Reflection on visit with Spiff Whitfield

I "teleported" from our visit with Spiff Whitfield with a valuable lesson about how how education can be used in SL. Spiff's presentation taught me that I had been viewing SL all wrong, which has contributed to a lot of my disgruntlement with the program.
You see, I kept going into SL questioning how I could use it with a group of students. But constant tech problems and confusion over controls, not to mention the fact that not all learning in SL can be hands on, meaning that a lot of information is recieved through notecards, I kept thinking that text books and movies were just as good, if not a better resources. Spiff showed us ( and I know that Esme has said this to, but I didn't hear at well) that SL is better suited for helping educators work together to enrich their lessons and knowledge about their content area. Spiff listed a variety of locations that he has attended with other educators (most of which had a social-studies theme) and talked about the rich conversations he has had with other teachers about the subjects these Sims respresented. To see what Spiff was talking about, I spent some time in Virtual Harlem, at Spriff's recommendation. It is a neat place. It gives you a visual of what Harlem looked like in the 20's, with its famous theaters and rich artistic culture. There were images and notecards about famous African-American artists who transformed how artists of their color were recieved by popular culture. As I was sitting there watching the show, I remembered that I read a book my freshman year of college entitled When Harlem Was in Vogue. I had completely forgotten about this bookuntil I was sitting their in Virtual Harlmen, but suddenly I had a memory of all this information. It occured to me that although I was not in Virtual Harlem with a lot of educators, but had I been I would have undoubtebly benefitted from the other teachers.
Experiencing something can jog a memory, which can lead to more depth in a conversation. Teachers who know a little about Harlem in the 20's could meet in Virtual Harlem, exchange information and because they are connecting the information to their "surroundings" then they may just get more from the conversation.
I am sure that there was a lot more I could have learned from Spiff's presentation, and I certainly did appreciate the lengthy list of great Sims to visit that he provided us with. But what I really got out of was that SL serves a great ways for teachers, who would have never had a way way to meet otherwise, to excange their knowledge about a variety of topics and learn from one another.

An Interesting Approach to Using SL for Language Arts

The other day I was in SL looking for different islands used for Language Arts classrooms, when I found one that focused on the Robert Frost poem, The Road Less Traveled. My assumption was that I would find an island full of fact on Robert Frost, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the island designed as a place for students to collaborate and show their own intrepretation of the poem; after they removed its literal meaning. The assignment was given to a group of seventh graders, and instead of them talking about a time they did something different (which is what I would have done as a seventh grader reading this poem) the students created an area where other students can learn about eating disorders. The set up hits you hard because it is full of actual student images, images of people who suffer from eating disorders, and when you stand still fact cards slam into making sure you learn the hard truth about eating disorders.
It is hard for me to say, because obviously I wasn't there, but I would imagine that this assignment in SL provided a number of learning experiences. Among those is collaboration amongst a class to put all of this together. I am not 100% sure what building in SL entails, but I imagine that there are small costs, and that these students had to work together to really decide how this site would look. Another than forming communication and computer skills, these students must have had a heft conversation about the meaning of the poem and how that poem can be used for something other than its literal meaning. I'd be interested to know just how involved the teacher was in guiding students through the conversations.
As I think more about what I want to do for my own final project, I am intrigued by the idea of providing students with a place where they can work together to respond to literature and create intense methods of sharing their concerns.