction of the building and the walkway through the garden.
It was at this point that everything began falling apart. For some reason I have yet to divine, students on the research team seemed to forget, if not completely abandon, everything they had learned about evaluating source materials. I was suddenly inundated with notecards filled with questionable information derived from internet sources ranging from the Wikipedia to websites constructed by grade school students. One of the more serious pieces of misinformation my students advanced concerned the authenticity of the folksong “The Drinking Gourd.” Students were citing sources that claimed the song was used by slaves escaping north, pointing to the lyrics as a sort of secret code that helped escapees find their way north. I immediately questioned the claim on the surface as I had difficulty believing that African-Americans would require instruction in determining basic compass direction–two minutes and a Google search later, I had verified my suspicions*:
Could the song as it appears on most recordings and in the three children’s books have been sung by escaping slaves?
No, because the lyrics and chorus were written by Lee Hays and first published in 1947, nearly 80 years after the end of the Civil War. (A much smaller number of recordings use the Randy Sparks version, which came even later.) (Bresler, ¶2-3)
What disturbed me most about this discovery was that evidence questioning the authenticity of the song was much more prevalent on the Internet than claims to the contrary. Indeed, Bresler’s “Follow the Drinking Gourd” website, which includes a rather lengthy exploration of the issue, was available to students as a direct link from their most frequently quoted source, that of James and Leon at NASA Quest. Of course, I took the problem as an opportunity to review evaluating sources with students, and included a more focused discussion on the necessity of verifying information before using it. Although this review had the desired effect of getting more accurate information from students, they continued to focus their research efforts on the Internet and various websites and made little use of the materials I had placed on reserve in the library.
The larger problem with the assignment, however, was one that gradually emerged as I watched students complete the task of writing up the results of their research. Because my intent had been to use Second Life to provide a physical space (that of a gallery) that was otherwise not available to my class, I had failed to consider how text-based information might be created and published in-world. While I was well aware of the limitations of notecards and knew that text would have to be generated out of world and converted to image files for upload to Second Life, the connection I had failed to make was that this would require students to learn the use of programs other than Second Life. Only two of my students came to Second Life with enough experience using PowerPoint to be useful on the graphics team, and their experience using Photoshop (or similar programs) was non-existent. Since time was short, this situation necessitated that I handle most of the graphics work beyond cutting and pasting information from notecards into PowerPoint slides, including the creation of original background textures and conversion of PowerPoint slides to Targa image files. More problematic was entering text into notecards.
While formatting basic paragraphs isn’t especially difficult using the notecard interface within Second Life, the lack of right-click functionality that would have allowed students to generate text in Word (for example) and cut-and-paste it into Second Life easily was not present. This, oddly, hampered students as many were unfamiliar with the keyboard shortcuts necessary to complete the operation. As a result, most students chose to enter their text directly into notecards, eliminating many of the tools students rely on for the creation of text–most notably spell-check. And given that their information was going to be presented on PowerPoint slides, most of my students chose to format their information using bulleted lists, which are also unavailable in Second Life. Also missing from the Second Life notecard interface are the tools needed to underline, italicize, or boldface text, to automatically create hanging indents, or to turn off the option to automatically create hyperlinks, a situation that wreaked havoc on my student’s ability to create citations in recognizable formats. (I require MLA format in my classes.) As my students’ frustrations with the notecard system grew, my frustration with the quality of writing being produced also increased–the two are probably related, I admit–and in retrospect I have to wonder to what extent using notecards for the transmission of text in this course may have impacted my students’ understanding of the use of standardized citation formats, much less the need for them.
Nevertheless, my students were able to complete their project by the assigned deadline, and the museum opened to the public on May 2, 2007. While reception of the museum was favorable, other problems began to be pointed out by visitors. The most frequent criticism visitors had was difficulty reading the displays, usually as a result of the image failing to download quickly and fully resolve, thus creating a blurred version of the exhibit. I had tried to anticipate this problem by creating displays that all layered text in an easily read font on a transparent background against a single background image–thus limiting the size of the text image file that had to be downloaded when viewed. The strategy worked well during off-hours, but not during peak usage hours when more than ten visitors were present in the region of the museum. A few visitors also questioned the use of notecards (available through a notecard dispenser) to provide a bibliography of sources used in the construction of the exhibit, arguing that citations should have been included within the exhibit displays themselves. Overall, however, the museum was a success. It closed on June 2, 2007, when ownership of the space on which the museum had been built reverted to the person who had donated it.
