The CLT are currently working with LSE Spanish teachers to create an extracurricular Spanish Club which will be held in the virtual world Second Life (SL) on an island called Castor’s Retreat.   The club will provide online activities such as role plays for students studying Spanish at the LSE.

Last week I attended a Virtual Worlds event at Strathclyde University: Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning where I discovered that all but one UK university have a prescence in SL!   I particularly enjoyed the session by David White from TALL  who spoke about two SL pilots – one for Philosophy and one for Art & Design – that he has been involved in as part of the Open Habitat project.  David reported that the activities that had gone well were those where the environment was part of the discussion (eg discussing Digital identity) or where the process rather than the product were important (collaborative building tasks).  He suggested that the ‘shared experience’ was the key affordance of a virtual world platform.  He also highlighted the need for ground rules for communication because, as with standard text chat, communicating in SL is not straight-forward!

If you’d like to know more about the use of SL at the LSE don’t hesitate to contact us below or via clt-support@lse.ac.uk We’d be happy to show you around Castor’s Retreat  and explore possible uses for teaching.