Students' reflections on the activity on SmallWorlds

Our students Chris and Kieran 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:

I found the tutorial in Small Worlds incredibly engaging, if a bit surreal! We first met in the “MA for DTLT” space and sat around discussing the pros and cons of using SW for language learning. What struck me was how engaged I was when in this virtual world and also how less self-conscious I was. I liked the informal manner of the discussion too, and Kieran (or “Captain”, as he named his avatar) was on form and the humour being used by us all had me laughing a lot at my computer screen. Learning should be fun, so that is another positive aspect of SW.
The picture below is from the first tutorial and shows us (or our avatars rather) relaxing on the virtual beach. Although this looks like we are doing nothing, the discussion was about language learning believe it or not!
There are obviously many positives and negatives when using virtual worlds for learning and I think Kieran may be more vocal about the drawbacks (so over to you Kieran :-)). The lack of an audio option was noticeable, as was the slight frustrating occurrence of speech bubbles overlapping, although this can be overcome by opening the chat box at the bottom of the screen.


Chris

As Chris has pointed out, I am usually the more critical one when it comes to applications as such. Firstly, I found this application, although somewhat fun, a bit outdated (the software). It was running at 10 FPS at best and I found myself more focused in trying to get my avatar to move and follow simple commands than engaging in the discussion with the group. I agree with Chris and found that the lack of audio in this communicative software was a negative, particularly for the purpose of our MA in DTLT meeting. However, live forums, and discussions ages have been around for years and they all rarely include live audio chat. A discussion board could hold over 100 users so an audio input may cause more chaos than what these platforms already have.
I tried to step away from my negative attitude to see how this can benefit language students. To summarise, I feel that this would be great as an additional project for students to interact with each other and practice the target language. This platform can be one that allows mistakes and promotes peer to peer correction. This would be particularly appropriate for those students who lack confidence and have anxiety. This could be a way for them to engage with their peers, while maintaining anonymity.
From a teachers perspective, it would be great if a platform could record or send a feed of the discussions to the teacher so that the language can be monitored. This would of course need to have each student's consent, but would this effect the way students interact if they know they are being monitored? Can a teacher really involve themselves at all? If students are aware of this, they could fall into the Hawthorne effect, by demonstrating fabricated behaviour to appease the teacher, which will effect their language input.
Overall, this was a good activity and I feel that if developed correctly for the purpose of language students, a platform like this could shape a whole curriculum for those studying from overseas.