Yesterday, students wrote their first blog entries to Real Place, Virtual Space. The ‘virtual worlds’ students mention refer to their own private virtual world provided to them through Scicentr.org, an outreach program through the Cornell Theory Center. Scicentr (www.scicentr.org) uses virtual world technology to disseminate Cornell scientific research and teach students across the STEM disciplines. My students have had so far two meetings ‘in-world’. A Cornell Computer Science Ph.D. student, Lukas, has been teaching students how to navigate and build in their private world. The most distinctive thing about their introduction to the technology is their desire to move very quickly. We had decided that the first class would be spent learning how to navigate: how to walk, how to fly, how to change views, etc. We anticipated that students’ introductions to actual ‘building’ would be reserved for subsequent meetings. Within the first ten minutes, students were clamoring to build - and build they did. They started with a chess set, in imitation of a set already designed in another world. (Scicentr hosts nearly 100 worlds in an educational universe named CTCUni.) By the next meeting, students started the process of developing a neighborhood. Each student has built a fence around a space that will ultimately hold a house of their own design. (A house is built by moving individual panels around in the space and designing and ‘texturing’ a cube.)

I had hoped that the innovation and excitement provided by the virtual worlds would encourage students to write about it. Although they have enjoyed seeing their avatars and collages online, it was a limited attraction. And getting them to write about their experiences building in their virtual world was still a chore. HOWEVER, my hope was not to get them to enjoy writing, necessarily, but to encourage their computer arts skills. Watching them as they typed their paragraphs into Microsoft Word, I learned how they are incorporating now everyday technologies into their development as writers. The 4th grade student who struggled to write three sentences expertly navigated spellcheck using right-click shortcuts. Another ESL student did the same with a focus on checking her sentence structure with the grammar check. Elementary spelling and grammar mistakes were erased with a mouse-click. As a writing teacher, I cringe; as a computer arts educator, I’m wowed.