College of DuPage has attracted the attention of schools across the country by creating a virtual world where students explore an immersive online version of William Wordsworths Tintern Abbey.
Jason Snart, professor of English at College of DuPage, is the author of the forthcoming book, Hybrid Learning: The Perils and Promise of Blending Face-to-Face and Online Instruction in Higher Education (to be published by Praeger), which explores the concept of hybrid learning where both traditional and virtual classroom experiences are combined. He saw the potential in the three-dimensional online technology Second Life for visually immersing students in Wordsworths poem set near the now 900-year-old Welsh abbeys remains.
I wanted more than just a classroom space in Second Life, Snart said. Tintern Abbey is all about the space where it occurs and Wordsworth reflecting on that location. Second Life seemed an ideal place to bring the poem to life.
Snart contacted Denise Cote, assistant professor and reference librarian in the C.O.D. Library. She had created a Second Life site for the College in 2007 and already worked with several programs to enhance learning using the technology. Their collaboration resulted in an elaborate visualization of Tintern Abbey and its surroundings as described in the poem.
Snarts literature and composition students leisurely wander this virtual environment, where they find places among the abbeys surroundings to contemplate the poems meaning, listen to various passages recorded by C.O.D. Chemistry Professor and Oxford graduate Richard Jarman, interact with other students and work on assigned projects. They even create virtual journal entries that are collected by Snart.
In class we review their assignments and revisit the space together, and their understanding of the poem is so much richer, Snart said.
The Tintern Abbey site also has attracted the attention of other schools. Cote recently gave faculty from the University of Michigan a tour of the two-year-old Tintern Abbey site, while other schools already use the site in their own curriculum.
Tintern Abbey isnt the first learning environment for College of DuPage in Second Life. Cote has worked with the Fashion program to incorporate their annual fashion show into a virtual world. In addition, Jarman has created an alternative world where students build molecules in 3D. The College sponsors a community college users group in Second Life that has 500 members from across the U.S. and Canada.
We are focused on using this technology for very specific learning activities, Cote said. Whats great is that even though students are working within this new technology, they still have their textbooks open next to them, which is a concrete example of effectively melding both traditional and futuristic methods of learning.
And Snart now knows that the learning experience is deeply engaging for students. I recently had an e-mail from a former student and, in passing, asked if he remembered the experience. He quoted lines of the poem back to me because he still remembered it so vividly.
For more information on Second Life at College of DuPage, contact Cote at (630) 942-2092, e-mail: cotede@cod.edu. For more about the English program, call (630) 942-2047. People with a Second Life account can check out CODs site at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/College%20of%20DuPage/58/56/23.
