The virtual environment showed in the picture was created for the tutorial in SmallWorlds and was a familiar setting to everyone. It consisted of a cozy outdoor space where we could all sit together, drink a coffee and eat a snack. Our first meeting in the game was visually well planned, as choosing such an environment made us feel more at ease with the technology, no matter what our age, origin, gender, background or familiarity with SmallWorlds was. Cecilia encouraged us to sit together and this reminded us of a physical classroom arrangement (U-shape). The learning environment played an important role in the teacher's scaffolding as it introduced us to the activity.
The three of us found creating and personalisation of an avatar as one of the advantages. Most of us chose our lookalikes; we tried to make them similar to our true selves. They also reflected our personalities (e.g. Kieran brooding by himself by the beach in the Pirate Bay; Irena quietly observing and listening to others; Chris cracking jokes; etc.). It was fun trying to recognise who was who. It was also interesting to explore what avatars could do (dancing, eating, drinking).
On the other hand, we felt that even though this activity provided the opportunity to interact and collaborate with our peers, it was challenging to develop discussions related to the weekly topic since the conversations were difficult to follow and a few times some of us got quite distracted. This could potentially represent an issue for our students if we used VW for Language Teaching, as they would probably get distracted because the original purpose of such online games is in fact distraction and enjoyment.
As it can be seen in the screenshot, the avatars are talking about different topics (almost like monologues). Furthermore, since the activity was mainly visual, we did not really understand the learning objective of the session in terms of content, but we mainly focused on skills like moving around the environment.
The three of us found creating and personalisation of an avatar as one of the advantages. Most of us chose our lookalikes; we tried to make them similar to our true selves. They also reflected our personalities (e.g. Kieran brooding by himself by the beach in the Pirate Bay; Irena quietly observing and listening to others; Chris cracking jokes; etc.). It was fun trying to recognise who was who. It was also interesting to explore what avatars could do (dancing, eating, drinking).
On the other hand, we felt that even though this activity provided the opportunity to interact and collaborate with our peers, it was challenging to develop discussions related to the weekly topic since the conversations were difficult to follow and a few times some of us got quite distracted. This could potentially represent an issue for our students if we used VW for Language Teaching, as they would probably get distracted because the original purpose of such online games is in fact distraction and enjoyment.
As it can be seen in the screenshot, the avatars are talking about different topics (almost like monologues). Furthermore, since the activity was mainly visual, we did not really understand the learning objective of the session in terms of content, but we mainly focused on skills like moving around the environment.
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