Qian's week 7

Hello everyone,
 
I have spent some time on the Chinese island. I was trying to involve in some online Chinese lessons which were held by a university in Australia. The video shows parts of their lessons. This lesson was designed to those students about how to travel in China by train. It is a role-play lesson. All the students in that class need to play a role in this lesson, such as you can be a train driver, a ticket saler or a pasenger. Because this lesson is special for the students who enrolled in this online Chinese paper, I am not student in that Uni. So I have to pretend a passenger. It is a quite amazing way to learn the target language. I was trying to contact the designer and owner of that island. However, I have not got reply from them.
 
I have read a book called "V-Learning" (Annett et al., 2010) this week. It gives me many brilliant ideas on teaching or leanring 2nd language in virtual worlds. I also contacted an author who has designed a series online educational games for learners who study Chinese as a foreign language. We have a very pleasant chat with each other. He said that he was considering to update his 2D version games into 3D version. We were disussing some issues on designing some historical Chinese characters evolution in virtual worlds, in case to help the beginning level of learners to 'understand' Chinese characters. Even though the conversation turns out some good ideas, the technical skills bring us many obstacles.
 
Another issue I would like to talk about is, our English learning journey (my three friends and I) has been stopped. I have summarized several reasons according to it. First, it is important to bear in mind that different participant has different learning purpose. It means that the lesson should be set to meet the large part of participants, such as there are three students want to practice train related vocabulory, one student wants to learn bus related vocabulory. It should be settle for a train lesson. Second, it is important to make agreements before starting the whole programme, like when we meet in SL, where we meet and what are we going to do for each lesson. Once those stuff have been settle down, they cannot be changed totally. Third, there is a question bothering me for a long time. It is: how can we make the learners who do not belong to any social communities to be serious about online learning? In my case, all my friends are not 'professional' students in real life, they learn English in SL for different purpose. Sometimes, they want to learn this lesson; sometimes, they refused to learn one of the lessons. That makes me think that teaching or learning language does not require the ability to teach, but also requires the individual teacher needs to find some 'backs' to support their teaching process. A teacher cannot be a teacher in SL without communities involved in real life. That's what I thought recently.
 
By the way, I like Devi's Taiji Playing Video. I also look forward to meeting you guys in our trial lesson.
 
Qian