SL lecture - a new experience

Last night we had a class meeting in Second Life and about 30 people were there. I invited an experienced and knowledgeable SL reference librarian, Daisy, to come and give a talk on what it's like to provide reference services in SL. Since we are an advanced reference class and one of the learning objectives is to develop "awareness of the emerging trends of reference services", I think it'd be interesting to give students some exposure to SL reference and see what they think about it.

However, SL is definitely not an ideal place to have an online meeting and we encountered many difficulties during the meeting - the name tag object I created for students to display their real name suddenly became defective and students were not able to get their name tags as they were supposed to according to the instructions I sent out earlier; some of the students were not able to enable their voice feature so they couldn't hear the speaker; they didn't know how to control their camera so they weren't able to see the slides; -- all sorts of problems. Fortunately we had tech support from our SL campus director Jeremy throughout the meeting, but still, the experience was flat-out frustrating for many students.

I asked them to report their feedback on a Blackboard discussion forum - apparently most are negative. They don't see the value of providing reference services in SL and some of their comments are really bitter. Of course they are entitled to feel however they want about SL reference as SL reference itself is very controversial among librarians. The whole point of the guest lecture and the tour to Info Island last night was to introduce them to SL reference, and then they can decide whether they like it or not. Their perception would be groundless if they didn't spend time in SL and see what it's like to offer reference service there. So now no matter what their opinion is about SL reference, I know they have a personal experience to back it up.

Overall, I did my job, and I got my students some SL experience with regard to reference, but I would never go through this again the next time I teach this class. Managing a SL meeting and a tour is too challenging and SL gets really laggy when over ten people are walking simultaneously. Therefore, I will resort to plan B when it comes to the intro of SL reference - making a Machinima about it and show it to students. If they feel intrigued, they can go explore it themselves; if not, well, fine with me too.

Anyways, last night was s a good learning experience for me as well. I took some snapshots of the meeting:
Our guest speaker - the beautiful Daisy


The meeting was held at the amphitheater on our SL campus


Daisy had her slides up on the virtual projection screen