[staff/tsl] Changing the Facilitation Game in Second Life
It's been about two years since I facilitated my first workshop in Second Life, and since then I've encountered this core question of how to effectively facilitate in a space that offers lots of new opportunities from the offline setting, but also poses a new set of challenges.
As any good public speaker or facilitator knows, it's entirely possible to have an audience in "the palm of your hand", and how necessary it is to "feel out a room". I've written before about the challenges of emotional latitude in the virtual environment and its implications for learning, specifically about the ways that it makes perceiving how a given student is comprehending difficult when communicating via realtime chat. On the other side of things has always been the challenge of the facilitator getting across their ideas effectively and leading a class or workshop through strong facilitation. Via text chat, it's often hard to keep tempo up, relay long instructions, and have your "voice" as a facilitator heard within a potentially long stream of chat comments from the participants.
When voice was introduced to Second Life about a year ago, I was immediately thrilled to be able to start using it as another mode of facilitation within the space. It would be great to have workshop go quicker, be able to have students who might not articulate particularly well via text chat use a medium more comfortable for them, and a host of other uses.
The challenge I immediately came upon when I tried this in various contexts was, surprisingly, the Digital Divide. I don't mean that these kids didn't have access to computers or internet, as anyone who's in Second Life obviously wouldn't be there if they didn't. What I'm referring to is the ability to input sound into your computer. As a professional working in the field of educational technology (not to mention being a Mac laptop user), I took for granted the presence of the headset, or at least a microphone. I found that many kids in TSL, roughly (and totally unscientifically) about 50%, didn't have access to a sound input device of any sort. My hopes were dashed, and I returned to facilitating educational workshops and meetings via text chat.
A couple of weeks ago though, while prepping for one of our Fireside Workshops, I thought I would give voice another try, but just change my expectations concerning the place it would have in the workshop. The thought was that just the facilitators, myself and my colleague Shawna, would use voice. Everyone else, that being all the teen participants, would be asked to respond to us and each other via text chat.
To say that the approach has been working well would be a huge understatement. It's been incredible! We've used this facilitation approach for two workshops so far, one on the topic of Race in America and the other on the human rights issues surrounding chocolate, and each time we've found incredible improvements in a number of areas including tempo of activities, ease of giving and clarifying instructions, highlighting and reinforcing strong student comments, speed of completing activities, levels of engagement and participant retention of the course of the workshops.
Each of the last points will be areas that I'll need to explore further and expand on as I experiment more with this facilitation style, but for now I would say that for more as a distance educator, the game of facilitation has changed.