The following semester (Fall 2007), I tried using Second Life in my research writing course a second time. Still concerned about the impact of Second Life’s notecard system on student learning of citation formatting, I decided to integrate the media project with the rest of the class in a more thorough way. Thus, instead of requiring students produce a collaborative museum project, they were required to prepare a multimedia exhibit for presentation in Second Life, based on research they had completed as part of the prospectus, annotated bibliography, research paper assignments. I also decided that in order to help students better understand why my university requires a multimedia presentation in some form as part of this course, I would center the course topic around the Metaverse, its history, development, and the implications it has for real-world social issues like intellectual property rights, privacy, and the law. I planned to start the semester with readings and discussion of Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash, with Lessig’s Code: Version 2.0 as an optional reading for students interested in the legal and governance issues inherent in the development of the Metaverse. Students would center their research around topics based on their understanding of the readings and the issues raised by them.
My plans were beset with problems almost immediately when a family emergency required that I be away from my classes for extended periods during the first four weeks of class. The problems did not arise in the writing assignment; after all, prospectuses are a relatively easy type of paper to learn to write. However, the assigned reading for this section of the course, Neuromancer, proved to be rather more difficult for my students than I had anticipated. Only two students managed to complete the reading by the due date, and several students had abandoned their reading after thirty pages. Most of the in-class discussion centered, therefore, not on interpretive or analytical readings of the text, but discussion of how to read cyberpunk literature, explication of the character, and relevance of the work to real-life–including whether questions of relevance were appropriate when reading literature. While these are all certainly valid points of discussion, I had assumed (based on years of receiving papers on drug abuse) that what Neuromancer had to say about addiction (and by extension, cyberaddiction) would be central to our exploration of the work. But having been absent for several days, I chalked up this departure from my intentions as a consequence of my absence and resulting inability to help students understand the text as they read it. After talking the situation over with my class, we decided to abandon Neuromancer and focus our efforts on Snow Crash instead.
It was with Snow Crash that it became apparent that my students were unwilling to engage non-linear texts, much less the non-linear worldview of Second Life. As we began the same series of short exercises that had been so helpful for my students the previous semester, my students began complaining about the relevance of any online use of computer, beyond using library resources, in a writing class. As we approached the discussion date for Stephenson’s novel, I was increasingly asked what Snow Crash had to do with writing, what Second Life had to do with writing and research, and what, if anything, they were supposed to learn from the experience. While I was sorely tempted to tell my students that had they completed reading the book, they’d know the answer to these questions, I refrained and explained that computer literacy and an understanding of how computers shape literacy were necessary components of their education and future careers. My explanations seemed to fall on deaf ears, however, as our in-class discussions of the book revealed that only one student had finished the reading (though two more would complete it before the end of the semester) and none of the others had made it past the first fifty pages. In fact, even though most of the students had managed to read more than twenty pages of the book, only a very few of them had understood that Hiro Protagonist’s job was delivering pizzas.
At this point, I began to suspect two things were at work: first, that perhaps the readings were too advanced for a sophomore level English class, and second, that I was encountering a resistance to reading generally, rather than a resistance to the subject matter. In the case of my first suspicion, that was quickly laid to rest when one of the students who finished the novel raised the issue of language as a sort of virus for the transmission of ideas during a discussion of possible paper topics. This is, of course, one of the main concerns of Stephenson’s novel, and the comments made by other students in the class in response to the topic demonstrated that it was not beyond their abilities to understand and analyze. I used this opportunity to revisit Snow Crash, and to suggest that it was not too late to read the novel as a way of helping students to further refine their paper topics. While one student did take my advice, most of the class did not, reinforcing my suspicion that I was dealing with a generalized distaste for assigned reading on the part of my students. However, I would have concluded these difficulties were precisely that, had it not been for the resistance and outright objections my students displayed when it came to using Second Life.
I had began to notice that students were reluctant to log into Second Life after their experience with the online tutorials Second Life uses to familiarize users with the client program and general platform. Many students found completing the tutorials very difficult and proceeded to vent their frustrations in class by, again, questioning the applicability of Second Life in the classroom, their education, and their future careers. Other students had little difficulty with the tutorials, but found that using the program cumbersome and overly complicated–particularly when network issues caused the program to run slowly. In-class exercises such as the museum visit were derided as being stupid, busy-work, and, of course, irrelevant. By mid-semester, the only answer that seemed to placate my students was that there was a multimedia component of the course that would require use of Second Life for its presentation and the in-class assignments were designed to help them learn the program for that purpose. Still, I conceded a bit and made the building assignment that had been relatively successful the previous semester optional for students interested in more fully exploring Second Life’s potential as a communication medium.
