When you’re bleeding edge there’s always a chance of hemorrhage: What happens with things go awry teaching in SecondLife
Last week’s “Black Wednesday” update lasted well into Thursday with all kinds of system weirdness. Textures were missing (including the grass), folks were missing money, items, landmarks etc. All the typical update hiccups that we’ve come to expect. However, by Thursday night Linden was conducting rolling restarts if regions during my class. Students trying to teleport to other regions got stuck in limbo, thrown back home, or worse, booted out of the system all together.
At first the class group chat was full of students freaking out, worrying that their inability to complete the night’s task would cause them a grade, or that it was just their computer that was affected. After a few minutes of frantic messages, however, we all realized that we were all being affected and the attitude changed to a jovial, chaotic party-like atmosphere. Students with missing skins showed up with “missing image” printed across their faces and bodies.
Meanwhile, as I lamented the total failure of my planned assignment, I realized that there was an important lesson in my students’ reactions. They were rolling along with the problems, enjoying themselves despite the confusion, and talking to each other. Some checked the Linden blog for status updates on the problem while others, stranded in far away lands, sent back messages about what they were seeing. The assignment I had planned may have been trashed but their learning was not.
Whether it’s because they’re “digital natives” or because they are just a really great group of students, they adapted to the difficulty and didn’t just log out and give up. I was impressed by their tenacity, sense of play, and desire to learn.
September 19th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Hey there, Intellagirl… I’m Akela from Second Life Insider. Would you be interested in being interviewed for the blog? If you’re not familiar with it, go check it out: www.secondlifeinsider.com
Drop me a line if you’re amenable to the interview, at akelatal@gmail.com. Thank you!
September 21st, 2006 at 6:27 am
Reminds me of a neat essay by Michael Joyce, entitled “The Momentary Advantage of our Awkwardness,” in which he argues that what makes modern computing systems so interesting is NOT their high-polish visual sheen. Systems like Windows XP (and Second Life, I’d argue) thrive of a certain celebration of the surface appearance — not to say that SL is superficial, but rather that the surface of display is where the major actions take place. (Witness your highly-interesting avatar experiment from the other day.)
What makes such visual systems interesting, Joyce says, is not their sheen, but the moments at which the sheen completely fails. We love our visuals, but what’s educational is the process of seeing those visuals fall out from under us. I remember from when I was a kid that we always had to get most creative at the point where all the air fell out of the basketball — “oh crap, what’re we going to do now?” “Make up something else to do, I guess.”