When it all goes wrong!

Graham pointed me to a blog entry about a teaching experience that went horribly wrong in Second Life™

I'm not highlighting this to poke fun of the poor teacher - in fact she goes on to have some very useful comments about how she would do it next time to do it better that are well worth reading for everyone. So, to some extent I'm doing it to share access to her blog and the information. However, I am also doing it to link back to some of my earlier posts about teaching in SL and how that relates to teaching IRL.

For example, Margarita points out that:

If I were in a F2F setting, i would have never carry on with the activity: I would have stopped, said to participants let’s change and tackle the basics. Or i would have split the session into two groups: guiding newbies step by step, provided intermediate participants with a self-paced tutorial and just giving feedback on demand.

Definitely an object lesson for us all! Most of us teaching in SL are teachers IRL first. Whilst I would maintain that there are differences in approach in some aspects, we each have our accumulated experience of whether a class is working or not and often some immediate response as to how to fix it. Don't ignore that voice - you worked hard to acquire it and it does know what it's talking about.

I'm reminded of an earlier blog entry on this blog about a class I attended that was, frankly, a disaster and some of the comments attached to it. Good classes in SL, I believe, still need the planning and structure to be a good class. You might well (depending on how you teach IRL) teach in a different mode (more socratic, no lecturing etc.). Some of the challenges and mistakes that Margarita identifies are dependent on Second Life and it's structure (arranging students in a ring of 20m diameter so they can all hear each other for example), but others are dependent on general teaching principles - review required knowledge first, start with a simple exercise and then build up, pretest students for basic competence with pre-requisities etc.

Finally one really worth mentioning to new teachers in Second Life. Practise FIRST! Margarita mentions it as something to do for next time (if you read this Margarita and want a 'victim' to practice on, let me know and if I can, I'll be there). Ages ago I commented that Beth did it with her classes too - she would put out an appeal to the educators lists asking if anyone would like to come to her practice class so she could see how it went. Her classes went well, and she no longer does this regularly, as she has grown confident about teaching in Second Life. Depending on how you did your teacher training, you almost certainly had practice classes, trial runs, tried things out. Think about the last time you changed institutions (or presented at a conference away from 'home'): Do you try to get a feel for the technology, how easy the projector is to turn on, can you access the internet, will the machines they've provided run Second Life etc? Of course you might not manage this, but I bet you try. Why not try it in Second Life too?

Posted by Eloise Pasteur in General, Learning for all, SL tips
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#1 - Hiro Sheridan 2008-06-16 22:43 - (Reply)

El, Before I used SL to teach my classes I attended one of Desi's classes to see how she ran them. She has a different style than I do but I learnt a lot just by sitting in. So I couldn't agree more. If you're new to SL teaching either sit in on others classes or practice on some guinea pigs before you do it for real yourself.
-Hiro

#2 - Margarita Pérez-Garcia 2008-06-21 14:51 - (Reply)

Hi there,
I have tried to comment on your post but i received a message about my comment being identified as spam...
I tried twice. Maybe you have them in your moderation queue. Maybe not...
So i am sending my comment here:

*********************************

Eloise, I would like to give you some further insight towards understanding "A teaching nightmare!". This post presents itself as a short narrative that was written as part of a wider research process using storytelling to describe experiences in the area of teaching and learning in Second Life. I have been studying 'hand-on workshops' for several months in the role of participatory observation. From the analysis and mapping of these workshops, we (Steven and I) elaborated a taxonomy that covers four main processes and 26 criteria.
http://flickr.com/photos/margaperez/2080818919/
http://flickr.com/photos/margaperez/2081603932/

Amongst the results of our research we found a tension between teacher's IRL experience, pedagogical approach and the control of the virtual environment. Control (of the space, of conversational flow, of communication dynamics) appeared to be a factor that greatly influenced the outcomes of the workshop and the difficulty for experienced IRL teachers is that this belong to a specific set of knowledge and skills related to teaching in SL.

Reflecting about this I wanted to test with myself, and evaluate if an experienced SL denizen in the grid since 2006, IRL teacher for more than 16 years, but without any specific knowledge of the 'backstage of ·hands-on workshops' (e.g. never used a script to give automatic instructions) was capable of presenting a practical workshop and evaluating its outcomes. I wanted to know what other criteria for success I would find … when this time being an insider!