Only about half of the class attempted the building assignment, and of those trying it, only two managed to compete it within the alloted time, with a third taking several days to work out the intricacies of applying textures to a basic prim. Of the three students completing the exercise, only two opted to use their new-found building skills in the completion of their fourth, multimedia-based assignment. One of these students created an interactive exhibit in which visitors sat during his presentation on leadership skills. Throughout the presentation, he would move the audience around the exhibit by manipulating their seats and grouping people on the basis of various management strategies–demonstrating how categorizing people can be an effective or ineffective management tool. The other, a veteran of the Second Gulf War, recreated a real-world location where he and two other American servicemen had been attacked, leaving one dead. The recreation allowed visitors to walk through the area, facilitating an understanding of how events had unfolded in three-dimensions, providing a deeper understanding of how a person’s placement in an environment can affect perception, ability to act, and so forth. Both presentations were powerful examples of how Second Life can best be utilized as a communications platform, though neither incorporated any aspect of text beyond that needed to develop the presentation in the first place. As for the rest of the class, they chose to make their presentations using PowerPoint slides uploaded into Second Life, delivering them in an on-line speech during which they would click on a slide viewer to change slides.
Despite having been presented with two presentations that demonstrated how Second Life could move a multimedia presentation beyond PowerPoint and into a much more powerful, three-dimensional realm–particularly with the military presentation–and a series of PowerPoint presentations in Second Life that demonstrated how the platform could be used in a business environment as a sort of teleconferencing tool, the semester ended with all but a few students convinced that Second Life held no relevance for them, their chosen field of study, or their future careers.
*Note: It has since been pointed out that slaves in the south actually could not have determined compass directions. “Actually, the literature is full of examples of slaves lacking the most basic navigational knowledge. No knock on them, of course, it was in their ‘owners’’ interest to keep them as ignorant as possible on that score. Knowledge of even the basics, such as the sun seeming to rise in the east and set in the west, was by no means universal. (”Georgia slave John Brown ran away several times before he finally succeeded in reaching freedom. One time… thinking he was traveling north, he walked almost all the way to New Orleans…[1]) See http://www.followthedrinkinggourd.org/Appendix_Teachers_Guide.htm for more.” (Bresler)
Works Cited
Bresler, Joel. “Afterword, or ‘Is this Song “Authentic?”‘” “Follow the Drinking Gourd”: A Cultural History. Joel Bresler, Ed. 2008. 26¶. 19 March 2008. www.followthedrinkinggourd.org/Afterword.htm.
Bresler, Joel. Personal Communication. 19 March 2008. (http://kamaelxevious.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/writing-instruction-in-sl%e2%80%93one-avatar%e2%80%99s-experience-part-two/#comments)
Brynner, Milan. “Virtual Starry Night.” Second Life. 19 March 2008. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Luctesa/110/127/25/.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1986.
Harris, Robert. “Evaluating Internet Sources.” Virtual Salt. 15 June 2007. 48¶. 19 March 2008. http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm.
James, Donald and Mark Leon, Eds. “Explanation of ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd.” NASA Quest: An Educational Website. 10¶. 19 March 2008. http://quest.nasa.gov/ltc/special/mlk/gourd2.html.
Lessig, Lawrence. Code: Version 2.0. New York: Basic, 2006.
Rymaszewskih, Michael , Wagner James Au, Cory Ondrejka, Richard Platel, Sara Van Gorden, Jeanenette Cézanne, Paul Cézanne, Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham, Aleks Krotoski, Celebrity Trollop and Jim Rossignol. Second Life: The Official Guide. 1/e Hoboken, New Jersey: Sybex/John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
Spaceflight Museum Planning Group. “International Spaceflight Museum.” Second Life. 19 March 2008. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Alpha/128/128/22>.
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HELP!
I had planned on starting my tirade (and it would be a tirade–sort of–do rants count?) by saying something REALLY fascinating about how my non-traditional students actually took to Second Life more quickly than did their traditional counterparts. I had planned on starting with a comment by someone who said that non-trads had greater problems than did traditional students when it came to Second Life, but for the life of me I can’t find the source! I know I read it somewhere last week, but now, after 3 hours of poring back over my research, I can’t find it! If you have any ideas where I can find someone who says non-trads don’t take swimmingly to SL, let me know! Thanks.
In the mean time, it’s back to the stacks of photocopies and .pdf files! I’ll post a start tomorrow, whether or not I’ve found anything.