The first session with students in SL had its good and bad moments.  The session was disrupted by students getting lost and not being able to find the lab (L403).  We started with three students who were full of enthusiasm and couldn’t wait to get busy!  One of these students had been so enthusiastic that he had been into SL the evening before class just to get a head start.  Eddie (Druss Warcliffe) arrived with a brand new avatar, the cutest little blue dragon!  Shantelle (Kodee Button) and Cornelia (Laurelle Marialla) were soon almost as adept as Eddie.

Latecomers, Aziz (a280q Engineer), and Mal (who spent the period as Tarqel Korpov) arrived late.  Aziz had a problem remembering his password, and Mal struggled a bit with the technology as he is a brand new computer user.

Students had a checklist to use to mark off skills as they acquired them and felt confident with them.  Students started at the landing place on Kowhai, and worked through the Orientation boards provided.  Then they went to the Foundation build, practising walking, running, flying, sitting, and camera controls.  The garden was an inviting and motivating place to use for skills practice (thanks to Aaron – SL Isa Goodman, our wonderful builder).

Students wanted to play with their appearances so used the shop to obtain clothing, and were soon all attired in clothing of their own choice.  They were soon editing Appearance, making themselves, taller or shorter, thinner or fatter, adjusting face shape, foot size and clothing fit.

In order to experiment with teleporting, students visited Koru and had a quick play on the dodgems, dance floor, and beach.  They used voice chat, and tried out a few gestures.  We returned to Kowhai for the media to take photos, and then ended up on the Sandbox on Koru.  Students were given a couple of gifts, a folder of skins and a folder of clothes.  On the Sandbox students were able to rez their boxes, and copy the contents to Inventory.

So what was good about the session?

• Student motivation was extremely high.  In fact, it was so high it was hard to hold them back in any way.  They wanted to try the next thing, learn the next skill, just continually moving forward at a break-neck pace.
• Even our one non-computer user, although he struggled at times with lack of confidence, spent much of the period with a smile on his face!
• Students were very supportive of each other and helped each other with no hesitation or reserve.

What could have been improved?

• Perhaps there were too many people in the room – with three visitors from the Manukau Courier, our MIT staff media person Donna, Oriel (SL – Noumea Sands) handling media questions, our MIT staff photographer, Maryanne (SL – Nugget Mixemup), and myself (SL – Briarmelle Quintessa), we outnumbered the students!!  Not an ideal situation.  The students didn’t seem to mind and carried on regardless!
• The front computer was not behaving well!  It was impossible to demonstrate to the students what I wanted them to do.  This made it harder to keep all students on the same activity.  This was made even more difficult by the media moving around asking questions and the photographer setting up his shots.
• The students on three of the pcs found the lagging very hard to handle.  We did not take into consideration that we started class at midday on Monday, Sunday night in the States, a very busy time in SL.  Once they shifted onto the Macs they were quite happy!
• Half of the class were not in attendance.  This was disappointing, but I am not sure what I could have done to prevent this.  All students were notified of the change in classroom, and the room change was put on the whiteboard in B Block.  All students who were absent last week, were phoned or emailed, if their contact details were available.  Hmmm….  This is something I must try to remedy before Wednesday when the second class starts in SL and the class today has its second session.

All in all it was a good experience that the students enjoyed.  There was evidence that many skills were learned.