On Friday Ming and I co-presented at the LLAS E-learning Symposium at the University of Southampton. The title of our presentation was 'MA TESOL and Applied Linguistics Students Explore Second Life'. We reported on a project which took place over seven weeks at the end of 2009. The project was done in collaboration with languagelab.com, which has a space in Second Life called 'English City', in which EFL learners can practise using functional English in simulated real-world environments. The main focus of the activity for our students, who are all working in the field of TEFL, was to observe classes at languagelab, to reflect on their observations, and to consider whether Second Life might be a viable environment for EFL teaching in their particular contexts. Data is still being gathered and analysed to give us the full picture of how the students viewed the experience.

The project involved piloting a series of e-tivities which could potentially be built into the optional CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) module on the Online MA in the future. The design of the e-tivities was based on Salmon's (2004) five-stage model, and involved the integration of Second Life with the Blackboard discussion forum.

Of the approximately 120 students enrolled in the whole MA programme, 18 accepted the invitation to participate in the project. Six of these students actually created accounts for themselves in Second Life, and four then went on to observe EFL classes in Languagelab.com. (Two dropped out after the training due to insurmountable technical problems.)

Students used the Blackboard discussion forum to share information about the classes they had observed and to reflect on their experiences. The use of the asynchronous discussion board turned out to be critical to the success of the pilot, as it enabled students to interact with one another and with tutors, even when it proved difficult or impossible to meet in Second Life due to time zone differences and other logistics. Our partnership with languagelab enabled us to 'deliver' a component of a course on Second Life without having to either build anything in SL or to arrange synchronous meetings with our students in SL. We are seeing this as a transferable model: for example, a teacher of Art History could follow the same steps, just sending students to the Sistine Chapel in SL or to an art gallery, and any related knowledge-construction tasks involving interaction between students could take place largely on an asynchronous discussion forum.

We are planning to publish a description of the e-tivity design, along with a case study based on this pilot, as an OER as part of the OTTER (link) project. We will report in future blog posts on students' reflections on the experience.

Gabi Witthaus, 1 Feb 2010