Texas Trends in Art Education, 2010 Page: 33

                                
Carpenter  I  Real  W orld  Reflections

Figure 2: A Class Discussion on a Balcony. Avatars from left to
right (Authors in parentheses): Raptor Streusel; leo Myanamotu
(Joni Tilton Nichols); Jennifer Easterling (Jennifer Hartman);
Denovo Miami (Chih-Feng Chien); Fish Skute; Lizzy Serendipity
(Kristina Elizondo); Metaphor Voom (B. Stephen Carpenter, II);
Miyosa Sabri (Marissa Muioz); and Erwan McBride (Ludovic
Sourdot).
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Figure 3: A Class Discussion on a Roof. Student avatars pay
attention while Metaphor Voom (B. Stephen Carpenter, II) and
Erwan McBride (Ludovic Sourdot) lead a class discussion of a
chapter in one of the required readings.

The remainder of this article offers reflections on the
course by students from both institutions, as well as
comments from the graduate teaching assistant and the
professor. Collectively, the comments reveal explicitly and
implicitly the themes, topics, and intentions of the course
described above, and how this course served as a "creative
artistic  application[s] of new  learning  and  teaching
technologies" through and about visual culture.
S I  i    I     (  I   I
I was not aware of how powerful and effective SL could be
when integrated into education until I took EDCI 655:
Contemporary Visual Culture in the spring of 2009. The course
required students to register a SL avatar and attend the class
inworld (online in the virtual world of Second Life). I started by
thinking over and over about how the name of my avatar
might be able to represent my current mindset and psyche. I
also thought about the idea of an avatar as a fantasy character
as a way to idealize my self-image. I discovered that the
existence of a virtual avatar did not create conflicts with my
own ego in the real world; instead, it reconciled itself between
my ideal self and my real self. Attending class in SL in the form
of my avatar along with other avatars of classmates is a unique
experience of the utilization of distance education in which we
were able to conduct a variety of events through nearly all-
inclusive virtual features. Moreover, I found myself possessing
more positive attitudes and a stronger sense of commitment
by participating in the class.
My personal feeling toward teaching by using SL
corresponds to the finding by Burgess, Slate, Rojas-LeBouef, &
LaPrairie (2010) that SL promotes positive effects on
experiencing social, cognitive, and teaching presence by
analyzing a graduate-level course of students in instructional
technology. SL is full of pedagogical and constructive
environments that motivated   me   within this diverse
environment, scaffolded  my  knowledge  by  reinforcing
ecological intelligences, and integrated my visual and cultural
experience into curriculum.
n  11   1I    I  I I  t  III   I
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I found Second Life to be relatively easy to learn; after
spending about 10 hours in the program exploring and talking
to different avatars I was able to do most of the things I
wanted to do, ranging from carrying on a conversation to
furnishing an apartment. The "classroom" experience did
present social challenges, for example knowing when to speak
was difficult. In real life, you raise your hand; in Second Life
you do not. So there were often multiple layers of
conversation happening at one time and it could be hard to
follow. By the end of the semester though, new social norms
for the group evolved and communicating in Second Life was