Iggy's Syllabus: SLURL or LM?

Iggy’s Syllabus: SLURL or LM?
Location: Stuck Between a Wiki and a Hard Place

It was simple to come up with a first detailed assignment for my class. I think it accomplishes a major goal in the service of Tenchi's Law: Break the Ice. I want students to state one claim about SL and defend it, after seeing a series of videos and reading some articles about the virtual world.

The next step--sending them out into the world--is trickier. After the writers have an initial impression of SL, how do I get them to navigate to key locations? Do I provide them with landmarks or do I embed SLURLs into every page of the wiki? Students can be easily overloaded, but providing multiple ways to complete tasks is not a bad idea.

In the end, for a second assignment on marketing in SL, I'll give students both SLURLs and landmarks.

My reasoning follows a few assumptions about Millennial students. First, they need structure at all times, but they can be overwhelmed by too many steps or rules. They also tend to be forgetful and do the work at the final moment.

Not that faculty would ever act like that. I recall one who took months to learn NOT to put the entire text of an e-mail into the "subject" line, and then got upset that no one would reply to the messages.

My students are quicker than that, so in class they'll learn that there are at least two ways to get somewhere, and the SLURL can be linked from a conventional Web page or a wiki. Personally, I was not comfortable with SLURLs for about a month in-world. I'll remind writers that a landmark only exists with their avatars, and it can be lost, deleted, or accidentally destroyed in a LL server disaster.

Do we think often enough about how fragile our landmarks are? In scanning my avatar's list of landmarks I will wonder what on earth a particular one represents. Why do I have something called MATRIZ DONA LOLA, MotorCity Hills? I think it has something to do with driving and not some virtual floozy, but in SL, who can tell? It is, after all, a world of confusing labels, where some residents have first names like "ScreechDeth," "LuvFluff" or "Poot."

To avoid any confusion, the wiki client we use, from pbwiki.com, will enable annotated connections to SL via SLURLs. I've tested it for both the Linden Lab client and Onrez. Students will benefit by understanding that when they arrive at a spot, they should "run, and not walk, across the street to the main building. Do not let the Cthulhoid horror in the burning dumpster grab you!"

Second-Life landmarks, however, work nicely for teachers as a "push" technology. So I will use them too. I can, with my class group, send out a notice with a LM embedded. Then writers will get the sort of just-in-time advice they love. It will then be their jobs to avoid the thing in the dumpster...

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