Intellagirls’ Rhetoric "Board" Game

In her blog on February 13, Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins described a SecondLife-based Rhetoric “Board” Game she created to use in the rhetoric class(es) she teaches; reading her summary of the game is a valuable use of time. This is an incredibly creative use of several aspects of the Second Life interface and environment that can be informative to others teaching in other disciplines.

First, the game takes advantage of immersing learners in a learning space within the SL environment that creates a spatial relationship between abstract concepts. It may be an artificial spatial relationship; however, the visualization of the star creates more “memory hooks” for learners to remember audience, voice, medium, goal and context. Granted, graduate or upper level undergraduate students may be engaging these concepts at a much deeper level than simple recall or comprehension, but the visualization and exercise is relevant to learners of any level engaging the same or similar concepts. Second Life clearly makes it more possible for faculty to create interactive, computer-based visualizations; what are the chances that Professor Robbins would have developed a similar visualization in Flash, Photoshop etc? What are the chances that the visualization would have been multiplayer and interactive? Faculty in other disciplines may likely be able to apply the same concept to concepts they teach in their courses.

Second, creating the game to take advantage of SL’s natural distance-limits on the broadcast of the public chat channel is brilliant and highlights another capability of SL. Learners are working in the same virtual space, yet the distance between their avatars creates a small group working environment in which only those proximal to the respective “point” of the star hear the conversation related to that concept. Certainly, some facsimile of this process could have been previously created through a combination of public and private chat rooms – a public chat room for the entire class and five private chat rooms for each “point of the star” – but the visualization and placement of the groups in the same virtual space via SL achieves a learning space perceived to be much more contiguous and open than a collection of private chat rooms which learners or instructors have to exit and enter to participate in each discussion. Other learning spaces and activities could be created to take advantage of the SL distance-limits on the broadcast of the public chat channel.