Connecting through virtual worlds

This post is a bit more about my personal life rather than my virtual world life, yet I think it underlines an important feature of virtual worlds and video games.  I recall Dr. Peter mentioning that his interest in video games and virtual worlds stemmed from interactions with his hānai nephew.  Gaming allowed them to connect and find common ground, it inspired a rather quiet young boy to come out of his shell, interact, and engage.  In my own experience as a mother, I am finding similar patterns with my son.  When children are very young, you are the center of their world and they look to you for everything, yet this changes a great deal (as it should) as they grow older.  My son, Keahi, is still relatively young, but old enough to think that mom is uncool and interacting with her is a chore.  If I ask him what he did or how school was, I generally get one or two word answers.  That is unless I ask him about ...Minecraft.

Keahi loves playing Minecraft.  I often use it as a way to motivate him to do other things like homework.  He's learning to read, however is pretty uninterested in the books he brings home from school, except for the book I bought him about Minecraft.  While it's still a little above his level, we practice reading with it.  It's kind of funny because I have never actually played Minecraft, yet I have daily conversations about zombies, creepers, endermen, lava, pick axes etc.  In fact my first exposure to Minecraft was not from my son, but from Dr. Peter's LTEC 643 class.  During that semester Dr. Peter organized a Minecraft Feast event for homeless keiki on the Leeward side.  I volunteered at the registration table and was amazed to see how enthralled these kids were.  Later when I got home, I installed Minecraft on my tablet for my son to try.  He wasn't too interested at first, however several months later he got more into it.  These days it's pretty much all I hear about.

The teacher in my tries to look for ways we can use Minecraft for other opportunities, counting block, practicing writing character names, drawing the characters etc.  A few days ago I was working on the annotated list and watching some Minecraft tutorial, needless to say my son has never been more interested in my homework. While I still have not played Minecraft (and will probably be as bumbling and inept at it as I am in SL and OpenSim), I appreciate the way it allows me to connect with my son.

Our Minecraft drawings

Educational Design Tour

I am admittedly a bit slow at Second Life, so the 45 minutes in class wasn’t really enough for me to fully engage in the sims I visited.  Luckily, on my subsequent visits, I was able to have a much more engaging, immersive  first person experience.  

I will start with Beowulf & King Arthur’s Literature at Camelot.  It was a very engaging, albeit text heavy sim.  I liked the quest and quiz features, though I admit I was not able to complete many of the tasks.  This said, the sim was very impressive.  I think what first stuck me was the immense size and complexity of the castle.  When I entered it had a certain dark, medieval feel which I enjoyed.  I liked going into the Beowulf Hall and clicking on the bloodstains to learn more about the story.  Richter et al mention, “The way in which assessment is built into the learning environment may be of special interest to SL educators” (2007, p.25).  This certainly proved to be true for me, the quizzes embedded in the treasure chests were a nice feature, while they are essentially an assessment tool, they don’t feel like one. I did feel small jolts of excitement for the questions I answered correctly and the ones I got wrong I often Googled and answered again.  This is an important consideration in assessment, if we want to think of assessment as a learning tool, why do we often give students only one chance?  We learn from our mistakes, so being able to go back, research, and answer the question again provides a powerful learning opportunity.

I very vaguely recall reading Beowulf in middle school or high school, but didn’t remember much about it.  I feel that visiting this sim made me much more interested in the story, it also did an excellent job of giving the historical context and symbolic meaning.  I think if my English teacher had taught us Beowulf through SL, I would have remembered much more.  

As a language teacher, I was very excited to visit Monash University’s Chinese Island.  When visiting this sim, I was first struck by the extreme attention to detail.  On my first visit I went to the museum and looked at the exhibits.  I noticed that unlike many of the other sims I had visited this one had a lot more audio features.  I was able to click on the artwork and hear descriptions in both Mandarin and English.  

During my second visit to the island, I was able to do quite a bit more.  On my second visit I started in the restaurant, I liked how you could click on the dishes to hear about them or on the menu to hear how to order in Chinese, however, the audio on these items was very soft and there was Chinese pop music playing in the background which made it difficult to hear.  I couldn’t figure out how to turn down the volume of the music.  It was a little frustrating. As a language teacher I did appreciate the efforts made to teach contextualized language, for example the “number of” phrases while ordering in a restaurant.  

 One of the memorable details from the restaurant was the bathroom.  I have never been to China, but I have been to Japan and have many not so fond memories of the squat toilets there.  Well, the bathroom in the restaurant had squat toilets, it’s small details like this that show how much careful thought and attention to detail went into creating this sim.  

After I left the restaurant, I happened upon a street vendor.  I greeted him in Chinese and he gave me a phone HUD.  At first I did not understand what it was, but then (more or less) got the hang of it.  The Google maps function on the phone allowed me to travel to locations or do activities on the sim.  I thought this was a pretty cool feature and once I had sort of figured out how to use it, it made the experience more enjoyable.  I decided to see the dragon boats, however when I got there the video wouldn’t load. It was a bit frustrating, but I was able to learn about the dragon boats from the notecard and start the quest (though I haven’t finished it yet).  

Experiencing these sims gave me a deep appreciation for the amount of thought and work that must have gone on in their creation.  I think on my initial visit I was wondering and a bit lost, but on my subsequent visits I was able to more fully engage and enjoy the experience.  This brings me back to the idea of letting students re-do, relearn, and explore.