Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

I am amazed that our Teaching Spanish in Second Life group now has 51 members. We have been meeting monthly for five months now. As I am preparing the agenda for our meeting next Tuesday, I have been reflecting on the way that Second Life has opened up these possibilities for collaboration. With voice chat, we are able to speak with each other about language learning, literally from all over the world. Last month we had members from Mexico, Germany, Italy and the U.S. all online together as we toured the facilities of the Glendale Community College (Phoenix, Arizona) Spanish program. Calisto Encinal has built a beautiful interactive building for Spanish instruction. He even has a working bathroom, for those necessary moments. Oh no, Hacienda Segunda Vida doesn't have a bathroom...
Our agenda includes: getting our students together with native speakers for voice chat; sharing our office hours with all our students so that they can visit other faculty; sharing techniques and inventory. For example, Calisto gave us all a device that sends the students up into the sky for small group work. They stay on their pods in the sky until the instructor brings them down. They seriously look like they are sitting on pegs in purple cereal bowls. They can see other groups in the distance, but can't hear them. It is a great device when you have a whole class working on a project in small groups. One fact of working internationally is the clock. We generally have our meetings at 8:00 pm EST, but realized last time that our members from Germany and Italy were up in the middle of the night to attend. This month we are meeting at 8:00 am EDT, to accommodate their schedules.
I am also looking forward to the SL LAnguage '08 conference on May 23rd on EduNation. I went last year and heard speakers from many countries talk about the challenges and opportunities of teaching in SL. I had a proposal accepted, so this year I will be speaking on "Coordinating the Physical Classroom and Teaching from My Virtual Hot Tub: Hybrid Spanish Classes in Practice." The conference will run for twenty-four hours and each presenter will speak two times. More on that as I see the schedule.
All the best from the Hacienda,
Flora