It’s been eight years since I left the 3D virtual world of Second Life after a few years of experimenting with teaching English, co-creating the SLExperiments groups for teachers interested in language education in SL, and conducting teacher training!
A couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to go back. Daffodil was a bit cross with me for abandoning her, but we made up and are friends again. She still dresses much better than I, that hasn’t changed. But her movements have become a bit clumsy now and it takes her longer to do things, such as adjusting her camera view, rezzing an object, finding stuff in her inventory, etc. She lost her beautiful house at the seaside, too. Well actually, she’s still got the house and furniture in her inventory she said, but nowhere to set it up and settle. So, she was basically just sitting in a corner of a forest, where I had left her (OK, I do feel a bit guilty now…). She told me she kept all our teaching tools and objects, lesson notes, landmarks of interesting places…however, many of the locations don’t exist any longer. How sad is that? Well, she said when you live in a virtual world, you kinda get used to things appearing, being changed or moved, and then disappearing. That’s virtual life for you, she said… Well, it’s not much different in my world either I told her…at which point she took me to a place where she had the right to rez objects, and rolled out our favourite carpet with comfortable cushions, tea glasses and some (to my dismay virtual) food, and we sat down and told each other about our lives in the past eight years in our respective worlds…
When everyone was ‘Zooming’ in the past couple of months since this ‘p’ thing has happened to the real world and schools, universities, businesses, and socialising moved online, my mind kept going back to my Second Life times. As a blended and online learning professional, I know you can have great teaching and learning experiences online, whether in synchronous sessions using video conferencing tools or asynchronously. However, when most of our lives moved online, learners and teachers might benefit from a more immersed experience when working, learning or socialising. There are many more good reasons, but those are for other posts.
I told Daffodil that I was going to start exploring virtual reality for language learning and teaching purposes again, but that this time it wouldn’t just be in Second Life but also other worlds, and that I was planning to use VR headsets too. At which point she jumped up from her cushion and got all excited. ‘I have one, I have one’ she said, and started fiddling in her inventory. I was puzzled. ‘What do you mean you have one?’ – ‘I have a VR headset, wait…’, and there she took it out of her inventory and put it on. I didn’t know what to say. How could I explain to her that this didn’t make sense? ‘Look, you’re an avatar, you are already in a virtual world, you don’t need a VR headset to feel immersed in it.’ – ‘How do you know how I feel?’ she said, visibly hurt. Oh dear…I offended my avatar, and she was right too! Nobody had prepared me for this kind of situation, so I decided I’d best change the subject.
‘So, as I said, I’ll be visiting other worlds. You know, I found out there’re loads of them’ – “Great! I was getting bored here, I’ll come with you and we’ll explore them together, just as we did here back then! So when are we starting? What do you think shall I wear…comfortable clothes and shoes I guess? Right? Why aren’t you saying anything?’ – ‘Eh, I don’t think that’ll be possible. Unfortunately, avatars can’t just travel from one virtual world to another. I’d really love to take you with me. You know in some of the worlds they don’t even allow you to customise your avatar; you have to choose one they offer and you’re stuck with that look. Can you imagine? It’ll really be difficult for me to feel immersed in a world when I look like a robot or animal, and even worse, like a human but completely different from what I look like or would like to look like. I know there’re people who don’t mind this at all, but I do…So, really, I wish I could take you with me…Perhaps one day, one day it will be possible…’
There she was looking upset again…’Look, wherever I go, I’ll take notes and pictures and I’ll come back and report to you. How’s that? I might even try to rent a plot of land here where you can set up your lovely house again, hm, hm?’– ‘Now, that’s an offer! Then, I’d allow you to stay and use the house too sometimes… and sometimes we could go on field trips again and attend conferences together, like in the old times!’ – ‘Yes! Absolutely. That’s how we’ll do it!’
And so both of us were happy and excited about phase two of our virtual reality for language education explorations!
Bring it on!