I agree, practice first is good advice. However in my opinion, this has a lower impact when plotted against other criteria such design/display of the learning environment. This experience allowed me to identify some missing criteria in the grid such as 'interaction policies' and 'didactic strategies for individualisation of learning in a short synchronous session'. There is also one issue that interests me and this is about the time spent in the preparation of the activity. I would appreciate if you shared your experience about this.

Finally, a word about telling unsuccessful stories. I am convinced that unsuccessful stories can uncover good practices and help us to identify better ways of using virtual environments for education. Sadly these stories disappear behind the culture of the successful-look-at-me-teacher or the too-shy-to-recognize-I-have-also-failed.

I will kindly accept your offer to test the next workshop. So be prepared for an invitation! But I would also like to interview you as experienced teacher. Finally I was wondering if you would like to tell me a meaningful story about teaching and learning in Second Life: one that worth the effort to be passed on, that will smooth my path as a virtual teacher!

#2.1 - Eloise 2008-06-21 15:05 - (Reply)

As you can see Maragarita had issues posting her comment, so she did the smart thing and emailed it directly to me, so I've added it for her.

She asks me a couple of quite in-depth questions, which I will get back to when I've had a chance to think about them and generate a response, but the quick bits I can reply to now:

I'd be happy to be interviewed in SL sometime, as well as being a guinea pig to be practiced on. I'll be in touch to set up a time. I will try to come up with a good story for you too - and like you I think we can learn from mistakes, sometimes more than we can learn from our successes. I'd go so far as to say we almost always more from other people's horror stories than we learn from their success stories.

Thank you for keeping the dialogue alive - it looks to me like you probably didn't add an email or a homepage (that will automatically trigger the spam filter, since none of the words you used did), but if you can't reply this way, I'll happily post your replies by hand.

El.

#2.2 - Eloise 2008-06-25 15:04 - (Reply)

As promised a more detailed reply to Margarita's comment.

With regards to practise having a lower impact than the other features, I guess I must count myself in the "unconvinced" category. I'm not saying that good design and the like are unimportant, indeed they're essential as I hope my original post and the posts I linked out made clear.

I think the think that practising the class does is let you identify the areas which you can improve, barring those that are specific to the specific class. If your design skills weren't up to scratch for this challenge - and that would be because you designed based on RL experience and got the designing wrong for SL rather than lack of teaching experience - the practise would help identify that. If, however, you'd got the pitch of the content horribly wrong, you'd identify that. If you'd got some good RL habits that prove to be bad SL habits to work on, the practise should identify that.

As time goes by and you acquire more experience of teaching in SL you have that experience of what works and what doesn't work within SL to add to your experience of teaching in general. The closest analogy I can think of is the switch from lecturing to groups of 100+ to teaching 1:1 with a dyslexic learner. They are both teaching skills, and whilst you may prefer one or the other style of teaching, you can learn how to do both. However, anyone who has tried both would suggest they hit almost completely different subsets of the teaching tools we use and that it takes time to adjust to the new one. I think teaching in SL is like that.

As for the preparation time, from what I understand you were preparing for a new type of class, first time teaching the materials, new teaching environment. I'm not surprised it took "too long" to prepare when compared to preparing, even for a new class, in a classroom setting and teaching environment you are already used to. If you think back to your teacher training, how long did you take to prepare for your first few classes? Maybe not as long as you did for this, but still much longer than you for a class to teach now. I find now that preparation time is about the same for me for a RL and an SL class of similar type, but I've been teaching in SL for 3 years now.

I don't have a concrete story of a failure that I haven't already blogged. I do think though, thinking back over it, I've changed the style of my teaching somewhat. In my very early days I used to struggle to get feedback from the learners, so I specifically asked for it. It made me realise, in part, how much I relied on visual feedback because I found myself wanting to ask after every sentence! I've calmed down now, and only ask every now and again, but I've also noticed (and it was commented on in my latest teaching observation) that I've started checking IRL out loud more often and in better ways.

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