Traveler

Today we visited one of the many virtual worlds available through digitalspace's traveler application. I was expecting all kinds of technical problems but it was much smoother than I thought it would be. It probably helped that I had just three students to look after - that made setup quite a bit easier to supervise. We found a number of people online in a space called 'the batcave' and so headed over there to see what was going on. I was met by Dominic, who helped me sort out audio settings, and overcome any lingering technical problems. Then the students (Christine, Mandy and Wawa) arrived as well and Dominic got them set up too.

We talked to people from Ottawa, Washington and somewhere in NZ, which was quite a buzz. Wawa struck up a lengthy conversation with someone and was still chatting long after I left the room. It seems like a good way to practice fluency out of class this, as we all enjoyed creating our avatars and relating to other people in the virtual environment. A lot of the time students complain that they don't have opportunities to practice their spoken language with native speakers in authentic situations (they don't put it like that), because of the cultural situation here in Hong Kong, or for whatever reason. If students have the hardware at home to run this application, then this must open some doors to them - I was surprised at how smoothly it ran. As I left, Dominic invited us back so that he could take us to some of the different rooms that he has created in the 'batcave'. I think it would be a nice idea to take him up on this offer.