Crossing the virtual divide

IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG PCE
Harrogate, UK / Avalon Learning, Second Life
7 April, 2010

Bringing together participants in ‘real life’ in Harrogate, UK, with virtual participants at Avalon Learning in the virtual world Second Life, this year’s IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG PCE demonstrated the permeability of the real/virtual divide with frequent crossovers between Harrogate and Second Life.  Participants in Second Life, where I was based, viewed videos, watched slide presentations, listened to discussions in Harrogate via an audio hookup, and carried out their own discussions in audio and text channels.  It was a great demonstration of multimodal literacies in action …

4 - Conf (Avatars Listening to Presentation) - B

I kicked off the day in Second Life with my video and slide presentation, Digital literacies: Where do we start?, and followed up with a Q & A session and discussion which spanned Second Life and ‘real life’.  My video, slides and session photos can be viewed on the Digital Literacies research page of my wiki (see Artefacts 4A – 4D).  Scott Thornbury, based in Harrogate, followed with a presentation entitled Has the language lab failed? The third presenter of the day, Stephen Bax, was also based in Harrogate.

I couldn’t stay for the whole day, given the time difference between Australia and the UK, but the section in which I participated was a good indication of where new technologies and, more importantly, new literacies are taking us – despite certain challenges we’re facing along the way.

For more details of the whole event, plus videos of the Second Life discussions, see Heike Philp’s overview on the Avalon blog.

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