Presentation Woes
December 30th, 2007 by trottahe
In December, myself and two other colleagues, one of which was a faculty member, presented at the Symposium on the Evolution of Communication at the NMC Conference Center in Second Life. Our presentation, titled “Critical Analysis of Literary Works Using Virtual Worlds“, centered on the exploration of material culture through the use of objects in texts, a pilot project at Seton Hall University. In this project, graduate students explored themes and character development in the gothic novel, The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, by recreating the rooms in the virtual world of Second Life, as they invisioned through their readings and class discussions.
The conference took place on one of the new NMC Conference SIMS and was the first experience two of my colleagues had presenting in this unique environment. We wanted the presentation to be interactive and created an exercise where the participants read a passage and then chose objects based on their own interpretation of the text. Theory on material culture in literary works was presented with a discussion following the exercise.
The presentation for the most part hung together however, we used a thinc book to display our slides. Participants continually touched the book, advancing the pages so our commentary was not in sinc with the slides which proved distracting to all. Next time we will use a simple video screen which the presenters will control. It also would have been helpful for us to set up and practice in-world since it took us more time to set up the image boxes than we anticipated. We also should have included a slide on an outline of the total presentation and provided more of a seamless transition between the sections of the presentation. Finally, a printout of the total presentation would have been helpful since our online notes mininized everytime we used Second Life voice.
I always have to remind myself that we learn more from experiences that do not live up to our expectations than those that run seamlessly. As the senior member of our group, I never expected these problems 
. This virtual world environment has become so familiar to me yet still poses challenges in exploring the potentials of these virtual spaces for teaching and learning. Ahhhhh, next time will be better …
Related links and Resources:
NMC Campus Observer
Resources From All Sessions at the Symposium (including our presentation)
