The Affordances of Second Life for Education - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 100

Communication and Collaboration how many lines of chat appear before the mes-

sages scroll off the top. Chat can also be captured
into a log file for later use. It is also possible to
“shout” so that a chat message can be heard up
to 100 meters away, although—as in First Life—
shouting is considered rude in many situations.
The biggest problem with chat is that everyone
in the immediate vicinity can “hear” it. This makes
it unsuitable for small group discussions within
a larger classroom. One option is to separate the
small groups from each other by more than 20
meters (this can be a vertical as well as horizontal
distance, which invites interesting classroom ar-
rangements). Another is to utilize a “friends con-
ference” via instant messaging, discussed below.
A teacher can use chat to deliver information or
instructions to students. A “lecture” or presentation
can be prepared in advance and put onto a notecard
(see below) and delivered line by line simply by
clicking the mouse, through something called a
“notecard reader.” An example is the SpeakEasy
HUD (Heads-Up Display). Presentations can be
illustrated with various objects or with images,
using a slide viewer, also described below.
Instant messages, or IMs, are the second most
obvious way to communicate. Private one-on-one
conversations are easily initiated by right-clicking
on an avatar in the immediate vicinity and choosing
“Send IM” from the circular menu that appears.
One can also use the Search People function to
load a person's Profile, where a “Send IM” button
appears, no matter whether the person is nearby
or even logged into SL. To understand the real
value of the IM function, you need to understand
the concept of a “Friend.” When you meet an
avatar that you wish to have further interactions
with, you can right-click that avatar and “Add as
Friend.” (You can also find avatars by searching
for them, and click the “Add as Friend” button on
their profile.) If accepted by the other user, each
avatar name appears on the other's “Friends” list
(which can be seen on the Communicate panel or
via the View menu). Friends who are online are
indicated through bold letters and are alphabetized

Second Life offers myriad exciting possibilities
for fostering communication and collaboration
among both teachers and students. Communica-
tion and collaboration appear to have been built
into the environment from the very beginning,
and these affordances are highly developed in the
user interface. However, it may be necessary to
teach participants to use some of these forms of
communication and to adjust their Preferences (on
the Edit menu) to maximize their utility.
The most obvious form of communication in
Second Life is “chat,” wherein avatars that are in
close proximity with each other (20 meters) can
“talk” to each other using text. Chat easily enables
one avatar to present information to a group, or a
group to have a discussion, although as with other
types of chat systems, groups larger than 10 or so
may need a moderator or special rules to prevent the
chat from becoming chaotic or too fast to follow.
Other tools are available to support discussion in
chat. The ELVEN Institute has developed a set of
classroom chairs that allow individuals to “raise
their hands” using a menu built into the chair
and moderators to then “call on” each in turn by
clicking the chair. There are also special devices
available that help to “queue” participants in a
discussion, by calling on them one by one. Note
that it is not always necessary for avatars to “take
their turn,” or to wait for others to finish before
they begin typing their own comments; indeed,
one useful technique to move a discussion along
is to type one's own response and wait to hit the
“enter” key until the appropriate moment in the
conversation.
Chat appears in the lower left corner of the
SL user interface, identified by avatar name. The
History panel allows anyone to go back and look
at the chat that has occurred previously during a
session (that is, since the user logged into SL).
Preferences allow the user to decide how long
each chat “message” stays on the screen before it
fades, how big a font is used and what color, and