Students' reflections on the activity on SmallWorlds

Our students Maria, Eugenia, and Agata at the Master of Arts in Digital Technologies for Language Teaching collaboratively reflect on their experience on doing activities on an online Virtual World. Read their thoughts:

We found it quite difficult at first to get involved with the topic of Virtual worlds. In our case, and probably based on our lack of experience, we could see little pedagogical potential in the activity at first, and were more inclined to take it as a fun last module of the course. However, after our tutorial on Friday, we realized this is the type of activities you need to personally experience to actually understand its potential. Once we were part of it, we could genuinely understand its possible uses as a learning tool as well as its limitations.
From the social point of view, we find that an environment like SmallWorlds could help build that sense of community that many times is missing in online courses. It increases social presence in a more relaxed and less controlled setting. Besides, sitting around the campfire gave us the feeling of a non-threatening environment, where sharing occurred in a more horizontal and democratic manner and roles of tutors and students were less marked.
As far as limitation goes, online security is an element that cannot be overlooked. If used with underage students, steps must be taken to ensure a safe environment were instances of interaction with strangers must be minimised.
Both of us created avatars which resembled our real-selves and realized that at certain points of our interaction we experienced a feeling of “self-awareness”, especially when dealing with some situations which could interfere in how we were viewed by others.