The backstory of Second Italy, a new UTS project.

[Aleteia Infinity]

Backstory: I teach in a program called International Studies at UTS. It consists of some face to face subjects in contemporary cultures and societies and languages for three years and a fourth year when students go and study overseas in one of our partner universities. The idea is that our graduates will learn how to work and live cross and interculturally. I teach in the Italy Major.
We use a variety of not very good tools like email and Blackboard to teach students OS. It seemed only logical to me that if we could have students all in one virtual place at one time we could run seminars and workshops, which are much more effective than email exchange since they promote dialogue as opposed to rumination. Also students who are OS stress the benefits of communicating with students who will go OS in the next year and again building a virtual platform where they could all meet seemed like a good idea. I then flapped around SL trying to find interesting Italian speaking sims where students could go and practice their language skills (without being immediately chatted up according to stereotype) before going and after they return from Italy. The Italian spoken/written in SL is very real, much more than textbook Italian and this is, for our program, a distinctive advantage. But I am not a language teacher and I will leave this side of things to my colleague.
UTS gave me a small grant to develop 'Second Italy' as a pilot project to teach International Studies in virtual environments. I am building an island, called Isola del Giglio - do come and visit- where we can meet and run seminars.
It is not a particularly innovative project: I am not interested at all in my students building stuff, or enacting or experimenting with SL as a technology. Great if they do, of course. I am interested in building a horizontal knowledge network on contemporary Italian cultures through P2P exchanges and conversations. I suspect that having an avatar and an embodiment, even if only visual/aural, will create a different range of interactions from the usual online discussion forums. SL builds intertextual, layered, ludic, collaborative and affective environments and I want to understand what happens when students meet in such a place rather than on the rather sterile boxes of discussion boards.
I will start, officially, teaching at Isola del Giglio in September, running as series of research methodology workshops (before that I will run a couple of workshops on how and where to buy good hair and cool skins because I surely do not want a gaggle of noob looking people around me). I will keep you posted!

[Dean Groom]

Fantastic, thanks for sharing ... look forward to hearing how the students take to it. Dean